I finally got around to finishing Captain Blood. While the titular character didn't fart roses by the end, he did surprise me a little by suddenly dropping his Stu-ness and becoming--for a short while--a self-doubting and fallible character bereft of his moral compass.
The lead-up to this, unfortunately, is a mish-mash of social errors that could've been circumvented by the Captain's moral compass/lady love Arabella saying, "Oh, hey, I heard you're engaged and possibly a cold-blooded killer," and him saying, "I am not, don't be silly." Instead she goes on the offensive and calls him a thief and a pirate.
Captain Blood responds to this by angsting in a reasonable, recognizable fashion--then effs it all up by running off to Tortuga to sulk, where his natural propensity for excelling at everything he does easily renders him the most obnoxious emo kid to have bad hair, lock himself in his room, and whine about how no one
gets him. His remarkably loyal crew(s) respond accordingly: a number of them split before he can start singing Linkin Park.
Thankfully a French guy comes in to boot Blood out of his funk. The next ninety pages or so of the book can be summed up thusly:
Frenchman: Hello! I am an incompetent dandy with a ridiculously long title. Your hair is awful and you smell funny.
Blood: I . . . wish to become a dandy again. *dandies*
Frenchman: That's great, you poser. As you and the rest of your scurvy dogs boy band crew are now working for the King of France and are under my command, I shall tell you about the royally sanctioned battles we're going to have against those God-awful Spanish.
Blood: Avast! For I am a changed man. I tire of piracy, and shall wax poetic of my misdeeds and well-wishes alike! I am forever grateful for this chance to fight the cursed Spanish in a legal fashion! . . . if you pay us properly.
*dickering over money*
Blood: All right! We are prepared for this non-piratical and royally sanctioned outing! So where are we going?
Frenchman: TO MURDER AND PLUNDERRRRRR!!!!1!
Blood: 
The end, of course, remains predictable--he saves the day, gets the girl, and shows up the bad guys. But it was still a fun ride.
~~
I'm most of the way through Charlaine Harris's
Grave Sight, too. The basics for this one: Harper Connelly, once struck by lightning, is able to locate dead bodies--so she attempts to make a living off it. While it's also set in the South and narrated by a first-person mid-twenties female character, it's a completely different beast from the Sookie Stackhouse series. The characters of this series are obviously faulty and their relationships are much more complex than Sookie's, and Harris's already having a few years of writing under her belt means her prose in this is a lot more smooth than in her earlier works. That being said, this storyline has neither the same type of humor nor the frequently headlong pace of the Sookie series. This is possibly because of the sheer volume of exposition regarding Harper's ability/past, and in part because of Harper's detachment; she's finding bodies for people she doesn't know or really care about, and it shows. It's not until her stepbrother gets locked up--towards the last fifth of the book--that things really start rolling.
(Harris skips straight over the sex scenes in this one; it's kind of refreshing. The more of them she wrote in the Sookie series, the more annoyed with them I became.)
~~
I went out yesterday to build a
Calvin and Hobbes-style snowman, only to find the snow was so fluffy it wouldn't pack. This was greatly saddening--though I should be able to pull it off tomorrow.
In the meantime I'll . . . actually, I don't know that I'll keep watching Ghost Adventurers, aka Stupid Frat Boys go Ghost Hunting. It's like the movie where you're cheering for the moron protagonist to get eaten--but since there's a full season, I know that'll not happen. Boo.