Hm. I'll consider giving it another shot later.
BTW, the book I finished but didn't care for was
Blindsight, by Peter Watts. I finally found the title (after several unsuccessful search attempts here, at Amazon, on Google, and on Wikipedia) by searching for "vampire genetic aliens". I wanted to like this book, and if someone had given me the premise and some of the interesting ideas up front, I'd have prediced I would like it, but on the actual read I just didn't care for it. I suppose the effort to create a narration character incapable of empathy was too successful, leaving me unable to empathise with anyone in the story.
