On to something more pleasant...

So, in yet ANOTHER effort to break my "Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D." obsession, I did a free trial of Shudder on Amazon Prime this weekend and watched "A Discovery of Witches" and boy, did that do the trick! I am now completely obsessed! For one thing...Matthew Goode, who I have loved forever, but it is brilliant, romantic, historic and epic, all the things I just adore! I ended up just buying the series on Amazon, as well as the books. The books are quite long and, despite my penchant for fast reading, I still only managed to get through the first one and barely into the second one yesterday (although I still watched the show twice yesterday as well, so that counts as a major distraction). The first book is the entire first series, and it fills out a lot of the gaps that the series leaves out (if that's possible in an 8 hr-8 episode series), but since the series focuses more on all the characters and the book just really focuses more on Matthew and Diana, I see where things had to be lost (although I wish they weren't).

I love that they speak Occitane instead of French most of the time (another one of my childhood obsessions), that the daemons are pre-Christian, and therefore NOT evil (another one of my favorite myths) and the romance of it all is right at my level! Did I mention Matthew Goode! Anyhoo, here's the trailer, and for those who have access to Amazon Prime (or just to books in general), I highly recommend either or both!

The second series (which isn't out yet) and book (which is) takes them back in time and, although I've just started the second book, I'm thinking about not reading it just yet, until I watch the second series. The ending of the first series put a question in my mind that was a bit too FitzSimmons-y and it bothered me, so I wanted to make sure that they both made it back in time together. But the first couple of chapters were so amazing (School of Night, anyone?), that it's going to be hard to stop it now...I just don't want it to ruin the second series for me, let alone the third!

The reviews on Amazon bothered me to no end though. There were comparisons to both Anne Rice and Twilight...neither of which I understood! Yes, Anne Rice is meticulous about her history, but I wouldn't call a single one of her books a "romance", even if they may have romantic connotations. People complained that there was too much history which made them boring. I ALWAYS laugh at reviews like that, especially when they mention Anne Rice in the same review...The Witching Hour anyone? That's got like a hundred pages of genealogy in it! If you can make it through that, you can make it through anything! I love how Deborah Harkness weaves the history through the story. To me, Anne Rice always locks the story to the history and it makes it unwavering sometimes, leaving little room for ebbs and flows (which is why I think it lacks that romantic quality I typically need in a book). I do love Anne Rice, but honestly, I haven't read anything from her since she "got religion", wrote those books about Jesus (which is why she is the only author my mother and I both own books by), then went back to writing about vampires. I was afraid it affected her work and I'm not even sure she's still religious. But I was afraid it was like the Stephen King syndrome...after his accident, his writing just turned everything into giant spiders and stupid monsters, not his horror novels of old. I think that Needful Things was the last book of his I enjoyed (and the story in Four Past Midnight that was the prequel to it).

But comparing these books and movies to the Twilight series is just insulting! There is nothing intellectual about Twilight at all...it's just mindless teen drama, which sometimes is a good thing and even I have been known to want to shut off and Twilight my brains out. The All Souls trilogy isn't overtly sexual (so far), but it is very adult in themes, nature and behaviors, something the Twilight series always lacked. There is no teen drama here! And last I checked, Twilight was just vampires and werewolves...here we have witches, vampires, and daemons (and I'm spelling it that way for a reason...besides, I MISS spelling it that way!). It's like comparing knock-off Dollar Tree apple-flavored candy (aka Twilight) to a perfectly grown, freshly picked, ripe mango soaked in the finest champagne and served with candied violets with Ice Wine as your drink (The All Souls Triology). Seriously, they aren't even in the same league!