I could get into where/when I discovered Laurell K Hamilton’s Anita Blake series, as well as the doldrums concerning why I keep reading. But I won’t. Wait. Okay, I will say that I keep reading them because I am an Aquarius and we are known for our fierce loyalty and resolve to finish things that we've started. Nonetheless, I could also share my many meditations on what I loath about the series; if there‘s room, maybe what I love (at least within the first nine books). However, I've shared my wobbling opinions about this series time and time again with those who've listened and shared my troubled thoughts concerning this cast of puppets and caricatures. And despite so, I try and try again to read the next book with a fresh pair of nerves. It’s like a revolving door, I come close to saying “f this series”, yet follow through with the next book the proceeding year. As more of what I dislike about the series repeats itself, without the slightest dawdle in concerns to readers' fatigue, I notice that I spend less and less time finishing any one particular book. And it's this wave of Mary Sue nausea--among other things--that is probably why it took me five months and almost four weeks to finish Affliction. Around the last third of the book is when I really began to clunk out and crash. I spent more time engrossed in my Murder, She Wrote marathons than seeing whether Anita and company were going to get off their cranky, notional philosophizing asses and focus on the case at hand.
And that's pretty much all I got. So enough of the undercover conversations and spiels on misogyny, as well as themes concerning the accidental emasculation of men. Even the gratuitous, ill-expressed sex scenes are now cake (although I totally skipped the third one out of exhaustion) as opposed to Hamilton's need to pound her readers in the head with whatever the hell her characters give a crap about randomly discussing at any--and I mean any--given moment. Those subject matters are about as old as grunge music. Only I like grunge music for being such. This... is just plain beating--or flogging in this instance--a dead horse.
Where do we go from here? Or do I really care to know now?
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