The Sunday Salon: New Year, New Turn of the Page

Not posted here for some time. Hopefully something that will change over the next year or so :)

In the final months of 2009 I became obsessed with the Sookie Stackhouse books. They are not the best books ever written and sometimes Sookie does your head in but, by golly, there's something about them that sucks you in. The television adaptation just hit UK screens a couple of months ago and nearly everyone I know has been watching it.

It does feel a bit hypocritical due to my intense hatred of Twilight. Essentially the Sookie Stackhouse Saga is Twilight but with more sex. A hellva lot more sex. No subliminal abstinence messages here. Oh and the telepathic abilities but that's it. But they are highly addictive. One negative offshoot of reading the entire series almost in one go is that the books seemed to merge together. I could tell you the plot of the first and second books but any further on and I start getting mixed up with the characters' activities.

But they make a nice distraction from 'orrible uni reading. I am currently anxiously awaiting the most recent book in the series from Amazon. This might be swallowed up rather quickly if it arrives before the Christmas break is over (lucky me, I don't go back until the 11th).

However, my first 'proper' read of 2010 is the tome that is The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber. It was on my reading list for my writing class and I happened to spot it in a charity shop a week later. The tutor had described it as a 'typical' Victorian novel but written in the twentieth century. I have to admit I find it hard to get into Dickens and other books of that era. I do feel ashamed that I have only read the children's abridged version of Oliver Twist, Great Expectations and David Copperfield.

The book weighs in at c. 1000 pages but I have been gobbling it down. Last night was a quiet one at work so I managed to reign in 100 pages. The story revolves around numerous characters. The people at the centre of this saga are William Rackham, a feckless man turned failed writer turned master of his father's perfume business and Sugar, a prostitute that William becomes obsessed by. Faber's writing is a joy to read, his descriptions of Victorian London are so vivid that you can almost smell the filth and the squalour; the perfumes that Rackham's factories make. Some of the language in the book would make a genteel Victorian lady faint with shock but it does paint a picture of the less than prim Victorians that people skirt over. They were dirty bitches some of them, so they were ;)

So far, the start to my reads of 2010 is going rather swell.