Mina, I can only regard you with awe. You managed not only to read the whole of Varney, but to keep your critical faculties attuned throughout. Wow! I started reading Varney but, after a while, took to looking at the pictures, and skipping the text. Occasionally (but not often) a picture was sufficiently interesting for me to read a little bit to find out what was going on. I also read the ending to see whether it was as I’d heard. (“Crumbs!” was my reaction. “It really does end like that. Who’d have thought?”)

Rei and Miranda, thank you you for cluing me up on Twilight. I will freely admit to being fully half a century too old for Twilight. I hadn’t guessed that vampires could sink into such a debased form.

Marvellous article, I vote Jilly Cooper for the next lot of reading ;)

I have always felt that the vamps in Twilight were presented much more like fae than undead. Edward and his ethereally pretty family come over more like a weird iteration of the Elfin Bridegroom trope than walking corpses.

I think Mina’s response to this comment is pretty much dead-on, Pet, but I will add this, just because you mentioned it: there’s not actually a lot of bloodsucking in Twilight. The vampire aspect of it honestly isn’t much of a feature at all until the fourth book (and even then, you could pretty much switch them out for any other paranormal creature you’ve authorially modified to be invincible, impossibly beautiful and sparkly).

(And also, I really don’t think I’m in any position to judge anyone else’s choice of reading material. ;-))

To be perfectly honest with you, I found some of the earlier books kind of boring. This is maybe because I’m not that big on detective novels; I did enjoy the “monster of the week” setup to an extent, but…well, I think part of it might have been that, as I said above, I was reading them all at once, and they all have a very similar structure. After the first couple that started to drag.

Yeah, I think that was what ultimately left me with a bad taste in my mouth about the books. I think the author sees them as major gamechangers in paranormal romance, but they’re really not.

Thanks! I’m really glad you enjoyed it.

I struggled with the repetitive nature of the books as well; in perfect fairness to LKH, I think part of the reason it hit me especially hard is that I was reading a lot of books from a long-running series back to back, which I feel is kind of similar to marathoning a TV show that used to run once a week and getting annoyed by all the mandatory bits of set-up they do at the beginning of each episode because you’re seeing them all at once. She doesn’t half lay it on thick, though. And after a while there are just no new characters anymore. Maybe that would have bothered me less if I’d read each book as it was released, though. I guess I feel like in a long-running series the repetitive setup serves a purpose at the point of publication, but it doesn’t really reward back-to-back reading.

Yes, Anita Blake is a complete hypocrite. She’s…I don’t know, a lot about her rubs me up the wrong way. I’m totally fine with characters who just aren’t very nice people, but she’s so…*smug* about it.