evelyn_b

Crossposted from Livejournal

What I've Finished Reading

The Cricket on the Hearth is an incredibly sappy novella by Charles Dickens about Angels of the Home. There is a Scrooge-like character who has a last-minute change of heart no clear reason, and a saintly blind girl with a saintly father, and a charming awkward guy who is too nice for the Iago trick that Not Quite Scrooge tries to pull on him, and sentimental apostrophes for days. It's sort of a Complete Idiot's Guide to Why People Don't Like Dickens. I didn't hate it, but I'm not going to go around recommending it to anyone, either.

( Hold Me by Courtney Milan )

Plus, I finally got a new copy of Catching Fire so I could finish it. (I did not find the one I lost). Katniss gets sent back to the arena, because how else are you going to follow up a book about traumatized gladiator teens, other than by making them go back and do the same thing they just did? It reminds me of the sequels to the book Hatchet, where after Brian gets rescued from the Canadian wilderness, some TV network asshole shows up and asks him to go back For Science. This time it's a Tournament of Champions, pitting past victors against each other, which gives Katniss and Peeta (who should be named Cinnamonrohl) the chance to meet and ally with adults of all ages. Can they break the game if they work together? Will the cost be too terrible to live with? The answers are yes and yes.

I like the repulsive President Snow with his sickly scented roses and blood on his breath, even though he is not great at being a dictator and his propaganda skills are laughable. Then again, people don't become dictators from a love of the craft and painfully idiotic propaganda isn't necessarily any less effective than the clever and insidious kind. If anything it's worse because you think you're seeing through it.

What I Didn't Read Because It Was a Movie

I don't know if there's much point in trying to talk about going to see I Am Not Your Negro, a film made from the notes for James Baldwin's unfinished book about three murdered civil rights leaders, in the middle of reading Collins' slick and earnest music-video fantasy of rebellion. This is another job better suited to the non-lazy. So I'll just be glib and tell you the pettiest thing that made me angry, which was hearing the FBI's ungrammatical report on James Baldwin dropped in like a grubby rock among all of Baldwin's terribly lucid and careful sentences.

What I'm Reading Now

Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins. ( Time for a spoiler cut! )

I complain, but really I'm enjoying the heck out of these books, not just as a vehicle for complaining about shoddy dictatorial practices. Katniss is a genuinely flawed, genuinely strong protagonist, and Collins is sharp and unsentimental about trauma, hope, and guilt.

( I Capture the Castle )

This book (by Dodie Smith, author of The Hundred and One Dalmatians!) is off to a great start. Seventeen-year-old Cassandra lives in a falling-apart castle with her stepmother, her sister, and her dad, a depressed writer who no longer writes anything. She's started a diary because she wants practice writing well and writing the truth. It's difficult! But she is going to do her best.

And still Marmion! It's interesting. My lingering prior impression of Scott was based on trying to read him as a kid and getting bored out of my mind two pages in, but that was prose. In poetry he's fun, fluid, a little didactic, fast-moving and melodramatic - and colorful! I feel I understand L. M. Montgomery a little better just reading it. Some knights kidnap some women and fight each other, there is a fake ghost, sunsets make everything red, and along they way they sing a few ballads. The poetry is a kind of poetry I think we don't get much any more. It's not "bad poetry" by any means, it's workmanlike poetry - genuinely musical, not prose chopped into lines, but also not ever in the least bit startling or sublime, which is itself kind of a remarkable feat for a poem two hundred pages long. In all that time you would expect something beautiful to happen just by accident.

What I Plan to Read Next

Hold Me satisfies the Romance portion of my reading challenge, but wordsofastory and lost_spook gave me so many recs that I couldn't pick just one, so I have some others waiting for me: True Pretenses, Cotillion, and one more by Milan. Next on Mount TBR is Sargasso of Space by Andre Norton. I've never read Andre Norton, but she is an incredibly prolific SFF author that I've been meaning to try for a while.

Also future-reading Cotillion by Georgette Heyer, which I have been informed is not a romance in the strict sense, but a comedy of manners with a very pink cover.