New Reads:

Right now, I’m reading Interview with a Vampire by Ann Rice. Yes, it was one of A’s birthday presents, but he’s already read (!) it so I picked it up last night after finishing my previous book.

As this book was written in 1976, most of you have probably read it. But on the off chance you haven’t, here is the basic plot summary:

"The time is now. We are in a small room with the vampire, face to face, as he speaks -- as he pours out the hypnotic, shocking, moving, and erotically charged confessions of his first two hundred years as one of the living dead...

He speaks quietly, plainly, even gently... carrying us back to the night when he departed human existence as heir -- young, romantic, cultivated-- to a great Louisiana plantation, and was introduced by the radiant and sinister Lestat into the other, the "endless" life... learning first to sustain himself on the blood of cocks and rats caught in the raffish streets of New Orleans, then on the blood of human beings... to the years when, moving away from his final human ties under the tutelage of the hated yet necessary Lestat, he gradually embraces the habits, hungers, feelings of vampirism: the detachment, the hardened will, the "superior" sensual pleasures.

He carries us back to the crucial moment in a dark New Orleans street when he finds the exquisite lost young child Claudia, wanting not to hurt but to comfort her, struggling against the last residue of human feeling within him...

We see how Claudia in turn is made a vampire -- all her passion and intelligence trapped forever in the body of a small child -- and how they arrive at their passionate and dangerous alliance, their French Quarter life of sudden, stolen opulence: delicate Grecian statues, Chinese vases, crystal chandeliers, a butler, a maid, a stone nymph in the hidden garden court... night curving into night with their vampire senses heightened to the beauty of the world, thirsting for the beauty of death -- a constant stream of vulnerable strangers awaiting them below...

We see them joined against the envious, dangerous Lestat, embarking on a perilous search across Europe for others life themselves, desperate to discover the world they belong to, the ways of survival, to know what they are and why, where they came from, what their futures can be...

We follow them across Austria and Transylvania, encountering their kind in forms beyond their wildest imaginings... to Paris, where footsteps behind them, in exact rhythm with their own, steer them into the doors of the Theatre des Vampires, the beautiful, lewd, and febrile mime theatre whose posters of penny-dreadful vampires at once mask and reveal the horror within... to their meeting with the eerily magnetic Armand, who brings them, at last, into intimacy with a whole brilliant and decadent society of vampires, an intimacy that becomes sudden terror when they are compelled to confront what they have feared and fled...

In an unceasing flow of spellbinding storytelling, of danger and flight, loyalty and treachery, as vampires are created, destroyed, avenged, and "remade", as vampire worlds are summoned up in all their evil and frightening enchantment -- the sensuous power, the profound feeling, the wit and verisimilitude of Ann Rice's narrative announce a literary imagination of the first order."

It’s odd and a complete departure from what I usually read, but I’m hoping to get some exposure to the sci-fi/fantasy genre (or attempting, at least). So far, it’s interesting to me.

So, if you’re keeping count, this is the 4^th out of the 56 books that I pledged to read this year. So far, the list reads as follows:

1. Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? By Mindy Kaling
2. Everything I Needed to Know About Being a Girl I Learned From Judy Blume by Jennifer O’Connell
3. The Sweet Far Thing by Libba Bray
4. Interview with a Vampire by Ann Rice