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I've been too lazy and busy with other stuff to keep up with this, but I recently finished a good book: After Dark by Haruki Murakami.

It's very hard for me to say why I liked it. It's about a bunch of people interacting at night (After Dark) in fairly normal ways, but there's also a strange and surreal quality...and it's hard to tell whether or not what's happening is real or not. I almost think it doesn't matter. I try not to overanalyze Murakami, and just enjoy the writing.

I recently finished Obsidian Butterfly by Laurell K. Hamilton. This is the 9th book in the Anita Blake series.

As you may guess, I do like the series to have gotten this far, but the other side of the coin is that it's been 10 months since I finished #8...I haven't exactly been in a hurry.

At first I was rther disappointed. Some of the scenes seemed almost identical to those in ealier books. A few examples:

1. Anita is not dressed sexily enough and is forced to change for the occasion...for a girl who doesn't care about clothes, she sure spends a lot fo time talking about her outfits. Down the the underwear whee

2. Every meeting has to be a drama-infused confrontation. Whether it's a master vampire, a mean cop, or even one of the regulars, there will be words, and there will be guns drawn. Give it a freaking rest!

3. There's a public performance at a club full of supernatural creatures...and what do you know, they're doing to something illegal to bespell the audience. Anita must intervene...

Come on. If the above scenes are in mre than two different novels, LKH needs to do a little more creative thinking. Now, all of that said, I thought that around the midway point, the story picks up. Things move faster, and there is more that held my attention. From there to the end was a quick read, despite the book itself being nearly 600 pages long.

I will keep reading, but LKH needs to do better than just grafting the same scenarios into a book with a different monster.