Recommend Me (3)

Recommend Me is hosted by Kate @ The Neverending Shelf

Recommend Me is a weekly event in which you pick one of your all time favorite reads to share. This could be a book that you read as a child or even finished yesterday.

To play along, grab a favorite read and tell us about it. You can include

-- your thoughts about the novel
-- its summary,
-- your favorite memory related to the novel... the possibilities are limitless.
-- If you are up for a challenge, you can also include: your review of the novel, links to others' reviews of the novel or you can recommend the book to a general group of readers or if you want to be extra daring, to specific reader friends

Read more about this meme at http://www.theneverendingshelf.com/


This week I recommend:

Peeps by Scott Westerfeld (Sleuth RazorBill, August 2005)

Summary from Goodreads:  One year ago, Cal Thompson was a college freshman more interested in meeting girls and partying in New York City than in attending his biology classes. Now, after a fateful encounter with a mysterious woman named Morgan, biology has become, literally, Cal's life.
Cal was infected by a parasite that has a truly horrifying effect on its host. Cal himself is a carrier, unchanged by the parasite, but he's infected the girlfriends he's had since Morgan—and all have turned into the ravening ghouls Cal calls peeps. The rest of us know them as vampires. And it's Cal's job to hunt them down before they can create even more of their kind. . . .

This past week, I posted a review of The Silver Kiss and started a small discussion about vampire books.  I am a fan of vampires (yes, I admit to reading and enjoying Twilight).  I remember reading Interview with the Vampire in high school and all of my friends thinking I was odd.  So, I think its great that there is a renewed interest in them.  But, I've been noticing that quite a few recently published books have the same exact premises and often very similar plots.  That got me to thinking about the vampire books I have enjoyed reading and realized that they all add something to the mythology or present vampirism in a unique way.  So, when I was looking for a book for this week's Recommend Me, I thought why not a book about vampires? 

I chose Peeps by Scott Westerfeld because it is a very different sort of vampire book.  Vampires aren't glamorous or objects of lust or love.  In fact, they aren't even called vampires: they are parasite positives or peeps.  This is how Westerfeld describes Peeps on his website: "Maybe there are too many vampire novels, I thought. But that was part of the challenge, to see if I could do something that felt new and interesting, while still being full of bitey goodness. (Unsurprising confession: I am a Buffy fan.) So the book had to be original, but also icky, scary, funny, tragic, and (ahem) not sucky." Westerfeld did a great deal of research and it is very evident, every other chapter contains information about real parasites and he even includes a list of sources. 


Want more interesting vampire books?  Check out:

Morganville Vampires Series by Rachel Caine

Tantalize and

 Eternal by Cynthia Leitich Smith







What do you recommend this week?