Dead Until Dark by Charlaine Harris

Dead until Dark by Charlaine Harris was my book club book this month.  I'm actually the one who brought it as an option after several friends kept wanting me to try it.  Sorry folks, I just didn't love it.   Didn't really like it, to tell the truth.

It's the first in Harris' Sookie Stackhouse series, upon which HBO's True Blood series is based.  Sookie is a cocktail waitress from Bon Temps, Louisiana.  Vampires have recently come out of their coffins (get it?) and Sookie's been eagerly waiting to meet one.  Her wish comes true when Bill wanders into her bar -- and the bonus is that, unlike most people she encounters, she can't hear his thoughts.  Zany hijinks ensue.  (Translation:  I can't be bothered to recount more of the storyline.)

The best part for me was Sookie's ability to read minds -- perhaps because I didn't know that was a part of the storyline.  I was able to predict a certain character's alter ego -- also my favorite character -- or  at least my favorite after Harris killed off the member of Sookie's family I'd been enjoying getting to know. 

I'm not sure why I was so turned off -- I know that Sookie and Bill's relationship is everything I tend to hate about most paranormal-regular Jill relationships in this genre.  (Bottom line is, I don't find being in a relationship with someone you're afraid of (even part of the time) to be an awesome thing.)  Beyond that issue, though, I just didn't care about the book -- I didn't hate it, but it's just not my kind of fluff.

It's somewhat rare for me to start a series and not want to finish it or at least read a few more before I decide for sure.  This is going to be one of those times -- Sorry Sookie.

Ancestor by Scott Sigler

Hm.  Ancestor by Scott Sigler definitely falls into the airport fiction category for me.  That is what I call anything that I could see sitting in the front at an airport bookstore -- high action & suspense, simple, page-turning fluff.  Which is fine with me -- though I have a friend or two who might disagree, I think everyone needs the occasional fluff.  If there was one aspect of the book that might slightly rescue it from the airport fiction genre, it would be the theme of science gone wrong/where should scientists draw the line with their research and experiments.

So my basic first reaction to Ancestor was, as I told my husband, "It's like Jurassic Park with way more human to human violence and some pretty misogynistic attitudes and abhorrent behaviors towards women".  Though I haven't actually read Jurassic Park, only seen the movie, so I'm not sure how accurate that comparison is.

My more positive thoughts?  Sigler did a great job of creating a diverse set of characters -- each character was unique and it was easy to remember who was who -- not always the case with a page-turning thriller full of many characters.  I also enjoyed the running commentary from one of the older characters about all the famous people he knew "back in the day" (ie, "Charlie" Heston, Jack Kerouac, and Marilyn Monroe) and the portrayals of Michiganders in general.

I will also admit to being amused by the same character's response after being asked the whereabouts of another person on the island, ""Did you look up your asshole?  Oh wait, your head is already there, so you'd have seen her by now."

The book opens with Paul Fischer, a colonel in the Army working with infectious disease.  I expected him to reappear at the end and he never did -- which felt like a loose end left untied.

So in general, it was an interesting airport fiction storyline that I enjoyed in some ways, but the numerous men with hideous attitudes toward women was a pretty big distraction that, for me, took away from my enjoyment of the story.