I sometimes abuse ampersands

Listening to Meg Cabot's audiobook "Insatiable"; the premise sounded interesting (the main character is a TV scriptwriter/prophet! it purports to be dealing with the TV series' misogyny!), until the Eastern-Europeans showed up. Not 15 minutes into the recording, it already has (1) a flighty girl with no knowledge of English who comes to the US to become an actress (or, more likely, to be killed by a guy posing as an agent); (2) Romanian characters talking with a dreadful faux-Romanian accent when speaking their native language. (2) is obviously no author's fault, but grating nonetheless; but (1) - casting Eastern Europe as nothing but a source of pretty & criminally naive faces and occassional vampires (or, as in this case, both) - makes me headdesk. I'm taking bets on whether Eastern-European mafia & prostitutes will eventually show up, so that all the stereotypes about Eastern Europe will be gathered in one book. Shit, that's the reason I was so happy that my accent sounds vaguely German (obviously, to people who had never heard Ukrainian accent) when I was in the US.

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On a happier note, two book recs:

1) "Feed" by Mira Grant is all shades of awesome, and then some more. I love the idea of zombies, this perfect metaphor for a slow, clumsy, inevitable death, but most books about them fall short. Maybe I loved "Feed" because it is not really about zombies, despite being set in a postapocalyptic world where the zombie virus has become a pandemic. What it is about, instead, is the ways we construct humanity (or identity as humans?), and the freedom of information, and people uniting to form world-wide knowledge communities, and about blogging. The story follows a team of bloggers selected to cover the presidential campaign in the zombie-ravished USA, and it has a very cool plot twist which is completely unexpected because of purely formal reasons, and a form geek in me cannot help but flail & squee. I was somewhat discomfited, though, by how closely the presidential campaign was modelled after the last US elections.
official website

2) "The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland In A Ship Of Her Own Making" by Catherynne M. Valente is also awesome; it's a book about language first and foremost, the heroic quest of words which collide in new and creative ways. But on the surface, it's about a girl called September who gets whisked off to the Fairyland by The Green Wind; she doesn't wave goodbye to her mother, because "all children are Heartless. They have not grown a heart yet, which is why they can climb high trees and say shocking things and leap so very high grown-up hearts flutter in terror. Hearts weigh quite a lot. That is why it takes so long to grow one". In the Fairyland, September meets a wyverary (wyvern whose father was a library) called A-Through-L, tames wild migrating Velocipedes, and grows a heart, eventually, - all of it described in gorgeous, gorgeous language.
The first 14 chapters are up at the author's website.