Day 28 – First Favorite Book

My first literary love was probably Pratchett, and I did once read all of Anne McCaffrey‘s books in a single summer, but there aren’t many books that I link with specific childhood events.

We used to holiday in the States a lot when I was younger and I always underestimated the number of books I needed to bring with me. I’d read a lot because I’m not a sun bathing person and American TV has far to many adverts to be watchable. Remember this was in the days when most UK homes got only 4 or 5 TV channels and two of them had no commercial breaks, so watching stuff with adverts ever 5 minutes was a brain melting experience, even now I prefer to watch most series on DVD or On Demand to avoid the stupid adverts. Anyway we usually ended up in the hopelessly touristy parts of Florida without a book store in sight, or in the suburbs with only an S-Mart (or whatever they are called in Florida) for general shopping purposes.

I found this when we were staying in a villa with its own po0l (OMG luxury!), during a period when I was trying not to be goth (I occasionally tried to be normal as a teen, it never stuck for long), on a rack by the check outs at the S-Mart. I’m not sure if you can see it in the photo but the cover isn’t even cut straight. It was the only book I found all holiday and I probably read it three times whilst listening to the insane Floridian storms.

Interview With The Vampire isn’t the best book ever written, and Anne Rice has gone more than a bit in the years since this was released (if you missed her punctuation free tantrum in response to the poor reviews of Blackwood Farm you missed a real treat, it was epic), but despite the mediocre series that follows IWTV remains a classic of vampire writing. It also produced one of the only films where I can stand to watch Tom Cruise or Antonio Banderas. And without an ounce of glitter in sight!

Even Better 30 Day Song Challenge – Day 28 - Track to Chill Out/Unwind To

I’m not a summery person but I love this song. No it’s not the banned version :p

Day 20 – Favorite Kiss

It was insanely difficult to come up with an answer for this one, cos generally I don’t pay any attention to such sappiness.

In the end I picked the only kiss I could remember, from Seasons of Mist, volume four of the Sandman graphic novel series by Neil Gaiman. I’m not going to show the kiss itself here because, 1. I’ve lost my copies of Sandman one through six and 2. its rather graphic.

The kiss in question is between Lucifer (The Morningstar, The Adversary, The Great Serpent, Satan, Lord of Hell) and Mazikeen who is a demon and a daughter of Lilith. This kiss takes place as Lucifer is planning to close down Hell and quit his job as Satan. Mazikeen pledges her love and loyalty to him even though he is no longer her lord or master, to which he states “you may love me, if you wish” before kissing her goodbye and using her knife to cut off his wings. The reason I’d class the kiss as graphic is that Mazikeen (as a demon) is missing most of one side of her face. Literally her brain is exposed and you can see inside her mouth, which makes the image of her kissing the David Bowie-esque Lucifer very disturbing indeed. Here’s a link to it in ummm… spanish I think.  You’ve been warned.

The relationship Lucifer has with Mazikeen is the closest he seems to get to genuine emotion in the Sandman books, and I always felt sorry for poor ugly Mazikeen for being left behind. Until The Kindly Ones at least, when its revealed that Lucifer is playing piano in a wine bar and Mazikeen is part of the staff. One up for the ugly girls :p

Even Better 30 Day Song Challenge – Day 20 - Oh My God Listen To The Lyrics

It was so hard not to pick another JoCo song for this, but for such a sad song, with a such a depressing message, this always makes me giggle. Why? 3:40 to 3:46 that’s why. Ah, Pete Steele, you’re sadly missed.