And the winner for ‘Next book to consume Yami’s brain’ is:
Bitten, by Kelley Armstrong!
This book has a bit of a story behind it. Kae recommended the series to me highly, based on a number of similar series we have enjoyed together in the genre. However, he’d forgotten how ‘rough’ the first book was. He swears the series gets better, but I couldn’t finish the first book. So, in an effort to force my way through it, I figured I’d do it for the blog. This will fill the Tuesday slot, since I’m not ready to tackle another religious book yet.
Amazon.com summary:
“Elena Michaels seems like the typically strong and sexy modern woman, She lives with her architect boyfriend, writes for a popular newspaper, and works out at the gym. She’s also a werewolf.
Elena has done all she can to assimilate to the human world, but the man whose bite changed her existence forever, and his legacy, continue to haunt her. Thrown into a desperate war for survival that tests her allegiance to a secret clan of werewolves, Elena must recon with who, and what, she is in this passionate, page-turning novel that begins the Women of the Otherworld series. ”
Apparently there’s also a TV series? ETA: Firedrake informs me that the TV series is still forthcoming. So I might watch that or liveblog it or something when we’re done with the book. Anyway, if you want to pick up a copy to read along, the decon begins next Tuesday.
Other: Please Specify 
There isn’t a TV series yet – it’s filming now, and Space will be showing it “early in 2014”.
I have a low tolerance for urban fantasy, and I’m not sure why. I think that to me it often feels lazy – it’s not enough to have werewolves, you’ve got to have vampires and witches and demons and necromancers and ghosts and kitchen sinks too. And of course all of them are compellingly sexy…
There’s certainly a lot of bad urban fantasy out there. The good stuff doesn’t feel lazy to me, though; you can tell when an author’s put a lot of thought into how all these magical beings fit together into a cohesive pattern, and developed the history of how the world’s come to be. I just finished reading the Parasol Protectorate series, for example, which is steampunk fantasy rather than your usual urban fantasy; it put a lot of effort into making a world that feels Victorian but takes the supernatural elements as a matter of course, weaving them into social etiquette and protocol. Or the Dresden Files, which has its own rich history and world-building despite being your classic masqueraded-supernatural setting ala Buffy.
Though it’s probably telling that in neither of my examples are the supernatural beings supernaturally sexy 😉 But yeah, it’s easy to write bad low-fantasy and easy to spot a lack of effort from a mile away (see: Twilight). At least with high fantasy you have to do some world-building; DnD/Tolkein ripoff worlds _seem_ like they have more effort put into them than “just like our world but with vampires!”. Also low fantasy is real popular right now, so more and more crap is being published.
Sorry, I could go on about the genre all day if you let me XD
Some of it’s certainly a taste thing – I tried the first Parasol book and really didn’t get on with it, but that may be because I know rather more about the English system of honours and forms of address than the author does. (In grumpier moods I have been known to argue that Americans should not be allowed to write books about English nobility unless they know at least one English person who actually lives in that system and knows how it works.) It just didn’t grab me. Dresden Files I enjoyed rather more, though later books have started to feel a bit self-indulgent (I liked the hero who was a struggling PI more than the hero who’s the Most Important Wizard EVAR).
And of course I’m familiar with Sturgeon’s Law, which often needs to be applied recursively. 🙂
Just looking through books I’ve read recently that might be in this genre, I note that I’ve enjoyed Charlaine Harris (less the vampire stuff, more the other books) and Rachel Caine (though I didn’t finish her series). A lot of the time it comes down to “I’m not enjoying this” rather than “I think this is objectively bad”.
I haven’t read Rachel Caine, and the Sookie Stackhouse books turned me right off of Charlaine Harris 😦
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