Shannon brought up the possibility of reading the Aegypt series aloud together. I'm a big Crowley fan (Little, Big is one of my favorite books), so the idea appeals to me. It would take us forever, though. We'll talk more about it after we finish Harry Potter.
I've been reading a lot of bad Inu-Yasha fic lately. I keep starting a story and abandoning it part-way through when it becomes too painful. Nothing worth pointing and laughing, which would provide entertainment all its own, just your standard bad writing.
Speaking of bad writing, I also recently read Laurell K. Hamilton's new book, The Harlequin, which was bad bad bad. Amazingly enough, there were about 300 pages that weren't sex-related (big improvement over her recent books), but -- as I commented to Shannon -- absence of sex is not enough to make a book good. The book started with a hint of plot, which is the case with most of her books. They just always go to hell from there. In this case, the whole middle of the book was sex (as I have come to expect from Hamilton), and the final 150 pages quickly wrapped up the plot with a few bad guys we hadn't met previously. All of her recent books have had the same basic pattern: brief plot set-up, lengthy sex portion (which I generally do not find remotely sexy), and hurried wrap-up. The plot seems tacked on. I still read her books because the earlier ones, back before they started sucking, made me care about the characters (especially Jean-Claude, Nathaniel, Asher, and Jason), and there's always a little bit that happens to characters I care about in each book, just enough to keep me coming back for more.
I feel like Laurell K. Hamilton's Anita Blake books are sort of like Dawson's Creek for me. I started watching the series in the first season, when I really liked it. The show became worse and worse as time went on, but I liked the characters, so I kept watching. I hated Dawson's Creek by the time it went off the air, but I couldn't ... stop ... watching.
