The Golden Darter
My Life Through Books
Middle School was a weird mix of classics and Star Wars. I was obsessed with The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux to the point of the book falling apart. I also discovered that while I love Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters can go hang. As for Star Wars... I've read almost every meta-verse book that was published up until the New Order cannon. I can still go into detail and recite storylines of a few beloved books. Hence, my nerd life began.
High school was very paranormal, vampire, scifi, etc. I would literally go online and search for book series that concerned vampires and read everything on the list. We are talking Anita Blake, Charline Harris, Anne Rice, Amelia Atwater-Rhodes, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Tanya Huff, Steven King, etc. This was before they sparkled, ya'll. Early college was philosophical and political theory for school, and mainstream fiction in my personal time. Wicked, Life of Pi, Memoirs of a Geisha. These are the 3 books that pushed me into my next phase, mostly because of how ambiguous I felt about them, and their questionable endings.
Late-mid college I was introduced to LaVyrle Spencer by way of Hummingbird courtesy of a gripe session with my Mom about how depressing the books I had been reading lately were. I've never looked back and have been hooked on the romance genre ever since. I've read and loved a ton of LaVyrle Spencer (who is a little hit and miss), Judith McNaught (of the rapetastic 80s era of romance), and Georgette Heyer (who writes in the vein of Austen). More recently I've discovered the joys of contemporary authors like Susan Elizabeth Phillips.
Lately I've been trying to read more non-fiction. I really do enjoy learning about subjects that interest me, but non-fiction can feel like work sometimes. So I fall back to romance. You just can't go wrong with knowing that there will almost always be a happy ending.
Currently reading
This was less about ghosts than it was about nothing to do with ghosts. Not sure why the author decided to do that cause in the next few stories we are right back to ghosts again. Anyway, the writing is significantly better this time around, although there is still more navel-gazing than I would like. Weird as it is to say, even though Dex is off his meds for the majority of the book, I had less of a problem with his character this book. I think she toned down his crazy some which was exactly what I thought he needed. He was just on the verge of making me feel ick in book 1. Perry still has no self-worth but I can see where improvements are being made and character development is something she needs badly. If that ever stops, I am so off this series. Meanwhile, I feel like we got more of a resolution at the end than we did in the first, but I am still confused about a lot of things. Like what exactly happened to Rudy besides him just disappearing? For that matter, is Boy Boy ok? And how about the weird bird demon brothers? Who the hell were they, and why did they almost rape Perry? You could just feel the plot threads getting snipped at places. But like I said, significant improvement over the last book, enough so that I jumped right into the next one. TLDR - Improvement in writing and character development over the last one, and I like where I see things going (yes, I have read several spoilers, but if I hadn't, I prolly wouldn't have continued the series).