Is this a reading blog or what?

I have actually been reading quite a lot lately. It has been a snowy, blowy, wet winter, and I’ve been feeling a bit stressed out over the last six weeks or so – both elements combined make me want to hole right up inside my cozy house and not talk to anyone and just read. Reading a novel often helps me deal with stress, actually. I think getting into a book just helps me block out whatever is worrying me in real life and I can space out and forget about things for a while (a.k.a. putting my head in the sand, but whatever works!).

So I should post a little about what I’ve read this winter. Let’s start with the Vampire Fever. I caught it, I admit. To start, I read all four Twilight books, of course, in rapid succession. They were pretty entertaining, but… to be honest, I sort of got bored by Edward and Bella’s romance. I know. Blasphemy. But really, I get it: She smells good. He’s dreamy. Don’t need to describe it for another fifty pages, all right? The plotlines were sometimes interesting, though, especially in Breaking Dawn. I enjoy myths and such. But... I don't know. I am finding it really hard to judge these books. I don’t think they were really SUPER, and the writing was… fine, I guess, but what was it that made me come back for more and continue to commit to all four of those books, if I feel so lukewarm about the writing and main storyline? I can’t put my finger on it. My friends mostly seem enamored of the Edward/Bella romance, which, as I said before, did nothing for me. So I don’t know.

After that, I read The Host by Stephenie Meyer, which was... also fine. Again, a pretty interesting story about an alien being who inhabits a human host and their trials as they live together in a hostile environment, but I feel that, like the Twilight books, it just fell slightly short of being really good. Not sure what it is about Ms. Stephenie that just slightly misses the mark for me.

I also read Undead and Unwed, by Maryjanice Davidson, which was a book about a secretary who loses her job and then gets hit by a car and dies and then becomes a vampire. Kind of funny. I like the single girl books, but romances skeeve me out a little bit. I thought this would be the former and it turned out to be the latter. But it was funny enough to keep reading, so I just skipped the sex parts. Am I a prude, or what? I am not down on love. I just don’t like reading about it, for some reason. To be analyzed with my therapist at a later date. Moving on.

To complete my vampire-related winter reading list, I started reading Dead Until Dark by Charlaine Harris, the first book of the Sookie Stackhouse series on which HBO’s True Blood is based. Love True Blood, even though it's kind of gnarly at times, so I wanted to read the books that inspired the TV show. I had grown sort of weary of vampire stories at that point, however, so I put it aside after a couple of chapters. I will pick it up again some other time, but I think I have had enough of the undead for now.