a few unrelated (to each other) topics...

I just finished reading a vampire book that is actually really surprising and good. I would recommend it to all of you, because the writing style is great and the settings are various European countries in different eras and this gives it a great global/travel setting. Rather than actually being a traditional vampire book, it's set up and tells the story through historians and their fictional research. There are layers upon layers of narrative stories, letters, research, and actual action, so that everything in the book has a feel that you're being told a story through many sources, that you are discovering the story for yourself just like the characters in the book. It is similar to Possession (by A.S. Byatt) but not quite as inaccessible, and in this case about the historicity of Vlad Dracul the Impaler rather than a few Romantic Poets. It is most in feel and tone like The Time-Traveler's Wife, to me. I'm not sure why. It has a relatively engrossing, storytelling-based, and exploratory narrative, and it was a fun read.

Check it out at Amazon.






On other topics, we watched 2 new TV shows last week, and saw a lot of familiar faces. We enjoyed Chuck, although the only person we recognized was the main girl - Ben Stiller's wife, the reporter from Zoolander. Then we saw Bionic Woman just to see Starbuck from Battlestar Galactica, but it was a terrible show, despite them stealing most of the cast from BSG/Firefly. After they set up Katee Sackhoff as the evil nemesis, suddenly Chief Tyroll was sitting there at the bar, and that was odd. And then at the end in came the lawyer from season 3 of BSG (Badger on Firefly). Wild! Despite the fact that some of you - Ian and Liz - might like those actors, I would not recommend Bionic Woman even to my enemy.