literary garbage disposal mode

There's something about the beginning of summer (academic calendar summer, not solstice summer) that brings out my appetite for trashy novels. In the past, I've almost always gravitated towards fantasy and scifi for my fiction reading fix, but this year I've discovered a new depth to plumb...paranormal romance!

I started out with the Twilight series, out of curiousity; I'd won a gift certificate to amazon.com, and decided to use it to buy the Twilight series for the Kindle reader on my iPhone. Then I found a free edition of Lara Adrian's Kiss of Midnight on the Kindle site, so I read that and chased it with the next few books in the Midnight Breed series.

That's the point where I discovered that "paranormal romance" was a genre, and I started digging for comparable books. I stumbled across Laurell K. Hamilton's Anita Blake series, which has sixteen books (with the 17th due out in a few days). I love lengthy (preferably complete) series, because I'm a very fast reader, and books tend not to last me long. I'm also much too impatient to wait for the next book in a series to come out. I enjoyed the first eight Anita Blake books greatly, but then Hamilton started to become obsessed with the sexual activity rather than the plot, and the books went downhill. I'll admit that I kept reading, but with less and less enjoyment. I've also now read all the current books in Hamilton's Merry Gentry series, which suffers from some of the same sexual obsessions but manages to retain a tiny bit more plot and character development.

I also ran across the very entertaining "Southern Vampire Mysteries" series by Charlaine Harris, featuring the very appealing Sookie Stackhouse heroine. Of all of the series, I think I've enjoyed that one the most.

One of the wonderful parts of buying the first few books on the Kindle (for iPhone) was that I didn't have to deal with the embarrassment of having people see how lowbrow my reading tastes were at the moment. In fact, that's the only really good justification for buying ebooks that I've encountered thus far. But there's no way my budget could support my current reading habit in that form, so I've been making regular trips to the public library. (The women who work at the circulation desk don't quite seem to believe that I can read five hardcover books in three days, but they're quite wrong.)

Today I've finished off two books in another Charlaine Harris series, and am getting ready to start a three-book fantasy series by Lois McMaster Bujold. I'm not sure how long this reading compulsion is going to last, but I'm enjoying it while it does. :)