Winter Wednesday: The fog is rising...

The drive into work this morning started with rain, then became pea-soup fog, and then dissipated back into rain as we came up and out of the Ranges.

Last night had such a chill to it that I found it difficult to sleep; the combustion heating had been lit all day and continued ticking over all through the night, but Winter's icy cold grip refused to abate.

Winter Wednesday is a photo feature hosted by Hazel Dene.

(I felt today's dark, gloomy winterness was the perfect opportunity to join in.)

Dead Until Dark by Charlaine Harris

Dead Until Dark by Charlaine Harris

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

'You're different,' he said. 'What are you?' He seemed to be going through a list of possibilities in his head from the way he was looking at me. To my pleasure, I could not hear a one of them.
'Well. I'm Sookie Stackhouse, and I'm a waitress,' I told him.

Dead Until Dark is the first novel (of 11 to date) in the 'Sookie Stackhouse' series by Charlaine Harris. Orphaned as a child, Sookie and her brother, Jason, are raised by their Gran in the small town of Bon Temps, Louisiana, where as adults they continue to pass their lives. Sookie leads an otherwise uneventful life: She is a waitress in a local bar, but she does possess an interesting gift - The ability to read minds.

Sookie's world is one where vampires are accepted as being real and have assimilated into the community, with the mainstream opinion being that they are the victims of a rare virus. Sookie comes face to face with her first vampire when Bill Compton returns to his family home in Bon Temps - more than 100 years after his "death". This chance meeting with the vampire Bill sets in motion a series of heartstopping events - of the romantic, destructive and life-threatening kind.

My first impression of Dead Until Dark was that Harris' style was so simple it bordered on amateur, but by the time I'd reached the hundredth page I was totally, unequivocally, unrepentently hooked. The storyline and writing style may be uncomplicated, but the story is written from the point of view of Sookie, and what is so likeable about her is that she is a completely uncomplicated character.

I enjoyed this novel not because it's a literary masterpiece, but because it's the exact opposite and yet still suckered me in. Dead Until Dark is a light yet gratifying snack of a novel: The story flows effortlessly from one page to the next, and is not weighed down by heavy descriptive or emotional text. Harris easily draws the reader into Sookie's dark and mysterious existence, the confines of her mind being an intriguing (and sometimes amusing) place in which to spend 300-odd pages of book.

It may be "vampire trash", but it's terribly good vampire trash, and I'm looking forward to starting the next installment.

View all my reviews

About the House: Renovations & Repairs.

Despite my silence I am still here, but the days and nights are crazy-busy at the moment.

Renovations on the house are still in full swing: SJ took two weeks annual leave to get as much as possible completed. We are almost done with the living room and the dining room, just waiting on some architrave to arrive and still have to replace a few pieces of skirting that are old and damaged beyond repair.

[Our living room last week]

Not including the gyprock and cornice (I'm unsure as to how many metres of this we've needed so far), in the living and dining area alone we have so far used approximately 45kg of top coat, 12L sealant primer undercoat, 8 tubes of No More Gaps (I'll be opening the ninth this evening), 12L low sheen paint, 8L semi-gloss paint, and a countless number of screws, nails, glue, and sandpaper...

SJ is confident of having these two rooms completed over the weekend so that we can move our attention to the entrance hall, which still needs sanding, undercoating, No More Gaps-ing, painting...

There will be a series of "Before" and "After" pictures to come, hopefully in the not-too-distant future! I can't wait to show you what we've achieved (all of us amateur renovators!).