I just finished From Dead to Worse by Charlaine Harris, the most recent installment in her Southern Vampire Series about Sookie Stackhouse. The book itself was very interesting. Harris is at the point in the series where she can — and did — spend an entire book on already existing plotlines. Drawing them out, concluding them, adding new twists to perpetuate some, picking up some old ones to dust off and reinvigorate… it’s not often a series has the ability to do that. But it was good, even if it didn’t follow the typical format of a Sookie Stackhouse (or plain old urban fantasy adventure) novel. It’s also a relief in a way that she didn’t clog the book with a whole huge new plot (though there was a decently large new plot that was satisfying) and then sideline the already sidelined subplots again. I’m glad they got dealt with.

It’s interesting in another way too; now that the series is an HBO television series (True Blood), it’ll be interesting to see where HBO takes it. They can, with very subtle editing, probably do the entire series as written and do well with it. (Hurricane Katrina comes into it and is important to the plot in a peripheral way, but they can probably work around that.) Or, they may choose to take the characters and run with them into new territory. But it’ll be some time before they’ll have some serious decisions to make. For one, the series deviates from small-towns and vampires to larger issues and more supernatural types, and unless that’s handled in the manner with which they have started handling the supernatural stuff (with tact and seriousness) then it could be easily botched. But I doubt HBO will do the series wrong. I wonder how long they think it might last? Until the actors’ paychecks and lives no longer make it seem realistic to keep going? Because there are eight books so far and if season one of the series is maybe one or two books….

Anyway in other news I was really productive today and I look forward to more productivity tomorrow! Yay! I also need to hit up the library and return the large stack of books I’ve read lately and pick up Renegade’s Magic by Robin Hobb to start Reading Attempt #2. (#1 ended with me returning it because I couldn’t get into it easily and it came due. I was devouring other series at the time, too, which contributed to that.) I wonder how Hobb will end that trilogy…