Do You Hear the Wednesday Sing?
Mar. 8th, 2017 08:58 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
evelyn_bCrossposted from Livejournal
What I've Finished Reading
Mockingjay! When I first started reading The Hunger Games I got some warnings that the second two books weren't as good as the first, and that's probably objectively true, but I'm so glad that I read them that I barely even noticed. I didn't really believe in the rebellion as it was happening, which undermined things a little, but not as much as you might expect. This has never been a series where seamless plotting and economic feasibility were the point. I've spent a lot of time over the past couple of weeks making fun of/trying to make sense of the worldbuilding, but I've also been consistently impressed by Collins' achievement here: these books were totally addictive, totally memorable, smart and humane.
I know I just said "memorable," but actually, a few days after finishing the book, the details of the plot have already blurred together into a haze of impressions. I'm not sure that's actually a contradiction: the events are mostly just carriers for the imagery, the emotional beats and Collins' meticulous and unsentimental depictions of trauma.
Peeta gets brainwashed by the Capitol. The rebels kidnap him back (and another tribute who was being held as emotional leverage), but he's been conditioned to hate and fear Katniss, and has to be gradually de-conditioned by the District 13ers. Eventually the rebels storm the Capitol, and there's a horrible attack of uncertain provenance. It's suggested that Rebel Leader Coin masterminded it, but I'm not clear on whether that's ever confirmed. Coin DOES try to ring in the new regime by setting up a whole new round of Hunger Games for the children of the Capitol elite, so that those bastards can see how they like it, but Katniss is somewhat too conveniently able to shut this plan down by shooting Coin, instead of our favorite incompetent dictator President Snow, at what's intended to be Snow's execution. Luckily, Snow meets an equally convenient end soon after. Not that I'm complaining! Who wants a downer ending with a new Hunger Games and a never-ending cycle of vengeance? It's convenient. But what's the point of going to all the trouble of writing a book if you can't keep your fictional revolution from eating its children?
Technically there's still kind of a half-hearted love triangle knocking around the edges, but it hardly ever comes up and there's never any real uncertainty about Katniss ditching her childhood buddy Stormy McVengeance in favor of Literal Breadname the steady and nurturing rock biscuit (with extra cinnamon). I don't think it was really necessary to have Gale hanging around representing The Fighter in this dilemma of how to live in response to oppression, because Katniss is already The Fighter and knows perfectly well from experience how exhausting it gets after the first ten minutes.
The epilogue makes the series, in my opinion.
This isn't one of your pessimistic post-apocalyptic dystopias. The end of the world isn't the end of the world. The way things have always been gets torn down and crumbles to dirt and tomorrow comes anyway. Whether you live to see it is another story. In spite of everything, Katniss and Peeta live to see it. They move back into the old neighborhood, have a garden and some kids, and when they wake up, their nightmares drift back into the past for a little while. We don't actually learn much about the new regime, which is probably a good choice on Collins' part. We know that the Games are over. More people have died for this than they can know or name. Is that a happy ending? It's not the end, and that's something. It's better than they hoped for, and the best they can do.
I finished I Capture the Castle in no time, not because it's a fast-paced book (it's leisurely even when the emotional drama is at its peak) but because I liked the narrator so much and wanted to spend as much time with her and her family as possible. The joke was on me, because I got to the end of the book and then it was over.
I veered between hating the romance plot(s) and being indifferently tolerant toward them. Mostly I just wanted to buy Cassandra a chocolate with some brandy in it and maybe take her to a party where she can meet more than two people. Simon and Neil are the only really uninteresting characters in a gallery of wonderfully even-handed, funny and tolerant portraits - though I don't know if I would have found them as uninteresting if they hadn't been so pointedly the only love interest game in town. I did very much appreciate that [SPOILER] we did not go with a Childhood Sweethearts Forever ending - I was glad for that even though I liked Stephen about a billion times better than the Bros. Netherfield. Anyway, the romance plot was saved by its inconclusiveness: we don't know by the end if she's going to marry anyone, but we do know that she's writing a lot and getting better at it, or at least getting accustomed to the difficulty of making sentences out of feelings, and that's exactly as it should be.
I wished there were a little more about her dad and Topaz, because I loved them (Cassandra's dad is a nicely unsentimentalized Troubled Writer who doesn't write anything; Topaz is just the best) but they were treated at a level of detail that was realistic for Cassandra, so I won't complain.
On the one hand, I enjoyed Marmion a lot more than I expected to! At the same time, nothing about it has stuck in my mind, except an overall sense of Tropes Achieved: the Andre Norton of poetry? I've just started an Andre Norton book which feels like it will have much the same effect.
One of the suggested exercises at the back of this book has students reading passages from an 1808 review mostly panning Marmion and responding to them. This is something that I would have really enjoyed doing in middle school, but no one ever provided such a resource. If I wanted to see one of our reading assignments panned, I had to do it myself.
What I'm Reading Now
I started True Pretenses by Rose Lerner, but I'm thinking I might not finish it. These guys are appealing character outlines, but they had a whole chapter of dialogue to convince me they were characters and nothing came of it. And what's the point of an allegedly historical novel with no atmosphere, if the language isn't interesting? I'm going to assume I'm just being grumpy because I'm tired and give it another 50 pages to turn itself around.
Sargasso of Space by Andre Norton is a wonderfully unassuming Space TV Adventure (minus the TV). Dane's asshole friends make fun of him when he gets assigned to the lowest class of space trading ship, but he's determined to make the best of it, and the crew of the Solar Queen are friendlier and more interesting than those jerks, anyway. Almost as soon as they're underway, they gamble their salaries on a risky venture: buying sight-unseen trading rights to a Class D planet, which could have intelligent life but could just as easily be a bunch of fish in a bucket or nothing at all. What will they find? Probably something interesting, or there wouldn't be a book here - right? Clunky but earnest Circa 1955 racial diversity and lots of breezy worldbuilding.
What I Plan to Read Next
The Heiress Effect by Courtney Milan, maybe Cotillion. Probably other things.
I need to make an adjustment to my Mount TBR Challenge: I'm going to count books as read if I make an attempt but have to give up after 100 pages. Otherwise I may end up spending a lot of time reading books I don't care about, and I'd rather avoid that for now. No books in this DNF category yet, but I'm sure I'll need it eventually. My Mount TBR count is now 11 books, 1/6 of my total goal, which means I'm about where I should be.
Picnic at Hanging Rock is coming up, one of these days, for the "two books from Australia" portion of my reading challenge. What else is a book from Australia? Has anyone read Carpentaria?
What I've Finished Reading
Mockingjay! When I first started reading The Hunger Games I got some warnings that the second two books weren't as good as the first, and that's probably objectively true, but I'm so glad that I read them that I barely even noticed. I didn't really believe in the rebellion as it was happening, which undermined things a little, but not as much as you might expect. This has never been a series where seamless plotting and economic feasibility were the point. I've spent a lot of time over the past couple of weeks making fun of/trying to make sense of the worldbuilding, but I've also been consistently impressed by Collins' achievement here: these books were totally addictive, totally memorable, smart and humane.
I know I just said "memorable," but actually, a few days after finishing the book, the details of the plot have already blurred together into a haze of impressions. I'm not sure that's actually a contradiction: the events are mostly just carriers for the imagery, the emotional beats and Collins' meticulous and unsentimental depictions of trauma.
Peeta gets brainwashed by the Capitol. The rebels kidnap him back (and another tribute who was being held as emotional leverage), but he's been conditioned to hate and fear Katniss, and has to be gradually de-conditioned by the District 13ers. Eventually the rebels storm the Capitol, and there's a horrible attack of uncertain provenance. It's suggested that Rebel Leader Coin masterminded it, but I'm not clear on whether that's ever confirmed. Coin DOES try to ring in the new regime by setting up a whole new round of Hunger Games for the children of the Capitol elite, so that those bastards can see how they like it, but Katniss is somewhat too conveniently able to shut this plan down by shooting Coin, instead of our favorite incompetent dictator President Snow, at what's intended to be Snow's execution. Luckily, Snow meets an equally convenient end soon after. Not that I'm complaining! Who wants a downer ending with a new Hunger Games and a never-ending cycle of vengeance? It's convenient. But what's the point of going to all the trouble of writing a book if you can't keep your fictional revolution from eating its children?
Technically there's still kind of a half-hearted love triangle knocking around the edges, but it hardly ever comes up and there's never any real uncertainty about Katniss ditching her childhood buddy Stormy McVengeance in favor of Literal Breadname the steady and nurturing rock biscuit (with extra cinnamon). I don't think it was really necessary to have Gale hanging around representing The Fighter in this dilemma of how to live in response to oppression, because Katniss is already The Fighter and knows perfectly well from experience how exhausting it gets after the first ten minutes.
The epilogue makes the series, in my opinion.
The questions are just beginning. The arenas have been completely destroyed, the memorials built, there are no more Hunger Games. But they teach about them in school, and the girl knows we played a role in them. The boy will know in a few years. How can I tell them about that world without frightening them to death?
This isn't one of your pessimistic post-apocalyptic dystopias. The end of the world isn't the end of the world. The way things have always been gets torn down and crumbles to dirt and tomorrow comes anyway. Whether you live to see it is another story. In spite of everything, Katniss and Peeta live to see it. They move back into the old neighborhood, have a garden and some kids, and when they wake up, their nightmares drift back into the past for a little while. We don't actually learn much about the new regime, which is probably a good choice on Collins' part. We know that the Games are over. More people have died for this than they can know or name. Is that a happy ending? It's not the end, and that's something. It's better than they hoped for, and the best they can do.
I finished I Capture the Castle in no time, not because it's a fast-paced book (it's leisurely even when the emotional drama is at its peak) but because I liked the narrator so much and wanted to spend as much time with her and her family as possible. The joke was on me, because I got to the end of the book and then it was over.
I veered between hating the romance plot(s) and being indifferently tolerant toward them. Mostly I just wanted to buy Cassandra a chocolate with some brandy in it and maybe take her to a party where she can meet more than two people. Simon and Neil are the only really uninteresting characters in a gallery of wonderfully even-handed, funny and tolerant portraits - though I don't know if I would have found them as uninteresting if they hadn't been so pointedly the only love interest game in town. I did very much appreciate that [SPOILER] we did not go with a Childhood Sweethearts Forever ending - I was glad for that even though I liked Stephen about a billion times better than the Bros. Netherfield. Anyway, the romance plot was saved by its inconclusiveness: we don't know by the end if she's going to marry anyone, but we do know that she's writing a lot and getting better at it, or at least getting accustomed to the difficulty of making sentences out of feelings, and that's exactly as it should be.
I wished there were a little more about her dad and Topaz, because I loved them (Cassandra's dad is a nicely unsentimentalized Troubled Writer who doesn't write anything; Topaz is just the best) but they were treated at a level of detail that was realistic for Cassandra, so I won't complain.
“For the poor Lady Clare, she is a personage of still greater insipidity and insignificance. The author seems to have formed her upon the principle of Mr. Pope's maxim, that women have no character at all. We find her everywhere, where she has no business to be, neither doing anything of the least consequence, but whimpering and sobbing over the Matrimony in her prayer book, like a great miss from a boarding school; and all this is the more inexcusable, as she is altogether a supernumerary person in the play, who should atone for her intrusion by some brilliancy or novelty of deportment.”
On the one hand, I enjoyed Marmion a lot more than I expected to! At the same time, nothing about it has stuck in my mind, except an overall sense of Tropes Achieved: the Andre Norton of poetry? I've just started an Andre Norton book which feels like it will have much the same effect.
One of the suggested exercises at the back of this book has students reading passages from an 1808 review mostly panning Marmion and responding to them. This is something that I would have really enjoyed doing in middle school, but no one ever provided such a resource. If I wanted to see one of our reading assignments panned, I had to do it myself.
What I'm Reading Now
I started True Pretenses by Rose Lerner, but I'm thinking I might not finish it. These guys are appealing character outlines, but they had a whole chapter of dialogue to convince me they were characters and nothing came of it. And what's the point of an allegedly historical novel with no atmosphere, if the language isn't interesting? I'm going to assume I'm just being grumpy because I'm tired and give it another 50 pages to turn itself around.
Sargasso of Space by Andre Norton is a wonderfully unassuming Space TV Adventure (minus the TV). Dane's asshole friends make fun of him when he gets assigned to the lowest class of space trading ship, but he's determined to make the best of it, and the crew of the Solar Queen are friendlier and more interesting than those jerks, anyway. Almost as soon as they're underway, they gamble their salaries on a risky venture: buying sight-unseen trading rights to a Class D planet, which could have intelligent life but could just as easily be a bunch of fish in a bucket or nothing at all. What will they find? Probably something interesting, or there wouldn't be a book here - right? Clunky but earnest Circa 1955 racial diversity and lots of breezy worldbuilding.
What I Plan to Read Next
The Heiress Effect by Courtney Milan, maybe Cotillion. Probably other things.
I need to make an adjustment to my Mount TBR Challenge: I'm going to count books as read if I make an attempt but have to give up after 100 pages. Otherwise I may end up spending a lot of time reading books I don't care about, and I'd rather avoid that for now. No books in this DNF category yet, but I'm sure I'll need it eventually. My Mount TBR count is now 11 books, 1/6 of my total goal, which means I'm about where I should be.
Picnic at Hanging Rock is coming up, one of these days, for the "two books from Australia" portion of my reading challenge. What else is a book from Australia? Has anyone read Carpentaria?
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Date: 2017-04-06 12:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-04-06 01:29 pm (UTC)