All of the Reading

So as I may have mentioned in a previous post, I spent the couple of weeks between getting back from Paris and the start of school watching tv shows and binge reading. So its time for another fun and entertaining book review post!

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire - Suzanne Collins

Against all odds, Katniss has won the Hunger Games. She and fellow District 12 tribute Peeta Mellark are miraculously still alive. Katniss should be relieved, happy even. After all, she has returned to her family and her longtime friend, Gale. Yet nothing is the way Katniss wishes it to be. Gale holds her at an icy distance. Peeta has turned his back on her completely. And there are whispers of a rebellion against the Capitol - a rebellion that Katniss and Peeta may have helped create.

Much to her shock, Katniss has fueled an unrest she's afraid she cannot stop. And what scares her even more is that she's not entirely convinced she should try. As time draws near for Katniss and Peeta to visit the districts on the Capitol's cruel Victory Tour, the stakes are higher than ever. If they can't prove, without a shadow of a doubt, that they are lost in their love for each other, the consequences will be horrifying.

In Catching Fire, the second novel in the Hunger Games trilogy, Suzanne Collins continues the story of Katniss Everdeen, testing her more than ever before...and surprising readers at every turn.

I really enjoyed this book. Like the first book, I had already seen the movie before reading the book. However, after finishing the book I rewatched the movie, harassing Melissa by texting her all my observations. I was cataloguing things they had changed, and thinking about why they would have done so, which is just an interesting exercise in itself. Overall, they did stay very true to the books, and much of the dialogue is word for word. Though they did remove some of the more disturbing aspects, and changed other things to amp up the drama.

But this a book review not a movie review (the movie is really good though, much better than the first). The book was really good. Katniss is an enjoyable character to read, and while I think Collins' writing style tends towards the simplistic and cold, you get throughly swept up in her struggles that you are really too wrapped up to engage in any real criticism.

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Suzanne Collins

Katniss Everdeen, girl on fire, has survived, even though her home has been destroyed. Gale has escaped. Katniss's family is safe. Peeta has been captured by the Capitol. District 13 really does exist. There are rebels. There are new leaders. A revolution is unfolding.

It is by design that Katniss was rescued from the arena in the cruel and haunting Quarter Quell, and it is by design that she has long been part of the revolution without knowing it. District 13 has come out of the shadows and is plotting to overthrow the Capitol. Everyone, it seems, has had a hand in the carefully laid plans--except Katniss.

The success of the rebellion hinges on Katniss's willingness to be a pawn, to accept responsibility for countless lives, and to change the course of the future of Panem. To do this, she must put aside her feelings of anger and distrust. She must become the rebels' Mockingjay--no matter what the personal cost.

I think Mockingjay was probably my favourite book in this trilogy. I know a lot of people who were fans of the series consider this their least favourite. And I understand why. SPOILERS. After the trauma of going back into the arena, and being forced to kill and fight for her life again, Katniss demonstrates some serious PTSD, something that remains throughout the whole novel even as she tries to fight this war for her family and friends, resisting becoming just as much a pawn of the rebellion as she was for the capitol. It does result in quite a few slow periods, and a lot of Katniss kind of hiding in closets, but I appreciated the reality of it, and I think it makes you feel her pain so much more than having her being unrealistically strong in the face of adversity and not demonstrating the symptoms of PTSD that she does. There are some extremely disturbing parts of this book, of course, but I don't think Collins uses those unnecessarily or simply to shock. In all three books, I also really appreciated that Katniss doesn't know what is going on a lot of the time, and thus neither does the reader (something that has been changed in the movies, as the viewers are given scenes showing the decisions of people in power). But the books are entirely from Katniss' perspective, and I really like that we never know more than she does, and she often doesn't know nearly enough, as every faction attempts to exercise its control over her.

I really do recommend these books. They are really good and will seriously take you no time to read.

Gone Girl - Gillian Flynn

On a warm summer morning in North Carthage, Missouri, it is Nick and Amy Dunne's fifth wedding anniversary. Presents are being wrapped and reservations are being made when Nick's clever and beautiful wife disappears from their rented McMansion on the Mississippi River. Husband-of-the-Year Nick isn't doing himself any favors with cringe-worthy daydreams about the slope and shape of his wife's head, but passages from Amy's diary reveal the alpha-girl perfectionist could have put anyone dangerously on edge. Under mounting pressure from the police and the media--as well as Amy's fiercely doting parents--the town golden boy parades an endless series of lies, deceits, and inappropriate behavior. Nick is oddly evasive, and he's definitely bitter--but is he really a killer? 

As the cops close in, every couple in town is soon wondering how well they know the one that they love. With his twin sister, Margo, at his side, Nick stands by his innocence. Trouble is, if Nick didn't do it, where is that beautiful wife? And what was in that silvery gift box hidden in the back of her bedroom closet?

I know I mentioned Gone Girl the last time I did a book review post, but I finally finished, and can now provide a much better review of the novel. I was really drawn into this novel in the first half, stunned by the twist in the middle, and then in the second half found myself growing increasingly disinterested, before the ending made up for all of it. SPOILERS. In the first half you are lead to believe that Nick killed his wife (which the savvy reader is going to assume is false just because it is to obvious). However, he is just such a selfish and terrible person that you find yourself thinking he has done it anyways, just because you start disliking him so much. Then, in the middle, you find out that Amy is alive and framing Nick for her murder as punishment for being a douche and cheating on her. Which, at first, I was totally down with, as I had spent the previous half of the book discovering what a tool Nick was. However, by the end of the second part I came to dislike Amy just as much as Nick, so by the climax, when Amy murders an old friend of hers and lies to make it look like she was kidnapped by him, I honestly didn't know what I wanted to happen, because they were both such awful people that I didn't want either of them to remain unpunished, but having them both go to jail would be immensely unsatisfying (too neat) and either one of them going to jail alone would have been annoying. However, Flynn creates the perfect ending when Amy gets pregnant and their punishment becomes a lifetime with each other. I loved the ending. I spent the last ten pages of the novel just grinning - really makes up for the second half which I struggled with, as I really don't like reading books where everyone sucks. However, I do get why a lot of people don't like the ending, as it is very much a horror-esq ending, which a lot of people don't go for, but they are apparently rewriting it for the movie, which I do not approve of.

Fingersmith - Sarah Waters

Sue Trinder is an orphan, left as an infant in the care of Mrs. Sucksby, a "baby farmer," who raised her with unusual tenderness, as if Sue were her own. Mrs. Sucksby’s household, with its fussy babies calmed with doses of gin, also hosts a transient family of petty thieves— (fingersmiths) —for whom this house in the heart of a mean London slum is home.

One day, the most beloved thief of all arrives—Gentleman, an elegant con man, who carries with him an enticing proposition for Sue: If she wins a position as the maid to Maud Lilly, a naïve gentlewoman, and aids Gentleman in her seduction, then they will all share in Maud’s vast inheritance. Once the inheritance is secured, Maud will be disposed of—passed off as mad, and made to live out the rest of her days in a lunatic asylum.

With dreams of paying back the kindness of her adopted family, Sue agrees to the plan. Once in, however, Sue begins to pity her helpless mark and care for Maud Lilly in unexpected ways...But no one and nothing is as it seems in this Dickensian novel of thrills and reversals.

This was a book that had been on my to-read list for a long time, and was another book that I had seen (the BBC miniseries) before reading. I would recommend reading it before watching it, as the twist is so excellent. But it had been long enough since I watched the miniseries that I couldn't remember the details, and was drawn into Water's excellent novel with ease. The characters are great, the setting is wonderfully drawn, and the story is unexpected and compelling.

American Gods - Neil Gaiman

Days before his release from prison, Shadow's wife, Laura, dies in a mysterious car crash. Numbly, he makes his way back home. On the plane, he encounters the enigmatic Mr Wednesday, who claims to be a refugee from a distant war, a former god and the king of America.

Together they embark on a profoundly strange journey across the heart of the USA, whilst all around them a storm of preternatural and epic proportions threatens to break.

Scary, gripping and deeply unsettling, AMERICAN GODS takes a long, hard look into the soul of America. You'll be surprised by what and who it finds there...

The UK edition I bought was about 12,000 words longer than the original, and I cannot imagine it without a single one of them. I cannot recommend this book enough. It was so good. There is a particular scene (people who have read it will know exactly which one I'm talking about) that I remembered vividly from when I started reading the book about five years ago but never finished, and having now managed to finish the book, I doubt I will ever forget it.

Incredibly original and imaginative, with an ending that I totally did not see coming, American Gods operates on a huge field of characters who are strange and compelling, all revolving around Shadow, an ordinary human man who gets sucked into this huge cosmic mess, the battle between the old gods brought over to America by the immigrants, and the new gods, the gods of chrome and steel. This was one of those books that I kept looking at the pages left and thinking no, I don't want it to end! (which wasn't enough to stop me from reading the whole thing in about three days).

Zombie - Joyce Carol Oates

Meet Quentin P., the most believably terrifying sexual psychopath and killer ever brought to life in fiction. The author deftly puts you inside the mind of a serial killer--succeeding not in writing about madness, but in writing with the logic of madness.

Zombie was a (predictably) very disturbing book. I don't know that I would recommend it to anyone who wasn't into horror, but for all its grotesqueness, it is very well written and a blessedly short read (I started and finished it on the train between Bath and London).

I don't want to talk about it.

Looking for Alaska - John Green

Before. Miles "Pudge" Halter's whole existence has been one big nonevent, and his obsession with famous last words has only made him crave the "Great Perhaps" (François Rabelais, poet) even more. Then he heads off to the sometimes crazy, possibly unstable, and anything-but-boring world of Culver Creek Boarding School, and his life becomes the opposite of safe. Because down the hall is Alaska Young. The gorgeous, clever, funny, sexy, self-destructive, screwed-up, and utterly fascinating Alaska Young, who is an event unto herself. She pulls Pudge into her world, launches him into the Great Perhaps, and steals his heart.

After. Nothing is ever the same

While I loved John Green's newest novel, The Fault in Our Stars (the movie trailer is now out and it looks like it will be just as heartbreaking as the novel. Awesome), I haven't really enjoyed his other books that much. Both An Abundance of Katherine's and Looking for Alaska involve a self-involved adolescent male narrator with terrible attitudes and relationships with women. Overall, this was a quick read, and a relatively amusing story, but it didn't elicit any feeling in me with more strength than it did annoyance. SPOILERS. Alaska is a complete MPDG - the kind of girl whose only "flaws" are those which make her mysterious and cool, and whose basic function is to exist for the narrator or protagonist to fall in love with it, and then, as Alaska does, die to catalyze a journey of self growth in our male protagonist. It was all terribly cliche and insulting and I did not like it.

Related: Melissa, Alix, and my YouTube channel is still ongoing, though we have now changed the format to a single person review three times a week, which I think is going to work better. The reason I bring it up is because I did my video this week on Looking for Alaska and the phenomenon of the MPDG.

In conclusion, American Gods for all of the awards.

Look, I Did Stuff

I realized I really didn't post much last month (to be fair, I was really stressed about finding a new flat) so I'm gonna try and post more this month. Though I still haven't decided if I'm going to take my computer with me while I travel over Christmas or not, so there may be a large chunk of time where I'm away from the blog. We shall see. 

Anyways, today part of my school decided to go on strike (to my everlasting annoyance), so I finally had time to do what I've been meaning to for a couple of weeks now - dye my hair! I also went to my one class that was still on, and then spent a couple of hours in the computer lab working on my book formatting, but thats not that interesting. 

So I am once again a redhead! 

And my bathroom looks like I murdered someone!

This is not a good photograph!

Credit where credit's due - my shower may have terrible pressure, but man, is it hot. It goes up to nine, and I can only stand it up to 6.5 (and I'm the kind of person who likes my shower so hot my skin turns red). 

Started reading An Abundance of Katherines by John Green. Fell asleep on the couch for a little bit - I was in a cozy little nest of warmth and it was icky outside, so I was pretty happy. Someone finally told me why all of the windows here are stupidly single glaze - its because the buildings are by and large historical, and there is a law that doesn't allow the owners to install double windows, because they want to preserve the historical looks of the windows. To which I say PAH. Give me warmth fools! But I've figured out how the thermostat works, you can set it on all the time, on once a day, or on twice a day (on a timer), so I've set the heat to start at 6:30 so the flats nice and cozy when I get out of bed :)

Reading & Books

One of the hardest parts of my undergrad was the persistent feeling that I was being slowly stripped of my love of reading. As everyone who knew me from about grade three onwards knows, I have always been an extremely voracious reader. This was something that I felt myself loose a lot as I did my undergrad in English. I still enjoyed reading, but over the course of the school year, I had to read so much for school that I found myself enjoying it less, and during the summer months, I would read far less, and what I did read would be what academia would deem "trash" (and thus, to my delight, were utterly different than the sometimes unbearably dull or outdated works I was required to read over the course of year). This was in part due to the nature of the school I went to - I choose a small school to do my undergraduate degree at, which had many benefits, but one way in which it was lacking was in terms of diversity of courses. This, combined with degree requirements that placed a greater emphasis on early works of English literature (think before the 20th, even 19th century), meant that I had little flexibility when it came to courses.

Now, don't get me wrong. I do love me some older English literature. But there is a point (that came around second year) where I was so completely, throughly, and overwhelmingly DONE with reading works penned by old, white, Christian men. The lack of diversity was stifling. My fourth year was a delightful change from this - having finished all my required early English course work, I powered through several amazing classes, including one on Horror, a Postmodernism course, African-American Lit, and a Text and Technology class that was wonderfully challenging. These courses left me with some wonderful books that I genuinely enjoyed reading and powered through in the same way I used to read everything I could get my hands on: Katherine Dunn's wonderfully disturbing Geek Love, Iain Bank's traumatizing and mesmerizing The Wasp Factory, Jesmyn Ward's haunting Salvage the Bones, and, of course, Mark Z. Danielewski's amazing, boundary-defying, and unforgettable work of ergodic literature, House of Leaves (I cannot emphasize how much you need to read this book. Right now. You cannot put it down).

Funny story about The Wasp Factory. We were talking Scottish authors the other day, a conversation which I was largely unable to participate in, but then Iain Banks came up and I was like oh! I've read a book of his. And Keira asked which one, and I replied The Wasp Factory, and her and Ali just sat there and looked at me for a minute before commenting that was a very intense introduction to his work. I replied yes, yes it was - this was the novel that I literally screamed at and then threw across the room at one point.

Anyways. now, almost seven months after finishing my degree in English, and after two months of constantly talking about books, I can feel my love for reading returning. And it is the most amazing thing. We talk about books and I want to go out and find them, I want to buy them, I want to sit in my room and read all day. I read a YA book, John Green's wonderfully heartbreaking The Fault in Our Stars, in about four hours the other day. It was wonderful.

Side note on John Green: him and his brother Hank run this hilarious and educational and generally fantastic YouTube channel called the vlogbrothers that I have become incredibly addicted to. Hank Green was also the genius behind the super cool The Lizzie Bennet Diaries which is a modern adaptation of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice as a vlog that you should totally check out (it won an Emmy!).

I can't really describe this feeling. But it is rather fantastic.

So, some book recommendations from what I've read recently:

• Read House of Leaves. Just do it.
• Years ago, when House of Leaves was first being passed around, it was nothing more than a badly bundled heap of paper, parts of which would occasionally surface on the Internet. No one could have anticipated the small but devoted following this terrifying story would soon command. Starting with an odd assortment of marginalized youth -- musicians, tattoo artists, programmers, strippers, environmentalists, and adrenaline junkies -- the book eventually made its way into the hands of older generations, who not only found themselves in those strangely arranged pages but also discovered a way back into the lives of their estranged children.
  
  Now, for the first time, this astonishing novel is made available in book form, complete with the original colored words, vertical footnotes, and newly added second and third appendices.
  
  The story remains unchanged, focusing on a young family that moves into a small home on Ash Tree Lane where they discover something is terribly wrong: their house is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside.
  
  Of course, neither Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Will Navidson nor his companion Karen Green was prepared to face the consequences of that impossibility, until the day their two little children wandered off and their voices eerily began to return another story -- of creature darkness, of an ever-growing abyss behind a closet door, and of that unholy growl which soon enough would tear through their walls and consume all their dreams

• Neil Gaiman's The Ocean at the End of the Lane. Everyone who has ever talked about books with me is probably aware of how much I love this man and his brain, and, with his first adult novel in eight years, he has created a wonderfully strange and mythic little world that just sits at the back of your head forever. 
• Sussex, England. A middle-aged man returns to his childhood home to attend a funeral. Although the house he lived in is long gone, he is drawn to the farm at the end of the road, where, when he was seven, he encountered a most remarkable girl, Lettie Hempstock, and her mother and grandmother. He hasn't thought of Lettie in decades, and yet as he sits by the pond (a pond that she'd claimed was an ocean) behind the ramshackle old farmhouse, the unremembered past comes flooding back. And it is a past too strange, too frightening, too dangerous to have happened to anyone, let alone a small boy.
  
  Forty years earlier, a man committed suicide in a stolen car at this farm at the end of the road. Like a fuse on a firework, his death lit a touchpaper and resonated in unimaginable ways. The darkness was unleashed, something scary and thoroughly incomprehensible to a little boy. And Lettie—magical, comforting, wise beyond her years—promised to protect him, no matter what.
  
  A groundbreaking work from a master, The Ocean at the End of the Lane is told with a rare understanding of all that makes us human, and shows the power of stories to reveal and shelter us from the darkness inside and out. It is a stirring, terrifying, and elegiac fable as delicate as a butterfly's wing and as menacing as a knife in the dark.

• John Green's The Fault in Our Stars. It is a young adult novel, which is part of the reason why I just powered through it so quickly. But it really is a fantastic novel, with a truly wonderful and hilarious narrator. Funny and sad, this book's ending is really just amazing. 
• Despite the tumor-shrinking medical miracle that has bought her a few years, Hazel has never been anything but terminal, her final chapter inscribed upon diagnosis. But when a gorgeous plot twist named Augustus Waters suddenly appears at Cancer Kid Support Group, Hazel's story is about to be completely rewritten.
• Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn. I haven't quite finished this one yet, but man, it is good. 
• On a warm summer morning in North Carthage, Missouri, it is Nick and Amy Dunne's fifth wedding anniversary. Presents are being wrapped and reservations are being made when Nick's clever and beautiful wife disappears from their rented McMansion on the Mississippi River. Husband-of-the-Year Nick isn't doing himself any favors with cringe-worthy daydreams about the slope and shape of his wife's head, but passages from Amy's diary reveal the alpha-girl perfectionist could have put anyone dangerously on edge. Under mounting pressure from the police and the media--as well as Amy's fiercely doting parents--the town golden boy parades an endless series of lies, deceits, and inappropriate behavior. Nick is oddly evasive, and he's definitely bitter--but is he really a killer?
  
  As the cops close in, every couple in town is soon wondering how well they know the one that they love. With his twin sister, Margo, at his side, Nick stands by his innocence. Trouble is, if Nick didn't do it, where is that beautiful wife? And what was in that silvery gift box hidden in the back of her bedroom closet?

Problem? Me? Nah...