I done read some stuff

I've sort of been casting about for another fabulous book after inhaling the Hunger Games trilogy, and haven't really been entirely enamored of anything yet.  I did finally finish all the Harry Potterses and while I enjoy them, they're not incredible literature by any means (Rowling has a tendency to repeat characters' names ad nauseam which I find terribly annoying, both in books and in movies/t.v. shows - every sentence does not have to start with someone's name).  My most recent conquests have been back into the realm of urban fantasy with Kitty and the Midnight Hour by Carrie Vaughn and My Life as a White Trash Zombie by Diana Rowland.  Mixed results there.

Kitty and the Midnight Hour is pretty standard urban fantasy fare, starting with the cover which has a long-haired girl standing back-to, wearing a leather halter and low riders, so that her tramp stamp shows, with a snarling wolf off to the side.  The titular Kitty is a werewolf DJ who finds herself accidentally running a call-in  late night radio advice show for werewolves and vampires.  She is struggling to find her position in her wolf pack, has pissed off all the local vampires and has a hot werewolf hunter nosing around, plus a string of dead and mutilated bodies are popping up around town which may or may not mean a rogue werewolf.  There's a little rough wolfpack sex - nothing like the Anita Blake series levels, thank goodness, and hopefully the books in this series won't veer off into that soft-core format.  There are a bunch of books in this series but this first one compelling enough for me to explore further, I'm afraid.

I liked My Life as a White Trash Zombie much better, largely because it seemed so new and different: girl zombies are rarely the protagonists of urban fantasy books, so I didn't feel as though this was such tired ground.  Angel has a shitty house in a small Louisiana town, an alcoholic father and a drug-dealing part-time boyfriend.  When she wakes up in the hospital after a car crash, she has no injuries, a mysterious job offer with the coroner's office and a strange new craving for brains.  The book follows her as she tries to make sense out of what happened to her, track down a serial killer who decapitates his victims and keep herself fed enough to not disintegrate and attack living humans for their skull candy.  To her surprise, she's much better off dead than she ever was alive.  This is a quick, fairly funny read (Angel likes to blend her brains with tomato soup for added flavor) that puts a lively new take on a classic horror trope.