Let’s put it this way: after one reading through Hot Chocolate by Michael Turbeck, I wanted to have sex with this book. Not with the author. With the book.

The Amazon page says there are “more than 60″ recipes in this book, which probably means there are 61 or something. It’s a thin book, with a wide range of chocolates for every taste: the thick chocolate from Cafe Angelina in Paris, spicy Aztec-inspired chocolates, a hot white chocolate from Sweden, Frrrozen Hot Chocolate from Serendipity, alcoholic chocolates for adults, side dishes of tuiles and little cookies, coconut marshmallows…

Seriously, depending on how this winter goes my entire running program could be for naught, because I seriously want to try half of the recipes in this book tonight. I’ll leave the lavender-and-pistachio hot chocolate (yup) for tomorrow.

Oh man. Kepler’s is out of business. I can’t believe it. That was a wonderful bookstore, one of the few independents in this area. (For such a literate area, we have a complete Hobson’s choice of bookstores: B&N or Borders. Whee. Ha.)

If Kepler’s couldn’t make it—whenever I went there it was packed—the independent bookstore is truly doomed.

I bought Dearly Devoted Dexter by Jeff Lindsay in hardcover. That should tell you how eager I was to read this sequel to Darkly Dreaming Dexter. Because I never buy hardcover.

Sat down. Read it straight through. Wished the next book were out already.

Dexter is the Energizer Bunny of serial killers: he’s still finding bad guys who deserve to be dispatched and, well, takes care of them. His sister is now a homicide detective who gets called to the scene of a particularly gruesome crime (despite the humor of these books, Lindsay doesn’t stint on describing the sort of awful things serial monsters like to do) and she asks Dexter for his particular insights into this crime. Only to discover that whoever’s doing this is wanted by more than the Miami Police—the guys in Washington need to find this guy, and fast.

Meanwhile, Dexter is being followed by Detective Doakes, who knows there’s something Not Right about Dexter and wants to provoke him into acting stupid. So Dexter does: he becomes a couch potato at his girlfriend Rita’s apartment and just the substitute Dad Rita’s two kids need. And then the most awful, unthinkable thing happens: Dexter gets mistakenly engaged.

Several times I read a particularly funny line aloud to Darin, who eyed me warily (I don’t think he quite “gets” Dexter). There are some seriously hilarious parts to this book. There are also some gruesome ones (but hey: you’re reading a serial killer novel), so be warned. Dexter’s voice and worldview are so engaging though—what grosses us out is merely fodder for artistic appreciation to him—that you can get through it.

I still don’t know how Lindsay is going to keep this going, but what he has so far is hilarious and wonderful. Dexter definitely stands out. Though he’s trying his damnedest to blend in with these human weirdoes.

§

Sarah Weinman notes that Jeff Lindsay has sold two more Dexter novels: DEAR DADDY DEXTER and Untitled. Untitled??? Well, some of her commenters have good suggestions. My favorite is DEMONICALLY DIAPERING DEXTER. Because, you know: he could.

Underwhelming.

Okay, I guess that was a little terse. It’s kind of meant to be a joke, given that The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova is 656 pages long. It’s also had one of the greatest publicity blitzes in recent memory—I’d been hearing about this book for weeks before it was published, with articles using such phrases as “one of the rare books that’s worthy of the hype.” I was so excited when it was available at the library. Darin needed something to read; I let him read it first.

He was underwhelmed. If you read EW, he completely agreed with its review, except he said, “I’d give it a B- instead of a B.”

The Historian is the story of several generations of scholars who have been obsessed by who Vlad the Impaler was and what really happened to him. The first problem I had with this book is this: in the first couple hundred pages, there are three narrators:

1. A woman in 2008, looking back to when she was 16, in 1972.
2. Her father, discussing events that happened in the early 1950s.
3. The father’s academic mentor, an Englishman, discussing what happened in the 1930s.

Guess what? They all sound exactly the same. Same stentorian phrases, same high-flown descriptions. I had to pay particular attention to the opening phrase of any given chapter so I could be sure as to who in the hell was speaking, or, in many cases, writing—there are lots and lots of letters that apparently everyone leaves around describing what had happened at some period in the past.

And I get the point, Kostova wants to describe a different, more removed world, but the only detail I remember her including that links what happens in her book to the real world is a passing reflection that after the events that happened here, the Soviets invaded Hungary. Oh, and a discussion of what would happen if someone like Stalin were immortal, the damage he could do. (Were the extent and severity of Stalin’s crimes as well known in the 1950s? I ask because I actually don’t know the answer to that.)

Another problem is the writing about past events. Everyone describes everything exactly chronologically. The problem with this is, in several cases, the writer knows how it’s going to turn out but somehow forgets to put that in the beginning of the letter they’ve left for posterity. Imagine if someone who lived in NYC wrote down the events of their day on September 11, not just as history but as a warning to future readers. Think they might put some of the salient points up front?

Not in this book. No, in this book people will just leave off in the middle of their stories, needing to pause for whatever reason.

Janet Maslin, in her review, mentions the endless travelogues. Yup, gotta agree with her there. Worse than that, however, is that these descriptions go on for so damn long I forget what the characters are doing there. There’s one section that’s an ancient letter describing the pilgrimage of some monks from Wallachia to Constantinople and from there to Bulgaria, and as I started reading it I suddenly realized I had no idea what the point was.

The Historian isn’t terrible; it’s just ponderous. And if there’s one thing a frickin’ vampire novel shouldn’t be, it’s ponderous. So I’m with Darin: I give it a B-. And I want the name of Kostova’s publicist for my own future reference.

Dexter Morgan, the hero and narrator of Jeff Lindsay’s novel Darkly Dreaming Dexter, is a guy with a problem: while he doesn’t exactly know what’s “right” and what’s “wrong,” he’s a serial killer who’s known from a young age both what he is and that murder is generally considered “wrong.” His foster father, a cop, trained him how to channel his impulses toward a fairly narrow set of victims: other serial killers.

In his day-to-day life, the one where he pretends to be human and interacts with humans with complete incomprehension of what they’re thinking, Dexter is a blood splatter analyst for the Miami police department. His foster sister, Deborah, is a cop who really wants out of vice and into homicide. There’s a serial killer preying on the hookers on the Tamiami Trail, and Deb knows this could be her ticket to a detective’s badge. She needs Dexter to give him one of his famed “hunches.” Dexter often has hunches when serial killers are on the loose, because he knows how to think like them better than anyone. But the Tamiami Trail killer is different—not only does Dexter highly admire the killer’s technique, if not his aims, but the killings seem almost like they’re meant to communicate something specifically to him. Dexter, you see, has been having strange, incomprehensible dreams, and he’s been sleep walking. The question he faces is: has he been sleep killing?

I started reading this at 10:30 last night and finished the entire thing shortly after 12, so I rate this one, Two thumbs, way up.

What I especially love in this book is how Lindsay keeps Dexter in character all the time, showing us Dexter’s point of view at all times. Dexter finds humans utterly incomprehensible. For example, there’s the female detective in charge of the Tamiami Trail case who seems to treat Dexter in the oddest way:

She finished with a few threats and sent the man away. “Indio,” she spat, as he lumbered out of earshot.

“It takes all kinds, Detective,” I said. “Even campesinos.” She looked up and ran her eyes over me, slowly, while I stood and wondered why. Had she forgotten what I looked like? But she finished with a big smile. She really did like me, the idiot.

“Hola, Dexter. What brings you here?”

“I heard you were here and couldn’t stay away. Please, Detective, when will you marry me?”

She giggled. The other officers within earshot exchanged a glance and then looked away. “I don’t buy a shoe until I try it on,” LaGuerta said. “No matter how good the shoe looks.” And while I was sure that was true, it didn’t actually explain to me why she stared at me with her tongue between her teeth as she said it. “Now go away, you distracting me. I have serious work here.”

Lindsay builds the suspense very nicely—Dexter knows he’s off, but how off is he?—and maintains a great balance between humor and horror. Dexter is a great narrator: ironic, charming, confident of his abilities, pathetic in his inhumanity. The ending has a few problems, but the thrill ride to get there, and the unexpected emotional punch of the unusual choice Dexter has to make, make it worthwhile.

The sequel, Dearly Devoted Dexter, is due out next month. I don’t know how long Lindsay will be able to keep up this balancing act, but I’m definitely picking up this book. And according to Lee Goldberg, Showtime has ordered a pilot for a series based on this book. To which I say, !!! I don’t know how they’d do it. Can you show the hero of a series killing people every week in a particularly inhuman manner?—well, I guess cop shows have been doing that for years. I’d at least tune in for one episode.

I fully expect all of my friends to sign up for this in lieu of, you know, developing craft:

Casting Call For Reality TV Show Contestants…

“At Last, You Could Become America’s Next Best Selling Author and Reality Show TV Celebrity!”

The newest reality TV show, Book Millionaire, is providing applications and holding casting calls for people who want to become published authors or those who are published and want to achieve best selling status.

Eight people with dreams of seeing their book ideas become published and being the next author launched to best selling and celebrity status will meet Book Millionaire‘s Publishing Committee during July 2005 to start filming of Book Millionaire Reality TV Show.

Here’s your chance to finally become America’s next Best Selling Author and Reality Show TV Celebrity! We are scouting for the next group of candidates for America’s hottest new reality show. Act now. Picture yourself featured on national television sharing your story, writing, book-to-be or book with millions of people showing you have what it takes to be America’s next Best Selling Author and Book Millionaire.

At last…

Why do I find myself hoping this is some kind of Internet scam and not an actual show?

Update: Lee Goldberg has a longer analysis of this.