Biblio Beau

Thursday, January 7, 2016

Title: [Blood Noir]
Author: Laurell K. Hamilton
Genre: Vampires
Medium: Hardback
Acquisition: Originally preordered, re-read
Date Completed: January 6, 2016
Rating: ****

Blood Noir is, like most Anita Blake books, filled with angst, but of a different sort than we see in the books immediately preceding - this angst is professional, and how the monster-hunter manages to both love and murder the supernatural. When a serial-killing vampire reappears in Vegas, Anita takes off while Jean Claude is still asleep, the better to slip away. The bounty hunters Edward, Bernardo, and Olaf are back, and Anita navigates local supernatural politics, local law enforcement, and her own killer instincts as she seeks out a real, material threat. Anita is a better vampire hunter than she is a partner or a lover, and I appreciate when the books find a balance of the two. This book earns four stars from me less for its actual content, and more for the welcome change from the last one.

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Favorite Quotes

"To tell people what to read is, as a rule, either useless or harmful; for the appreciation of literature is a question of temperament not of teaching [...]. But to tell people what not to read is a very different matter, and I venture to recommend it as a mission..." - Oscar Wilde, "Letter to the Pall Mall Gazette on the Subject of 'The Best Hundred Books'" (qtd. Wright, Built of Books, 317).

"I wish you joy o'th' worm" - Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, 5.2.270.

"The world must be peopled!" - Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." - Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice.

"That a man who has sons brings up chickens for his own table ... whereas daughters are chickens brought up for the tables of other men." - Samuel Richardson, Clarissa (77).

“No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” - Samuel Beckett

And then there is more Oscar Wilde:

"It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it."

"You can never be overdressed or overeducated."

"You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you never had the courage to commit." - The Picture of Dorian Gray.

"Appearance blinds, whereas words reveal." - Personal Impressions of America

"A poet can survive everything but a misprint." - "The Children of the Poets", The Pall Mall Gazette

"There is no sin except stupidity." - The Critic as Artist

"One should always be a little improbable." - "Phrases and Philosophies for the use of the Young"

"The truth is rarely pure and never simple." - The Importance of Being Earnest

"Even when reading is impossible, the presence of books acquired produces such an ecstasy that the buying of more books than one can read is nothing less than the soul reaching towards infinity... we cherish books even if unread, their mere presence exudes comfort, their ready access, reassurance."
--- A.E. Newton