Whatcha' Reading? Forum Foibles

Whatcha Reading? Forum Foibles

It is that time of week where I tell you what I am currently reading, recently read and what is next.

Then you tell me what you have on your bedside table and bookshelf!

I started reading Laurel K. Hamilton's Guilty Pleasures, described as the novel that introduced Anita Blake. I previously read flirt, so I think I will start chewing my way through these.

I was checking out Laurel K. Hamilton's web site today and learned that she decided to take a year off from writing the Meredith Gentry series.  So the next book will not be available until 2011. While I love her writing; her prose can be positively lyrical, I find her forum quite off-putting. It has rules such to the effect of: you will not speculate or ask questions on LKH's personal life but you may mention things she has mentioned in the forum; You will not ask LKH who she thinks will play a character in a movie, etc.

I was a volunteer-moderator for a pretty big-time author's forum and hehad no such rules; when we had a question we thought he might not want to answer we showed it to him, if we thought it inappropriate we discarded it.  I have no idea if this is her doing or that of the organization.  My general feeling was that there were too many rules and I was afraid I would break one inadvertently and that we really weren't welcome.  I will probably be kicked out for having spoken.

Author forums are good for answers to questions like "when is the next Meredith Gentry book coming out." Sadly, due to spammers, fewer and fewer authors maintain them.  Since the author I worked for answered every single question himself, and was particularly kind to young writers, I feel it is a loss.

So I am about halfway through and I am really enjoying it.

I have five pages of unread books on my Kindle. I have to cull them before I choose what is next. I might try a Gena Showwalter book, any suggestions?

I have reviewed the other books I read this week:  Hello Gorgeous, A Touch of Dead and Zan-Gah, but I also read Diane Mott Davidson's Fatally Flaky.  I like her mysteries and found this one a bit less church-y which I like.  I always think if I want religion I will read religion.

Your Turn: What have you got going on?!



In the meantime, between writing and publishing, I had the time (I woke up at 4) to finish the first in the Anita Blake series, Guilty Pleasures.  I feel a bit as if I am missing something -- how the world got the way it is in the book.  But other than that I really enjoyed it; found it bittersweet.  Unlike Meredith Gentry, Laurel K. Hamilton's other heroine of recent times, Anita is not really likable in a "I want to be BFFs," kind of way.  She is a good person, all for justice, a female supernatural Jack Bauer, but she is not warm and fuzzy. You can find Laurel K. Hamilton's books by clicking here  LKH on Amazon.com

It is strange that I am not enthralled with her character and yet I want to read the next book.  (I have read the first and the second to last Flirt.  I feel as if I am behind at school because there are so many books I have yet to read!

Next up:  The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: Seance for a Vampire by Fred Saberhagen which the publisher asked me to review. It is from Titan Books and I was given the copy I am reading.