Reading: June 2008 Archives

On the surface, the story of Gabriele Caccini is a classic telling of the "Vampire Who Wants to be Loved." In place of the tired cliche of the vampire who wants to be human, however, we have a vampire who really is human: he's hardly a monster at all, obsessing more about love than blood. He starves himself to his own despair, allowing himself to feed only once a year in his quest to find the woman who can be both his victim and his lover. 

The story is told in an interleaved style, folding back and forth between Gabriele's past and present. In the past, Gabriele becomes a vampire, a development which causes him to lose his first love. In the present, he continues his quest for the woman who can survive to become his eternal bride. His repeated failures, both in the past and present, shape a character ripe with despair. Both tales are wrought with love, lust, and tragedy. Without giving away the ending, there is also a convergence of the plot that leaves the book well situated for a sequel (a planned sequel is evident in the title, so you can look forward to it). 

Now, vampire-romances are not my cup of proverbial tea, so I am no expert here, but I wasn't expecting to read a book about vampires where the vamps had such real weaknesses of character: self-confidence issues; not being able to fit in; unable to come to terms with their vampirism ... that kind of thing. I actually got irritated at the main character for not being bad-ass enough (I mean, come on man! You're four hundred years old ... grow a pair!). That may sound like a dig, but it is actually a compliment: any character that gets a rise out of me is a character written well enough that I'm thinking about them as a personality and not a plot mechanism. 

There were plentiful doses of sex to feed the desires of those looking for a romance fix, though these scenes were more civilized that you expect from a romance novel (well, than I what I expect ... and I admittedly don't read them). Overall, the clear and colorful characters are what makes  Gabriele Caccini: The Vampire Gene - Book 1 (The Vampire Gene) a book worth reading - and the silver medal that it earned.

Four-and-a-half Feathers from the Rooster King.  Pros: strong character development, well structured plot.  Cons: wussy vampire, too much romance, not enough horror.

What did I find? I found what everyone finds when they search for answers in a half-assed, non-scientific manner.  I found the truth.  The truth is: Women Read Naked.  Maybe just topless, maybe sans-pantaloons, maybe just with breast-revealing unbuttoned blouses, but for a 30-something married guy, that's more or less the same as being naked.

They were everywhere: students reading books while wearing sweaters so tight that it would be impossible for them to turn the pages without getting paper-cuts on their nipples; Women lounging in bed, their perfect pendulous prizes barely hidden by the fluff of the featherbed, a book spread sensually before them; Wonky-eyed women clutching an open copy of Cluck to their bare chests in wonton embrace. 

Now, I wasn't running a google image search with the parental controls turned off, using keywords like 'sexy nude women boobs breasts natural live xxx +book' (I tried but the results were too disturbing).  I wasn't searching porn sites or sleazy image galleries.  Rather, I was searching legitimate stock photo art sites, looking for images that I could legitimately purchase and use to lure browsers from those "other sites" to mine, in hopes that they'd take time out from their internet fetish-play fantasies and buy a book about zombie chickens. 

Now I know what you're saying.  You're saying, "did you ever stop to think that maybe the women reading books are all topless and hot because you're searching a stock-art site, which is populated with nothing except photos of models posing seductively, because those photos are designed for marketing folks like you, with the sole intention of luring people into buying decisions based solely on a libido response?"  Well, that is a distinct possibility, so I won't even criticize your use of an amazingly long run-on sentence.  However, I still prefer to draw my own conclusions, which is that women simply like to read in the buff. It's a much more concise explanation.

It could be that thing about the media, and sex, and money, but I think it has more to do with free will.  Isn't it nicer know that we're not complete slaves to the media?  isn't it better to pretend that sex doesn't sell? For example, this woman here, to the left, is:

I'm much happier with 'a'.  She's not wearing pants because she doesn't want to wear pants while she's reading such a fantastic book. In fact, it's unclear at first whether she's even wearing panties, but if you zoom way in using photo-editing software, you can see that she is (not that I did that, that would be creepy). Judging by the angle of the book, she's not even reading it: rather, she's contemplating how much she wishes she knew more people who read zombie chicken books, so that they could engage in wild sex parties together.  Again, this is free choice at work, and has nothing to do with my poor photo-editing skills.  Honest. It's all about her.  Further proof lies in the note, which clearly states, "To do: 1) read about zombie chickens, 2) go to a bar and pick up strangers who also also read zombie chicken books, 3) engage in wild, nude acts of giggling, tickling sex."**  A marketing guy would never make something like that up, would they?

This almost-scientific approach to research led me to wonder if the clotheslessness of female readers was due to comfort, temperature, or (as implicated above) uncontrollable horniness.  More painstaking research, wading through screen after screen of professional photos of attractive women (hey, it's a hard job but somebody has to do it), and I found the proof that I was determined to find:  a fully clothed but obviously lusty redhead reading my book.  Incontrovertable.  I mean, really.  Look at her:

Wow. If she's not about to take her clothes off, it's only because she doesn't really have to. 

So, to answer the question using perfectly invalid scientific method, women read naked because that's the way they like it.  End of story.

Need further proof?  If you are a woman, buy a copy of my book, and read it.  Feeling a bit constricted in that cotton? If you're a man, buy a copy of my book for your girlfriend and see if she takes her clothes off.***  If she does, ask her the same question.  Remember, this is for posterity, so be honest. 

* I did attempt to find real live hot, lusty women who were reading my book, but after abject failure I opted for stock art and photoshop.