Culling that TBR pile…

This year I ventured into re-reading Anne Rice‘s Vampire Chronicles and mabye venturing further along into unread titles. So I read Interview with the Vampire in February and gave it 4 stars. The Vampire Lestat in April was another 4 stars, The Queen of the Damned in June still managed to garner 3.5 stars from me. Then came The Body Thief in September and I bounced off it hard…

I took a long, hard look at the next two books in the series, already sitting on my bookshelf. Took a breather, looked again. Read the blurbs… Meh.

They would be the first two books in the series that I haven‘t read yet. Anyway, the blurbs do not grab me and reviews of Memnoch The Devil by my reading buddies were not good. So, I am calling it. Done! Off into my give-away basket…

Memnoch the Devil (The Vampire Chronicles, #5)
by Anne Rice

In the fifth Vampire Chronicle, Lestat is searching for Dora, the beautiful and charismatic mortal daughter of a drug lord. Dora has moved Lestat like no other mortal ever has, and he cannot get her out of his visions. At the same time, he is increasingly aware that the Devil knows who he is and wants something from him. While torn between his vampire world and his passion for Dora, Lestat is sucked in by Memnoch, who claims to be the Devil himself. Memnoch presents Lestat with unimagined opportunities: to witness creation, to visit purgatory, to be treated like a prophet. Lestat faces a choice between the Devil or God. Whom does he believe in? Who does he serve? What are the elements of religious belief? Lestat finds himself caught in a whirlpool of the ultimate choice.

The Vampire Armand (The Vampire Chronicles, #6)
by Anne Rice

In this installment of The Vampire Chronicles, Anne Rice summons up dazzling worlds to bring us the story of Armand — eternally young, with the face of a Botticelli angel. We travel with Armand across the centuries to the Kiev Rus of his boyhood — a ruined city under Mongol dominion — and to ancient Constantinople, where Tartar raiders sell him into slavery. And in a magnificent palazzo in the Venice of the Renaissance we see him emotionally and intellectually in thrall to the great vampire Marius, who masquerades among humankind as a mysterious, reclusive painter and who will bestow upon Armand the gift of vampiric blood.
As the novel races to its climax, moving through scenes of luxury and elegance, of ambush, fire, and devil worship, to nineteenth-century Paris and today’s New Orleans, we see its eternally vulnerable and romantic hero forced to choose between his twilight immortality and the salvation of his immortal soul.