Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

A rare case in which the TV show is better (for a time)

Dead Until Dark by Charlaine Harris

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If you’ve seen the HBO Show True Blood, then you know the plot of Dead Until Dark. Vampires are real and everyone knows about them. Sookie Stackhouse wants to meet a vampire desperately, but she’s just a waitress at a small bar in Bon Temps, Louisiana where nothing exciting ever happens. The only thing that keeps things interesting/challenging for Sookie is that she can read minds. Other than that, her life is boring: she goes to work, she goes home to her home where she lives with […]

CBR Diversions – Dream Casting

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As a lover of all things pop culture, I love to read and watch book adaptations on the big and small screen. I first saw HBO’s True Blood series before absolutely devouring the Charlaine Harris Sookie Stackhouse books. Same for The Golden Compass, which was panned by critics, but led to me reading the His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman. The screen versions captivated me and I simply had to know the literary origins of the characters. When I read a particularly engaging novel, […]

My Watch Has Ended

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I had divorced myself from the world of Sookie Stackhouse following the terrible twelfth book in the series, Deadlocked, back in 2012. It was, to me, a complete destruction of all the reasons I had been gamely reading along with this series since my friend Meika came across it in 2007 and we rapidly consumed all the available books. When I reviewed Deadlocked I thought I’d eventually read this book because I have series completion OCD, but in the intervening years I’ve avoided it. For […]

Skip the book, watch season one, then skip the rest of True Blood

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Like most of us, I think, I watched the show that grew out of these novels. And while I very much enjoyed the first season of True Blood, the bad acting (especially from Anna Paquin) and tiresome storyline of subsequent seasons eventually lost me. I honestly don’t even know if the show is still on, and can’t really be bothered to check. So why did I read the book upon which the show was based? To be honest…..I don’t really know the answer to that. […]

Not with a vampire bang, but with a supe whimper

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This is the 13th and final installment in the Southern Vampire Mystery Series, aka, the True Blood books. Sometimes, you finish a series and you are left wanting more. This was not one of those times. These have been my beach books, my brain candy, and I have enjoyed them for what they are, but the thrill was gone by the end of the book. After so long in Sookie’s world the characters have become predictable, as have the plot lines. Or, when there is […]

Sookie + Supes = Madcap Hijinks

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This Charlaine Harris series is my guilty pleasure, the dirty secret I try not to read in public. I don’t think they are particularly great, but sometimes when life is tough you just need brain candy, and this is where I turn. Ironically, I read the next book in the series before this one because I simply didn’t realize I had skipped it. Her writing style is such that each book spends half the time explaining what happened before, and it had been a while […]



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