Christopher Moore: You Suck

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

I hadn't been sure that I would read this book next but did after all. The eventful weekend didn't leave room for much reading as I spent it trying to cheer up my newly become jobless sister. It took longer to read the book than I thought it would because of this but not for a lack of interest in reading it. I set it down with regret each time I had to lie the book aside.

Often a series might grow on me as I think was the case for this one, though its two companion books rather than a series from what I can tell. The characters grow on you and I love nothing more than books that follow another because you can stay with the characters who you have already begun to know and understand. In some ways this story was different because a new point of view was introduced but it never failed to make me laugh. I think I can say the story only got better.

This book takes place immediately following where its companion novel, Bloodsucking Fiends, leaves off. Vampires Jody and Tommy are still in San Francisco and with a few problems:

They need to find food, a priority to newly made vampire Tommy who is experiencing the hunger for the first time.

They need a new minion, or onion, if you ask Jody.

They need to find a new apartment to please the San Francisco police.

They need to go Christmas shopping for their parents because in all that had been going on, they've forgotten it's only about two days away.

Learning how to be a vampire and pushing a great huge statue down the street can be hard work but then again so can hiding on top of a pipe that heats up during the day. Being a statue for a living is the easy job, or so it is for one statue in particular. I won't reveal any more when it comes to that but its quite funny.

Through their adventures they find the strangest ways of acquiring food, searching for a way that their bodies can accept the coffee that satisfied them as humans. That comes in handy later on but I won't reveal why. Jody and Tommy get themselves a regular blood donor with little cost to them. A shaved cat in a red sweater is probably the one who pays the most.

Tommy's love for literature plays a role in checking 'minion' off their to-do list. Strange, amusing, Gothic, street-smart, and very much a teenager are some of best words of choice in describing Abby Normal who prefers to not use her day slave name. Abby more than happily becomes the loyal servant of her very old vampires, Flood and the Countess. Her only hope is to become one of them.

A woman named Blue comes into the story while spending time with the Animals, a nickname given to those who work Safeway's night shift. Tommy's old friends reveal to her that Tommy is a newly made vampire and from then on she has one goal: "'You want to be orange?' 'Not orange, you nitwit, a vampire!'" (Moore 162).

Only one of these girls becomes a vampire. Which one will it be? I will not say so you will have to find out yourself. This book is filled with just as much humor as the last book and I enjoyed it a bit more. Moore does a brilliant job capturing the point of view of the sixteen-year-old that is Abby Normal. I don't feel he could have done any better on that. I kind of missed a few things that couldn't be in this book that had been a part of the one previous but the author more than makes up for it. Hysterical!

I've loaned both books out to someone who is reading them as quickly as the murdering vampire of San Francisco seemed to be draining bodies of their blood in the first of these two books. She is ecstatic and loving the series, the first vampire books she has ever read. The amount of humor in these books just has her so drug into these books. I see books grab at her attention on a regular basis, but these two are not books the nonfiction reader I know her to be would pick up to read on her own. I think that says something more for these two books.

Christopher Moore: Bloodsucking Fiends

I think I heard this book mentioned a good year or more before it made it's way to my wishlist. My TBR pile was great already. With the Twilight series over though, I've been branching out to other vampire series, something I never dreamed would happen. It's not that I think books about vampires are bad, because I don't think that. I had just thought them all juvenile after spending much of my teen years buried in them. I had read L.J Smith's complete works. I had also read Christopher Pike's The Last Vampire series, a collection of six books. (The Remember Me books had been ones I reread over and over again as well.)

After buried in so many Young Adult books as a teen I had thought growing up meant no longer reading YAs, and definitely putting vampire books behind me while moving on to those great and wonderful classic stories. I think I needed a little reminder of everything on that list of classic books because I know now there is at the very least one vampire book on that list. It wasn't until more recent years and seeing how many adults read YAs that I began to pick them up again myself.

Christopher Moore: Bloodsucking Fiends
Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

The book I'm going to talk about in this blog entry today is not a YA at all, but it is a vampire love story. Vampire books as ordinary fiction books - who knew? I had never read any perhaps until now. And yet, this book was not simply ordinary. It was a rather humorous one. Jokes were far apart at times, but other times they were left and right. Sometimes they were buried without characters even taking note of them when the jokes were right in front of them. This is a good thing though, because innocent and unnoticed jokes by the characters are always jokes very much enjoyed.

I was very confused about the setting when I first started reading. An Emperor was mentioned and my thoughts were, 'Egypt?' The next thing I knew it was mentioning Oakland, and this might just be because I am from California, but when I think Oakland, I think CA. It's a pretty scary place at times. The violence and gangs keep me away from it. It's not a place for someone my size to be alone. It soon became apparent that it was indeed the San Francisco Bay Area where this book takes place, and the Emperor was in fact Emperor of Chinatown. I obviously haven't been there often enough.

When we first meet one of our main characters, Jody, she is walking to a bus stop at night on her way home after work. 'This is the last time,' she thinks of being out that late as she aims to go past passersby. Have I ever known that feeling! The details of events for the next few days will go unspoiled by me with warning and you may use your imagination. Otherwise... (SPOILER) Jody thinks herself at some point left for dead. Until she wakes up. Was she left for dead, though? This is where the story really begins. (END spoiler.)

Tommy Flood finds his way into San Francisco immediately seeking a roof over his head and a job. His only real desire is to write and he creates a name for himself. His roommates and apartment tenant are quite the characters. So is his strange crew of co-workers who are up to all sorts of things that really make you wonder just what exactly goes on in grocery stores at night. They really had me laughing. What does Tommy have to do with Jody? I said this was a love story.

It took me a while to really get into this book but once I did, I was very glad for my mistake of buying book two by accident when shopping for book one. It allows me to jump right into the next book if I so chose. I haven't read a book that has made me laugh as much as this in a while. I really recommend it. In some places I was looking for something more and it's not a book I love such as those I rate at four to five stars. It was however a good book, and I can't wait till I have a person to talk to about it instead of just trying to avoid giving spoilers here.

Lewis Carrol: Through the Looking Glass

The last book I finished reading in 2008 was Alice in Wonderland and I have now finished reading part two of the story, Through the Looking Glass. I was at first puzzled by the board game inside my copy of the book. The first page notes which characters (players) are which color (red or white) for a game of chess. It made me think of how we see font such as was in this book in works of Shakespeare right before the start of the plays. I began reading wondering if the story would appear in a similar fashion. It began with a poem and then an introduction about the pages showing the chess game information to make it more clear. The story itself was just like the last story in the way of the style it was written in.

I immediately ooed and awed over the black and white kittens, Kitty and Snowdrop. I had only known of Alice's cat, Dina, existing. As I read I had to stop toward the beginning because it hadn't been clear to me right away that Alice, rather than dreaming such as in Alice in Wonderland, was this time daydreaming and using her imagination.

Imagination is a perfect thing for children to have, and very good for a child who seems to not have any other children around to play with. Alice occupies her time playing with cats and inventing things that are make believe. She starts off with the mirror in the very room she is playing in by going through it and seeing how everything she already knew from her own world in another way, how it is on the other and unknown side of the looking glass.

On the other side of the looking glass, the chess pieces in the room have life. Alice begins this story by playing the part of one of the pawns. She comes across a few characters (i.e., players in this story) who she already met before and meets a few new faces as well. There is a great deal of playing with words. The characters put focus on some words versus others, and change the form of some sentences entirely to have a new meaning or to ask a new question.

I had to fold one of the pages because the poem on it reminded me of another. This is what was inside my book:

"The time has come," the Walrus said,
"To talk of many things :
Of shoes -- and ships -- and sealing wax --
Of cabbages -- and kings --
And why the sea is boiling hot --
And whether pigs have wings"
--(Carrol, 153)

I think there were actually a few poems this reminded me of but at present I can't name a single one. I think some others who read poetry might be able to tell me what other poem I might possibly have been thinking of.

Of course, I was very likely to recall these words from Disney's movie as well, which I did. I pictured it and was not happy for those dear little clams. I think I would have lacked as much sympathy for them without it because they were just too young and cute in the film. How dare that Carpenter and Walrus! I also pitied the kitty who Alice shook when the Red Queen turned into Kitty. Yes, it's only a story. Yes also that Alice must love them, though not quite enough to understand what their meows mean. Silly Alice.

Lewis Carrol: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

There are many books I missed as a child that others generally read enough times to sometimes even memorize. It wasn't that my mother never read to me because I remember reading in the rocking chair with her many times. It was my favorite thing because it was when I had alone time with her in a single parent family of four people in those days. I just for some reason never got to some of them. I was a poor reader until my teens. Before anyone misjudges and thinks it was a call for attention, I had a partial learning disability that I didn't overcome until I was older. Two of the stories absent from my childhood were Lewis Carrol's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass.

I spent the first half of my childhood with four other kids in the house, all of them younger. Our favorite things to do involved watching movies again and again before playing and acting them out in the backyard. We'd have them memorized. This is one way I came to know a good deal of the Alice stories without ever having read them until I read the first of the two this month. It was from the movie that I came to recognise and fall in love with the Cat Formerly Known as Cheshire in Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next series, a much-loved and favorite series of mine.

I first heard about Fforde's books while in high school but never got around to reading them until college. This was about six months after I first read Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre in a women's literature class, a book which strongly ties to the first in the Thursday Next series, The Eyre Affair. About that time was when I really and truly began to fall in love with books, and after getting further along in the Thursday Next series the thing I thought most amazing would be to have a stuffed Cheshire Cat toy. I wanted to keep one amongst my own small pile of books to mimic the Great Library in Jasper Fforde's created Book World. As of Christmas last week I now have one, and quite a good deal more books since then that it can actually be considered a small library for him to sit amongst. I was very excited and happy for the gift.

The Thursday Next series pretty much taught me all that I didn't learn from Disney's created Alice film up until now. It's usual for one to watch a book made into a movie and say, "What did they do with this or that scene?" For some reason I had it in my head that there was a good deal more in Disney's film than what I've read in Carrol's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. I dare say I need to re-watch the film I once knew by heart. Speaking of hearts, the deck of cards is hilarious. Alice is a peculiar sort of girl in a time not quite our own any longer. I'm happy to be reading it at last. My book is a two-in-one and I plan to begin the second story very soon. After that I may at long last read the much curious Looking Glass Wars by Frank Beddor.

Louise Rennison: Dancing

This is the fourth book in a series about a teenage girl in the United Kingdom. She's always watchful to make sure she gets her beauty rest, face masks, and looks her best with lots of lip gloss to impress the boys she likes. Current beau: In a band.

These books are funny and amusing, plus the author's word use is interesting to those of us not familiar with English words for things. (I.E., in the United States, what we refer to as a cookie, they actually refer to as a biscuit.)

Louise Rennison: Knocked Out

Book three in a funny and amusing series about a teenage girl in the United Kingdom.

Louise Rennison: Georgia Nicholson

Angus and On the Bright Side

Books one and two in a series about a teenage girl in living in the United Kingdom. Angus is the name of her strange cat who always seems to be in trouble. It also behaves like it's not even a cat, but some other creature. Very quick reads and tres amusant.

"The Princess Bride"

I was reading this book for a while but put it down. I'm not giving up on it, but I was simply reading it much too slowly to be drawn in to the book. I'm going to read a few other books and come back to it later, after having watched the movie. For now, I'm reading a nonfiction book that I'm hoping to finish by Monday. After that, I have some reading to do as preparation for the literary graveyard I make for Halloween.

Thursday Next Adventure Continues

I can't believe I missed this one when I was doing updates. Jasper Fforde has been one of my favorite authors for the last four years maybe. I had meant to read his first book, The Eyre Affair, much sooner than that, but didn't get around to it. It all worked out for the best, though, or I would not have read Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre before reading it.

#14 Thursday Next in First Among Sequels (August 2007)

I was so happy that this series would continue! I had thought it would end with Something Rotten. I enjoyed this book immensley, though feel it's not quite like the author's other books in this series. I found myself disappointed that the Cat did not make an appearance, nor did Thursday's father. I also missed the intensity of the main book being used within First Among Sequels, as Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, one of my favorite books, wasn't there much at all. Better luck next time, Mr. Fforde!