Tag: Laurell K Hamilton

An Anita Blake Limited Edition Lot Find I REFUSED to Leave Behind

Okay. Okay. Okay. So, Anita Blake and I have beefed back and forth for years. I stopped reading the series for a few years, jumped back on, stopped again, and recently decided to jump back on to catch up on Blake’s (and Hamilton’s) latest offering with 2020’s Sucker Punch and 2021’s Rafael. I had some deep, ripping issues with 2018’s Serpentine; I welcome you to find the video in which I shared my concerns.

Nevertheless, my continuing to read Hamilton on and off is driven chiefly by the state of nostalgia her work generates. Summer of 2007. Just discovering how the urban fantasy/action woman stories stretched outside Buffy meant everything during that time. Not to mention how incredible the first nine Anita Blake books were (though I’ve gradually become accustomed to the tone change after book nine).



Anyway, enough of that. These omnibus limited book club editions of the first ten books have always had the most fabulous covers (I particularly love the rendering of Blake on Club Vampyre; Luis Royo is the artist behind all four). I’ve always wanted these books. To me they capture the absolute best of Blake during all her early-to-late 90’s glory days of vampire hunting and zombie raising. Also, as a fan of 80’s horror and specifically Night of the Comet, they just look freakin’ desirable. The original mass market covers featuring character renderings are my favorite as well. 

Nonetheless, when you attempt to purchase these rare books online through resellers, you need to know what condition they will actually arrive in. That has been my biggest hesitation. 

So despite the blistering negative-something-degrees cold this Friday before Christmas, I was going to have a day out to myself and made it to 2nd & Charles after a Walmart run. And mannnnn, was I shocked to find all four of these rare Anita Blake omnibus books on the shelf in GREAT condition. Did they come from someone’s estate collection? Or did somebody’s partner make a spiteful-ass move on an ex and gave this collection away as a getback. They have obviously been read, but were well taken care for. Even down to the freakin’ dust-jackets’ spines being virtually trauma less. Regardless, there was no way I would overlook this opportunity. Whether I’m beefing with Anita Blake or not.


They were grabbed. They were paid for. They were brought to my collection with little hesitation. Maybe after fifteen years it’s time to reread the early Anita books…

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(2) Last Year's Disappointing Reads | Serpentine by Laurell K Hamilton

I.  Have.  Got.  To.  End.  Reading.  This.  Series.

Serpentine (Anita Blake #26) by Laurell K. Hamilton

“A remote Florida island is the perfect wedding destination for the upcoming nuptials of Anita’s fellow U.S. Marshal and best friend, Edward. For Anita, the vacation is a welcome break, as it’s the first trip she gets to take with just wereleopards Micah and Nathaniel. But it’s not all fun and games and bachelor parties…  

In this tropical paradise, Micah discovers a horrific new form of lycanthropy, one that has afflicted a single family for generations. Believed to be the result of an ancient Greek curse, it turns human bodies into a mass of snakes.  

When long-simmering resentment leads to a big blowp within the wedding party, the last thing Anita needs is more drama. But it finds her anyway when women start disappearing from the hotel, and worse, her own friends and lovers are considered the prime suspects. There’s a strange power afoot that Anita has never confronted before, a force that’s rendering those around her helpless. Unable to face it on her own, Anita is willing to accept help from even the deadliest places. Help that she will most certainly regret—if she survives at all, that is…”

SAVE US, BUFFY!  SAVE USSSSSSSSSS!
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Book Buying Bargaining ~ With No Self-Control

Got rid of a lot, and brought plenty back in.  Oh course, through store credits and bargain-area shopping.  Kind of a strange mix–but not really.  The Susan Wittig Albert books were simple enough to pick up.  Toni Braxton memoir I found tucked in a low shelf in a bookstore bargain section for $5.  I went ahead and grabbed Laurell K Hamilton’s A Shiver of Light, because I’m compulsive when it comes to completing series.  Even those I’ve grown to dislike.  And, because I want more fantasy in my life, I decided to go back to my initiation into fantasy via a T. A Barron novel.

Apprentice in Death came out on September 6th.  I moved heavy and earth to get to it.  (Currently reading it.  This is only the dust-jacket.)  Salvage the Bones and Speaking from Among the Bones I got for $2.50 apiece.  Both easily crossed off that Amazon wishlist.
Now.  Will this book craving stop?
Hell, no.

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Creatures of the Night BOOK TAG (Video)

CREATURES OF THE NIGHT BOOK TAG
(All links are Amazon affiliate)

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#Friday Read | Surviving Another Go at Anita Blake

Do not judge, but this is totally happening…

According to Goodreads:

Anita Blake has the highest kill count of any vampire executioner in the country. She’s a U.S. Marshal who can raise zombies with the best of them. But ever since she and master vampire Jean-Claude went public with their engagement, all she is to anyone and everyone is Jean-Claude’s fiancée.

It’s wreaking havoc with her reputation as a hard ass—to some extent. Luckily, in professional circles, she’s still the go-to expert for zombie issues. And right now, the FBI is having one hell of a zombie issue.

Someone is producing zombie porn. Anita has seen her share of freaky undead fetishes, so this shouldn’t bother her. But the women being victimized aren’t just mindless, rotting corpses. Their souls are trapped behind their eyes, signaling voodoo of the blackest kind.

It’s the sort of case that can leave a mark on a person. And Anita’s own soul may not survive unscathed . . .

FRIDAY READ?  OR WEEKEND SURVIVAL?


I’ll see this series till the very end.  End of story.  Throughout all the sex and relationship vomiting and diarrhea combos this series produces (and fosters in me), I’m invested.  I don’t know what it is, but Anita Blake’s spell has yet to be broken by me.  It’s like nosy lurkers on your social media profile; I have to piece together her character from a distance, and understand how it has devolved over the series (while simultaneously bleaching my brain).  Well, that’s an awful perception, but a true one.  Nonetheless, it’s too complicated to make sense of, only that I’m a fan; severely troubled but loyal.  And possibly looking for more reasons to despise this series until I can finally get it out of my system.

Such a negative post, this is.  Wonder how steep my final thoughts of the book will also be.

And that’s the catch!  I gotta read it to know it.

So this is my Friday Read: Dead Ice by Laurell K. Hamilton.  I’m off today and tomorrow (this may be the one time I wish my job would call me to come in).  So I can stay up late with my energy drink and pulled pork sandwich (add the slaw and vinegar), and pray I don’t fall over dead from either the book or my survivalist binge eating.  Yes.  You read that right.  Survivalist.

This time I’m hoping I don’t drop the book for eights months like I did the last entry in the series, Affliction.  That’s right.  I started Affliction in June and didn’t finish it until January.  Lesson, evidently, still not learned.

Pray for me, folks.  I’m going in…

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What to Read Next Issues…

I finished Stephen King’s Mr. Mercedes before noon today. Once finished, I spent an afternoon racing through Kroger with my aunt. We were buying groceries for my grandma, and had our asses out of that place in less than forty-five minutes.  I’m not a fan of grocery shopping.  Swerving carts, comparing off-brand from popular brands, calculating budgets; I rather do without all that fuss, though I know it’s necessary if you want to eat.  

Okay, okay. I’m getting off track. This post is about books!

Anyway, after that was finished, I did something I haven’t done in awhile: I visited the three used bookstores in my area. My immediate focus was to use a credit slip to buy Laurell K. Hamilton’s new, ninth book in her Merry Gentry book, Shiver of Light. That’s right. You read me correctly. Laurell K. Hamilton. Merry Gentry. I’m such a hack sometimes, feeding myself foolishly with both of this author’s insufferable series. But see, it’s hard for a completionist–such as myself–to walk away.  By the way, I didn’t find it.  However, here’s what’s going on…


Bought 5/3/10 and never read

According to my receipt, I bought book eight in the Merry Gentry series, Divine Misdemeanors, from a used bookstore on 5/03/10. And I have yet to crack open the book! Seriously, it’s been sitting on my shelf for that many years unread.  So now that the ninth book has recently released, after a five-year series hiatus, book eight is suddenly calling me. Seemingly… from the grave I should add. And so I hate this. I hate having to finish things! Especially concerning this series—this author! The truth is that without even reading it, I can review this book blindfolded without missing a beat.  How?  Because there’s a 101% chance that there isn’t a plot to construct a review with. I know this! I know this stuff for facts! Yet! I’ve held on to the book with the intention of one day plowing through it with a bottle of Vodka at my bedside to wash each wasted, printed word down. 

My fingers are itching to verbally bodyslam the book before I’ve read it. Can’t you tell?

So that’s part of my conundrum. As painful and insipid as it sounds. I know I should just do away with the whole idea and put the sonofabitch back on the shelf where it belongs. However, Shiver of Light is out there, and here I am with an incomplete series.  Grrrr!

It’s especially hard when I have a stack of great books I just received from The BookOutlet. We’re talking books by Nnedi Okorafor (an African-American female sci-fi writer the likes of Octavia Butler); P.D. James’s first book in her Adam Dalgliesh mystery series; the biography of Madam Chiang Kai-Shek; and The Book of Night Women by Jamaican novelist, Marlon James. So I have books I can and want to read. They are definitely there calling out.

Back to the bookstore tour from today. I walked out with Julia Cameron’s Walking in this World, the sequel to her highly inspirational book, The Artist’s Way. I even snagged something off my Amazon Wishlist in Martha Grimes’s crime fiction novel, Hotel Paradise. Then there’s the third book in Barbara Neely’s Blanche White mystery series. If you don’t know what that series is about, it’s about an African-American domestic worker who solves mysteries.  Which, of course, is right up my alley!

I have books to read. Better books. Greater books. And it’s equally disturbing that I want to follow a Stephen King novel with a book about a faerie princess who whines about sex from a team of faire men with peas for brains.

Ah, the frustration.

I want to crack open a new book tonight, but I think I’ll play some form of Resident Evil and figure this out in the morning.


EARLY MORNING UPDATE

On page 4 of Divine Misdemeanors comes this halting–yet familiarly expressed–form of thought:

“Detective Lucy Tate came to stand beside me.  She was wearing a pants suit complete with jacket and a white button-up shirt that strained a little across the front because Lucy, like me, had too much figure for most button-up shirts.  But I wasn’t a police detective so I didn’t have to pretend I was a man to try to fit in.”

Yep!  Totally called it quits!  We’re quickly back to focusing on body image and women in law enforcement again.  Something like a resident leitmotif in both Hamilton’s Anita Blake and Merry Gentry series–among other tired conversations.  We’ll put this book away until I have absolutely nothing else to read.

Pardon the rant!  But what do you do when you’re trying to find out what you want to read next?  Top that by asking yourself what series do you loathe but find yourself unable to turn away with each new release?  Share your thoughts below.

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15985372I could get into where/when I discovered Laurell K Hamilton’s Anita Blake series, as well as the doldrums concerning why I keep reading.  But I won’t.  Wait.  Okay, I will say that I keep reading them because I am an Aquarius and we are known for our fierce loyalty and resolve to finish things that we’ve started.  Nonetheless, I could also share my many meditations on what I loath about the series; if there‘s room, maybe what I love (at least within the first nine books).  However, I’ve shared my wobbling opinions about this series time and time again with those who’ve listened and shared my troubled thoughts concerning this cast of puppets and caricatures.  And despite so, I try and try again to read the next book with a fresh pair of nerves.  It’s like a revolving door, I come close to saying “f this series”, yet follow through with the next book the proceeding year.  As more of what I dislike about the series repeats itself, without the slightest dawdle in concerns to readers’ fatigue, I notice that I spend less and less time finishing any one particular book.  And it’s this wave of Mary Sue nausea–among other things–that is probably why it took me five months and almost four weeks to finish Affliction.  Around the last third of the book is when I really began to clunk out and crash.  I spent more time engrossed in my Murder, She Wrote marathons than seeing whether Anita and company were going to get off their cranky, notional philosophizing asses and focus on the case at hand. 


And that’s pretty much all I got.  So enough of the undercover conversations and spiels on misogyny, as well as themes concerning the accidental emasculation of men.  Even the gratuitous, ill-expressed sex scenes are now cake (although I totally skipped the third one out of exhaustion) as opposed to Hamilton’s need to pound her readers in the head with whatever the hell her characters give a crap about randomly discussing at any–and I mean any–given moment.  Those subject matters are about as old as grunge music.  Only I like grunge music for being such.  This… is just plain beating–or flogging in this instance–a dead horse.

Where do we go from here?  Or do I really care to know now?

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Book/Manga Chat 1

Why of course Towel & Cornbread is a blog about books, manga, and the various methods I like to share concerning self-help.  So to tie those in, I’ve posted my recent book chat video.  Inside I discuss books by Gloria Naylor and Laurell K Hamilton (who I should do a blog post on because of my love-hate relationship for her Anita Blake series).  I touch a little on Naoko Takeuchi’s Sailor Moon English reissue of volume 12, as well as some bonus material from the depths of my general interest.

The Men of Brewster Place – Gloria Naylor
Linden Hills – Gloria Naylor
Mama Day – Gloria Naylor
Bailey’s Café – Gloria Naylor
Affliction – Laurell K. Hamilton
Sailor Moon 12 – Naoko Takeuchi
Time and Eternity – NIS America
Songversation – India.Arie

 

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