The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins

Soooooo remember when I read The Hunger Games and I liked it and then I read the sequels and I did not like them? If you did, you're better than me, because I totally forgot the first part of that. And so when my book group decided to read The Hunger Games I was like, uggggggggggggggggggggh I don't wanna.

And so I sat down and I started reading it, and then I got distracted by other books, and then I decided to just power through it and oh, right, I forgot that this one is actually pretty darn good and so I stayed up until midnight (horrors!) reading it.

In case you also have forgotten this book in the wake of its sequels, the premise is awesome: dystopian future, The Man (well, The Capitol) keeping his subjects down, said subjects unable to rally against The Capitol because they are instead pitted against each other in a yearly deathmatch using children and sadly not claymation. Oh, devious, Capitol. Delightfully evil. Well done.

My favorite parts of this book take place in the arena. Kids killing kids, kids allying with kids who are going to kill them later, kids making up temporary ethics in order to have some semblance of humanity in the midst of all the killing. Watching Katniss devise plans is awesome; watching her carry them out is even more awesome.

The rest? Eh. I had a lot of problems with this book last time I read it because of the love story, which still stinks, and the handful of things that seem super important at the beginning but seem to be forgotten by the end, which still exist and still irk but after reading the whole series I know which ones to just flat-out ignore. I actually got through a lot of the crappier parts of the book that way this time, just remembering that they weren't really important and thus not worrying about them. I highly recommend this course of action.

Another plus side to the re-read is that I could stop being frustrated that Collins chose to create a love story that I find both implausible and annoying and instead just read her story as written. I still found myself rolling my eyes at many turns, but I could appreciate better the interactions and emotions that Collins created. I'm going to maintain my allegiance to Team Katniss Should Grow A Pair, but I guess I can hang out with the other teams if they're having a party or something.

Recommendation: If you like a good (bad?) dystopian future and some excellent fighting and logic-using, you should read this book. Just this one.

Rating: 8/10
(A to Z Challenge)

A Visit from the Goon Squad, by Jennifer Egan

I saw a LOT of this book when it first came out, with all these wonderful glowing reviews, and so of course I ignored it because I am nothing if not contrary in the face of hype. I figured I'd let the excitement die down before checking this one out, but then it won the flipping PULITZER and I was like, "I should probably read this now while I still have a chance of getting from the library" and immediately put it on hold. I got it quickly, but then I let it languish for my six-week lending period and found myself preparing to power through it last week so I could finish by the time it was due back.

In fact, I didn't so much "power through it" as "not stop reading it because it's so darn good." I can see why it won the Pulitzer; I am going to have to buy my own copy and read it like sixteen more times before I can even pretend to understand everything Egan's got going on in here. But I so want to.

Very generally, what you've got here is a set of short stories about a set of characters who interact with each other in various configurations over a long period of time.

But each story has its own narrator and voice, with first person chapters and third person chapters and a second-person chapter and a chapter written as a magazine article and a chapter written as a PowerPoint.... And the stories jump around in time and space and Egan does a LOT of reader-trusting by not just giving you the time and place but expecting you to figure it out based on your prior knowledge and also expecting you to remember details from those previous chapters that do interesting things in subsequent chapters. And there are so many recurring phrases and themes and it all fits together just so well. Structurally, this book was fan-freaking-tastic.

I did have some problems with a couple of the chapters for being a little long and boring for being so short, or for being overly odd, and I really disliked the conceit of the last chapter though I appreciated the sentiment behind it. But overall I think that Egan has done a beautiful thing, and if you can stand the continual confusion, I think you will like this book. I could say many more things about this book, but so much of what I loved about it was watching everything unfold and I don't want to take that away from you!

Recommendation: For people who like experimental-type things, confusing things, and very intricate things.

Rating: 9.5/10
(A to Z Challenge)

A Red Herring Without Mustard, by Alan Bradley

I don't know what is going on in Bishop's Lacey. You can't seem to throw a stone in this place without hitting a conspiracy and a dead body. Luckily for everyone, 11-year-old Flavia de Luce is on the case. Well, she's interested in the case. And intrusive in the case. And totally holding back evidence until such time as she is forced to hand it over. Maybe it's not such a lucky thing.

After the interminable opening of The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag, I am glad to say that the mystery here gets started within the first sixth of the book, and that the preceding pages are full of Bradley's wonderful writing so it goes by quite quickly. In this go, Flavia sets fire to a gypsy's tent, then attempts to atone by offering the gypsy shelter at her family's estate, then finds an intruder in the house, then finds the gypsy beat over the head and nearly dead. Flavia, delighted by the new mystery, sets off to find the connections between gypsies, thieves, and odd religious sects.

There is also a bit more information about Flavia's dead mum and the slow ruin of her family's estate, and I think quite a bit more insight into the characters of Flavia's sisters and father. I liked this, and I liked the intriguing complexities of this set of mysteries, if not the selective genius of Flavia. It is a lot harder to believe in her 11-year-old-ness in this book and things get awfully convenient for her. But the story is amazingly engrossing and I tore through it in a few hours — though I was able to take a break and have some sleep before getting back to it the next day.

I'm hoping that things calm down around Bishop's Lacey, but if people just want to keep scheming and dying and whatnot, I'm very interested in hearing about it.

Recommendation: For fans of the Flavia and of precocious science-minded child mystery solvers in general. Are there others? I should go find out.

Rating: 8/10
(Global Reading Challenge: North America)

Bossypants, by Tina Fey

I liked this book surprisingly a lot, considering that my first knowledge of it came at work, when I stared at that super-creepy cover for way too long as I processed a dozen or so copies. I didn't really know anything about Tina Fey at the time outside of some random Weekend Updates I'd seen and of course her portrayal of Sarah Palin that confuses my husband to this day (Scott: "Wait, Sarah Palin didn't make finger guns and go 'pew pew pew!'?")(dang that's a lot of punctuation marks in a row), and so I was like, "I am definitely not interested in this... but let's check out that back cover and book flap." I don't quite remember what they said, but I absolutely loved the fake blurbs (including a time-capsule one from Mark Twain) and the description of the book sounded not terrible, and I needed something to listen to at work, so I put the audiobook on hold. And waited.

In the meantime, Scott and I discovered 30 Rock, and holy HECK why didn't you people make me watch that show sooner? I am holding all of you responsible for this. There are certainly a few too many scenes where I have to close my eyes and cover my ears and tell Scott to tell me when it's over because otherwise I would die of empathetic embarrassment, but there are also some freaking hilarious jokes (my current favorite: "It's not a Lemon party without old Dick!").

So by the time the audiobook arrived, I was super excited. And I was not wrong to be. Tina Fey has a sense of humor and timing and sarcasm that I just love. And there is so much less awkward in this book than in her show! The stories that she tells run the gamut from hilarious to interesting to prescient to kind of weird, but no matter how I felt about the content, Fey's presentation was spot-on. I need Tina Fey to read me things all the time.

One problem with loving Tina Fey as narrator, though, is that I really can't remember what she talked about, I was so busy enjoying her voice! A few things stick with me really well, like her story about climbing a mountain for a guy she liked and the one about how she ended up doing the Sarah Palin gig, but everything else is just in bits and pieces. Funny bits and pieces, of course.

Recommendation: If you love Tina Fey, you've probably already read this book. So... if you like humorous essays as written/spoken by a dryly sarcastic wit, you'll probably go for this.

Rating: 8/10

Juniper Berry, by M.P. Kozlowsky

One of the nice things about putting the stickers on library books is that I get to see these books before they make it out to the shelves, and often before regular library-goers even know these books exist. Sometimes I have no idea why the library buys some of these books. At better times, I go "oooooooh shiny want" and pull out my smartphone and put the book on hold so I can get it first!

This is, obviously, one of those books, and what struck me about it first was the cover, which is delightfully stylized. Then I saw the bit about "a tale of terror and temptation," and then I looked at the back which reads only "Be careful what you wish for." I didn't even have to read all the way through the book flap to know I wanted this book to come home with me. Phone! Hold!

Now, the book is not quite as exciting as all that, unfortunately, but I still found it rather adorable and worth a read by the braver children in your life. Juniper Berry is our protagonist of the amusing name, and she's the daughter of some very busy acTOR parents who have been acting increasingly weird of late. She is isolated in her giant house surrounded by forest, but one day she meets a boy called Giles in her backyard who is worried about his own strange-acting parents. He followed them to Juniper's yard, where they disappeared. Juniper and Giles set off to find out what their parents are doing, and it turns out to be a lot more creepy and sinister than they might have imagined.

It's sort of like a Coraline, I'd say. Very sort of, actually, but the mood is similar and I think it is looking for the same audience. In this case, it's the parents who have gone off looking for that elusive greener grass, but Juniper is still the one who has to set everything right because, you know, parents are useless. This book is also a little more obvious with its message of "no seriously just chill and make the best of the life you have because the life you want can kind of suck," but it's still a totally valid message.

Recommendation: For those who like kick-butt kids and creepy demon types.

Rating: 7/10
(A to Z Challenge)

To Say Nothing of the Dog, by Connie Willis

To say nothing of the dog! This book kind of broke my brain, on account of it's about time travel and there is nothing simple about time travel and to make it worse Connie Willis invents a time travel science and when you actually try to explain time travel you are going to make brains explode.

But what I love about this book, and part of why I'm going to go find some more Connie Willis books and read them ASAP, is that the time travel totally breaks the brains of the people doing the time travelling. In multiple ways! First, they don't really understand it any better than I do, and second... oh, second.

"It's no wonder they call you man's best friend. Faithful and loyal and true, you share in our sorrows and rejoice with us in our triumphs, the truest friend we ever have known, a better friend than we deserve. You have thrown in your lot with us, through thick and thin, on battlefield and hearthrug, refusing to leave your master even when death and destruction lie all around. Ah, noble dog, you are the furry mirror in which we see our better selves reflected, man as he could be, unstained by war or ambition, unspoilt by—"

And then the protagonist gets time travelled, but the point of it is that this whole soliloquy is part of the "maudlin sentimentality" that comes with time-lag, which encompasses many amusing (to the reader) symptoms and is a result of too much time travel. Willis writes these passages with obvious delight, and I can't help but love them.

The plot of the book is... simple... Ned Henry, our protagonist, is charged with finding this weird statue thing called the bishop's bird stump, which is apparently very ugly but which is required by a beast of a woman, Lady Schrapnell, to complete the rebuilding in 20... something... sometime in the mid-21st century... of a cathedral that burned down in 1940. Anyway, the vagaries of time travel mean that Henry and others can't get anywhere near the cathedral at the right time, and so they can't find this thing, but Lady Schrapnell is very persuasive and keeps sending Henry back in time until he gets totally time-lagged. The only cure is rest, which he can't get in the present time with Lady Schrapnell all a-crazy, and so he gets sent to the late 1800s instead to help return a cat that got mistakenly time-travelled when it should perhaps have been drowned. Then things start to get crazy.

I enjoyed the heck out of this book, which also features 1930s mystery novels, jumble sales, séances, crazy university professors, and many allusions to the book Three Men in a Boat which I must go read immediately, because it's got to be pretty awesome if it inspired this.

Recommendation: For those who enjoy being totally confused and bewildered.

Rating: 9/10
(TBR Challenge)

Booking Through Thursday — To Own or Borrow

Today's Booking Through Thursday asks, "All things being equal (money, space, etc), would you rather own copies of the books you read? Or borrow them?"

Well, I imagine that if I had more money and more space, I would buy more books. Because I like books, and I like authors, and I like supporting the books and authors I enjoy. And I do quite like owning the books that I love because a) I get to see them on a regular basis and b) I can easily loan them out to friends (read: force them upon unwitting victims).

But of course, I am also a longtime lover of the library, as you would know if you saw the shelf my husband just cleared out for me today just for my library books. I have a problem. But it's a good problem, I think, in that the books are free and when I go to read one and I don't like it or I realize that I no longer have an interest in reading it, I can go give it back to the library without hard feelings. And if I like it, I can wait a little longer to get the trade paperback (which is cheaper and lighter, which is good for my wallet and shelves) because I don't usually have an intense need to re-read things immediately.

So, all things being equal, I'd say that I still like my current method of obtaining books — checking millions out of the library, loving a handful, and showing off that handful on my shelf. If only I could afford bigger hands...

The Shining, by Stephen King

Here's another entry from my TBR Challenge... I saw this movie a while back and thought it was terrible, so I got it into my head that I should read the book because maybe it was better? And then my mother said, "No, really, the book is way better," and then I found the book at the used bookstore for cheap and THEN I totally didn't read it. Hence its addition to the challenge.

So! Now I've read it. Well, okay, I listened to it. And, in fact, it is way better than the movie, or at least what I remember of the movie — the problem with the movie is that it's just so middling that there's nothing to remember. Even after reading the book, my memory of the movie is this: Dude gets a job at a hotel. He goes all Jack Nicholson (see what I did there). He says, "Heeeeere's Johnny!" There is snow and possibly a snowmobile. The end.

The book, on the other hand, goes like this: Dude gets a job at a hotel, the only job he might even remotely get as a recovering alcoholic who, while sober beat the crap out of one of his students. His plan is to lay off the booze (which will be easy with no booze in the hotel), do some writing that will make him awesome and employable, and fix the problems with his family that are not all related to his alcoholism. This is a good plan. His wife and son come with him to take care of this hotel, which is closed for the winter, but the son has "the shining" which makes him a little bit psychic and a little too attuned to the horrors that have taken place in the hotel and that threaten to take place again. Dude is not attuned to these horrors, even as they start seeping into him, ruining his plan a little at a time until he goes all Jack Nicholson. He does not say "Heeeeere's Johnny!" There is lots and lots of snow and one too few snowmobiles.

I didn't exactly like the book, but compared to the movie it is downright wonderful. There's so much more backstory in the book that makes things make sense, and that also makes things more interesting and creepy. Like, the dad was an alcoholic until one night he and his bud ran over a bicycle in the middle of the road that may or may not have had a child on it; they can't find a kid but also can't figure out why there would be a tiny bicycle without a tiny human. And the psychic kid sees a lot more than just REDRUM; he sees what his dad has been and will be capable of and somehow does not pee his pants in fear. And the hotel is dang creepy with its dead people and midnight parties and moving shrubbery and I really don't think I'll be able to look at an animal topiary the same way again. Like, ever.

There's a lot more depth to the novel, is what I'm saying, and it allows King to be more subtle with the creepy and the psychological, which is just the way I like it. It didn't hurt that the audiobook narrator channeled a little Jack Nicholson into his reading — just enough to be fairly terrifying without going all Witches of Eastwick.

Unfortunately, the depth also comes with a lot of long boring bits, which made me not like this book so much. Also, an epilogue. I have been reading an inordinate number of epilogued books lately. Someday I will find a good one. Today is not that day.

Recommendation: Read this if you didn't like or don't remember the movie; it'll make you feel a little better. Not sure I would recommend it on its own strength.

Rating: 7/10
(TBR Challenge)

The Grim Grotto, by Lemony Snicket

This is the second and last of the Unfortunate Events books Scott and I made it through on our road trip... Scott spent too much time sleeping for us to listen more. That's right. I'm blaming him. I'm sure he cares.

Right, so, this is the one, as I recalled before we started it, that features horseradish. And a submarine. I have an excellent memory, you can see. But it is true that there is a submarine, and it is captained by a man who says "AYE!" a lot and crewed by AYE!-man's step-daughter and the optimistic dude from The Miserable Mill. And there is a fungus among us and it is super-deadly except that the deadliness can be cured by horseradish. And so of course it is. Spoiler.

I liked this better than the previous book largely because it seems to have more going on — there's the fungus and the sugar bowl and some capturing and releasing and only a few more questions and a decent number of answers, aye. But overall the series is getting more tedious than I remember and I am really hoping that it picks up in the last two books, or I am going to be apologizing to Scott for the next five years.

Recommendation: I think you know if you're going to read this one or not.

Rating: 7/10

Musing Mondays — Reading Nooks

Today's Musing Mondays question is... "Where is your favorite place to read?"

Well. Hmm. When it's nice outside (read: below 90 degrees [read: not now!]), I like to go hang out on my balcony, pictured here. Those chairs are surprisingly comfy.

But when it's like now, and the only safe place is indoors, I spend most of my time reading on the big leather couch in our living room. And then I have a nap on it. It's a pretty good deal, that. What's most fun is when Scott is playing video games on the TV and I can cuddle up with him while we're each doing our thing. That's really my favorite!

Strangely enough, the place where I do the most reading is my least favorite, because that's at work! I listen to all my audiobooks there, which sometimes takes quite a while because someone will make a super loud and prolonged noise and I'll have to just give up on trying to hear my book over it and instead wait and rewind back to where I think I was. Which is sometimes nowhere near where I actually was. Which is unfortunate, unless the book is really good, in which case it's just a second helping!

The Slippery Slope, by Lemony Snicket

Another road trip, another journey along the sad, sad path of the Baudelaire orphans! I'm not sure why that gets an exclamation mark, but it does.

Unfortunately (HA), I had forgotten how frightfully boring this installment is. After the violence and sloppy eating of The Carnivorous Carnival, this trip up a snow-covered mountain is just... meh.

What happens is this: Violet and Klaus have been separated from Sunny and are trying to find and rescue her, but they get sidetracked when they meet a wayward triplet and end up going to find the VFD headquarters, which has been set on fire. Meanwhile, Count Olaf is pretending it's The Bad Beginning all over again and making Sunny do chores. Yawn. Various secrets about the VFD are revealed, but of course they lead only to more secrets and more questions, and then in the end there is a very strange showdown that lets the orphans go on their not-so-merry way one more time.

I enjoyed it, certainly, because as always — TIM frickin' CURRY. But there is simply not enough exciting and treacherous in this story.

Recommendation: I mean, if you've read the other nine books already... :)

Rating: 7/10

The Looking Glass Wars, by Frank Beddor

A couple weeks ago, when I had run out of audiobooks to listen to at work (and just one day before a bunch of audiobooks I'd put on hold came in, of course!), I made an emergency trip to the library with my husband to find something to fill my time. I had no idea of what I wanted, so I just told Scott to grab the first thing that looked interesting. It was this, and I must say that Scott chooses very well!

Well, maybe. I adored this book, but from what the internets have told me, this is the kind of book that you're going to love or loathe, so be prepared!

What this is is a retelling of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, which I also liked quite a lot, largely because of Michael York. You know how it goes. Anyway, in Beddor's version, Alice is not just the overactively imagination-ed daughter of a friend of Charles Dodgson, but also Alyss Heart, Princess of Wonderland. After her not very nice aunt, Redd, comes out of exile, has Alyss's parents beheaded, and takes over Wonderland, Alyss is secretly shepherded out of Wonderland by Hatter Madigan, a Heart bodyguard and elite fighter. She ends up in late 19th-century London, where her story is mangled by Dodgson, and since no one believes her anyway she decides to forget all about having been a princess once. As these things go, of course, once she's grown up and about to be married, her wedding is crashed and she ends up back in Wonderland, where she has to fight Redd and try to win back the kingdom.

Or, to be brief, what this is is Alice with more action sequences.

And I liked it a lot. I'm always a fan of this kind of "true story" of a popular story, and I think Beddor does it quite well. Some of the conceits are a bit of a stretch (Dodgson inventing the White Rabbit from an anagrammatical counterpart, Bibwit Hare? Alyss and a boy being in love-ish at the age of, like, seven?), but for the most part I was totally on board with Beddor's world. I've seen some complaints about the writing, but I wasn't distracted by any of it while I was listening to this at work, so it can't be that terrible. If I ever get through all of the audiobooks that have subsequently arrived for me, I'm sure I will be dipping back into this series.

Recommendation: For readers of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland who thought, "Not enough heads are coming off, here."

Rating: 9/10
(A to Z Challenge)