I've been asked by the moderators of the Readers and Book Lovers forum to stop posting there. And so, after 4+ years of crossposting to plf515's and cfk's Wednesday book diaries, I'll be sticking to my own diary here, and to various other blogs outside of DK. If you like my book diaries, you'll still find me here, although it may not be on the first Friday night of the month--I've found that to be a really awkward time for getting traffic here.
Anyhow, this month in my eclectic reading included Doris Lessing, Francis Iles, Virgil, Nancy Mitford, more Jim Butcher, and--far and away outpacing any of the others--the last two volumes in the Hunger Games trilogy, which alone were worth the month and inspired me to write songs about them, included here in the hopes of amusing and enlightening you. Enjoy!
The 99% Solution: Catching Fire, by Suzanne Collins
All I can think of is the emaciated bodies of the children on our kitchen table as my mother prescribes what the parents can't give. More food. Now that we're rich, she'll send some home with them. But often in the old days, there was nothing to give and the child was past saving anyway. And here in the Capitol they're vomiting for the pleasure of filling their bellies again and again. Not from some illness of body or mind, not from spoiled food. It's what everyone does at a party. Expected. Part of the fun.
One day when I stopped by to give Hazelle the game, Vick was home sick with a bad cough. Being part of Gale's family, the kid has to eat better than ninety percent of the rest of District 12. But he still spent about fifteen minutes talking about how they'd opened a can of corn syrup from Parcel Day and each had a spoonful on bread and were going to have more later in the week. How Hazelle had said he could have a bit in a cup of tea to soothe his cough, but he wouldn't feel right unless the others had some, too. If it's like that at Gale's, what's it like in the other houses?
This is the second book in the Hunger Games trilogy, and It’s almost disconcerting how Suzanne Collins has managed to get me so emotional over a YA series. It’s one of the most gripping things I’ve read in a while, and if you’ve been reading my bookposts, you know I read a lot. I even wrote a song about the first book, to the tune of the Indigo Girls’ “Love Will Come to You”:
I remember when you were a lass
I saw you with your face pressed up against the glass
I was beaten for giving the girl next door
The bread she never could afford
They brought us to the Capitol
When they chose us for the games
You impressed them with your archery
And your dress of burning flames
Meanwhile, I'm just painted fire
No match for the predators that wait inside there
And now, Hunger comes for you
When in the arena, may the odds favor you
Everybody cast your lots and when you are through
Where there are lots, there will be few.
If I should win, I'm not much of a spender
The one I'd want to share it with is a contender
I'd give you all that I have to give
But only one of us can live...
And I see, Hunger comes for you
When in the arena, may the odds favor you
I'll protect you from the hunters of District Two
For if you're dead, I will be, too.
Seeking provisions in a field of knives
Looking for weapons to hunt down one another's lives
And now, Hunger's just begun
For the miner's daughter and the baker's grown son
We'll sink into each other's arms, and when we are done
Where there's now two, there will be one.
If you're the survivor, I hope that you're able
To find a way to turn the tables
To reach all those in the districts scattered
And show them survival isn't all that matters.
I don’t think it’s TOO much of a spoiler to tell you that the narrator survives to make it to book two, and that the prize for winning the Hunger Games is to get pretty much everything money and fame can get you for the rest of your life. Which, in a village where all of your friends and neighbors are being kept starved into submission by the government, can be almost as problematic as having to scrounge for one’s existence day after day.
In book two, we finally get to meet President Romney Voldemort Palpatine Snow. We learn why Haymitch became an alcoholic after winning his games, and we watch the preparations for the 75th anniversary games, which are made extra special with a little addition to the rules (it’s not something nice). As before, the story can be read as an adventure, watching the various competitors die in the arena one by one, or as a serious commentary on the 1%.
Does He Fry or Does He Walk?: Malice Aforethought, by Francis Iles
He had been thoroughly rehearsed, of course, as to the line his examination would take, though not as to its exact questions; the right answers fell from him one by one, delivered in just the right tone. Beforehand he had spent nerve-racked hours debating his attitude in this witness box. If too calm and collected, might that not be construed as the brazenness of the criminal? If flustered and anxious, as a guilty conscience? Now he did not worry. The right attitude had to come to him instinctively. He just knew it was the right attitude.
Even when the Attorney-General rose to cross-examine, that nauseating fear did not return. He felt no fear at all. His wits were all about him. He was going to beat the man at his own game, and it was going to be fun.
And it was fun.
This was apparently an important development in crime fiction: one of the very first novels where, instead of keeping the criminal's identity secret until the end, the author reveals who did it right at the start and tells the story from the point of view of the criminal, describing the planning and execution of the crime and whether the killer gets away with it or makes that one fatal mistake. It's been done to death since then, from Julian Symons's psychological thrillers to Donald Westlake's wonderfully funny adventures of the Dortmunder gang, and reading the first of its kind id a little like reading the first mystery ever in which the butler did it. It loses some of the suspense.
That said, I gobbled it down in an afternoon, so the story of a Walter Mittyish English country doctor plotting to murder his horrible wife must have been more suspenseful than I was giving it credit for, even at the time. As with many mysteries, the victim is such a bad person that the reader hopes that the police will either fail to solve the crime or let the culprit off regardless. The antihero is simultaneously sympathetic and odious, and the supporting characters mostly unlikable. The story also suffers from one twist too many. It wraps itself up fairly well, and then does something so stupid with the plot in the final two pages that I really did throw the book across the room in disgust. Fortunately, by then I was done with the book.
Woman, Interrupted: The Golden Notebook, by Doris Lessing
The four notebooks were identical, about eighteen inches square, with shiny covers, like the texture of a cheap watered silk. But the colours distinguished them—black, red, yellow and blue. When the covers were laid back, exposing the four first pages, it seemed that order had not immediately imposed itself. In each, the first page or two showed broken scribblings and half sentences. Then a title appeared, as if Anna had, almost automatically, divided herself into four, and then, from the nature of what she had written, named these divisions. And this is what had happened. The first book, the black notebook began with doodlings, scattered musical symbols, treble signs that shifted into the £ sign and back again; then a complicated design of interlocking circles, then words.
The notebooks belong to Anna Wulf, the main character, and she writes about her life in them. The black notebook is about her experiences in Africa, among colonialists and natives in the 1950s, and so this is a story about racial conflicts. The red book (get it?) is about her experiences in the British communist party, and so this is a book about class conflicts. The yellow notebook contains third-person narratives or autobiographical stories about her love relationships, and so this is a book about gender conflicts. The blue notebook is a personal diary, and so this is a book about psychological conflicts.
Put it all together, and Anna is having one or more breakdowns, and the main story is how she stops writing in those four notebooks and learns to be a single, complete person, and puts it all down in a fifth notebook, the golden one.
If that idea fascinates you, then you will love The Golden Notebook. If it sounds boring as hell, then the novel will bore you. If you're like me and find the theme moderately interesting, then the book as a whole might strike you as thought-provoking and an interesting exercise, but not necessarily 660 pages worth of interesting. It gets a little wordy, and there were passages, especially in the black and blue notebooks, where I found myself nodding off and reading mechanically without absorbing all of the details, even as I was aware that there were important subtexts that were passing me by. This is the kind of book you are meant to read more than once in your lifetime, and which will show you a bit more on the second reading than you got in the first.
I could tell that Lessing was influenced by Virginia Woolf, and that Lessing in turn influenced A.S. Byatt, whose Possession (Bookpost, October 2010) contained a Women's Studies Department that I'm sure in retrospective was focused on Doris Lessing. I'm told that The Golden Notebook is considered a Big Feminist Novel; I'm not quite sure why, except that the main character is a woman, and so her sexual hang-ups are naturally presented from a gynocentric point of view. Doesn't mean a man can't look at and identify with her sense of alienation and her efforts to become a whole person. Besides, I cheated. I read Lessing's introduction to the 1980 edition, in which she explicitly says, the book is primarily about breakdown and unification, not primarily about womens' issues. Considering the various roles I have to juggle in my life (family, work, working out, politics, music, books, gardening) that overlap with distressing rarity, it's easy for me to see how one point can be overwhelming to some to the point where they miss some of the others.
Studying the Strange People of Htrae: Shikasta, by Doris Lessing
World War I—to use Shikastan nomenclature (otherwise the First Intensive Phase of the Twentieth Century War)—began as a quarrel between the Northwest fringers over colonial spoils. It was distinguished by a savagery that could not be matched by the most backward of barbarians. Also by stupidity: the waste of human life and of the earth’s products was, to us onlookers, simply unbelievable, even judged by Shikastan standards. Also by the total inability of the population masses to understand what was going on: propaganda on this scale was tried for the first time, using methods of indoctrination based on the new technologies, and was successful. What the unfortunates were told who had to give up life and property—or at the best, health—for the war, bore no relation at any time to the real facts of the matter; and while of course any local group or culture engaged in war persuades itself according to the exigencies of self-interest, never in Shikastan history, or for that matter, on any planet—except for the planets of the Puttorian group—has deception been used on this scale.
This war lasted for nearly five of their years. It ended in a disease that carried off six times as many people as those killed in the actual fighting. This war slaughtered, particularly in the Northwest fringes, a generation of their best young males. But—potentially the worst result—it strengthened the position of the armament industries (mechanical, chemical and psychological) to a point where from now on it had to be said that these industries dominated the economies and therefore the governments of all the participating nations. Above all, this war barbarised and lowered the already very low level of accepted conduct in what they referred to as “the civilized world”—by which they meant, mostly, the Northwest fringes.
This is the kind of book Jonathan Swift might write if he lived in the late 20th century and, instead of Gulliver, imagined a race of advanced aliens writing reports on the history of Earth from his usual bitterly satirical perspective. It’s almost hard to imagine that the author of the intensely literary Golden Notebook and Shikasta (full title: “RE: Colonised Planet 5, Shikasta: Personal, Psychological, Historical Documents Relating to Visit by Johor (George Sherban), Emissary (Grade 9) 87th of the Period of the Last Days”--yes, really). It’s as though a work by Henry James and one by Mark Twain were the work of the same author.
As with Gulliver among the tiny people, the big people and the horse people, Shikasta is mainly about looking at typical human behaviors and beliefs from an outsider’s eye, and being shocked and appalled at how wretched it is. In this case, the outsider is a race of omnipresent aliens, filled with love for all living creatures and respect for the needs of ecosystems for sustainability, who have been studying the planet since human life began, through the point at which the atom war blew up everything. Sometimes the aliens attempt to intervene by visiting the humans; this is when religious beliefs in angels, Messiahs and UFOs spring up. Caucasians are depicted as a tiny fringe part of the human race, confined to the barbaric north and responsible for most of the world’s problems. Darker-skinned peoples are depicted as more in tune with nature and Universal Love. Sometimes the focus is on various, usually unnamed, individuals, and the psychological way they cope with life in a hellhole of a world.
I found it fascinating. If you like satirical fables like those of Swift and Twain, Shikasta will both delight you and help you blow off steam about what the assholes who have been running the world did. If you dislike the recent choices for the Nobel Peace Prize, you’ll hate this book.
Farmville: The Eclogues and Georgics, by Virgil
Pray for wet summers and for winters fine,
Ye husbandmen; in winter's dust the crops
Exceedingly rejoice, the field hath joy;
No tilt makes Mysia lift her head so high,
Nor Gargarus his own harvests so admire.
Why tell of him, who, having launched his seed,
Sets on for close encounter, and rakes smooth
The dry dust hillocks, then on the tender corn
Lets in the flood, whose waters follow fain;
And when the parched field quivers, and all the blades
Are dying, from the brow of its hill-bed,
See! see! he lures the runnel; down it falls,
Waking hoarse murmurs o'er the polished stones,
And with its bubbling slakes the thirsty fields?
Or why of him, who lest the heavy ears
Overweigh the stalk, while yet in tender blade
Feeds down the crop's luxuriance, when its growth
First tops the furrows? Why of him who drains
The marsh-land's gathered ooze through soaking sand,
Chiefly what time in treacherous moons a stream
Goes out in spate, and with its coat of slime
Holds all the country, whence the hollow dykes
Sweat steaming vapour?
Homer wrote two big epic poems, while Rome's Great Poet had only the Aeneid, which was incomplete, to compare to those, and so the compilers of Great Works of the Western World included these two sets of minor poems to round out Virgil. I'm assuming they lose something in translation from the original Latin.
The Eclogues consist of ten short pastoral poems about carefree shepherds having singing contests, playing reed pipes, feeding each other grapes, pining with love for damsels, breathing fresh, sweet air on lush green hillsides and generally prancing about like fauns in Arcadia. The four longer Georgics are "didactic poems" about the art and mystery of caring for crops, orchards, vines, livestock and honeybees. Some practical information in verse is mixed with a lot of homage to sweet fruits, amber waves of grain, white lambs, etc. Among both sets of poems are praises and honors sung to Emperor Augustus, Virgil's patron, who had evicted thousands of peasants from their ancestral farmlands to give them to his soldiers but who had made an exception for Virgil in exchange for some serious ass-kissing in verse.
The subject matter made me giggle. I've worked on a farm--a family-owned one, not the kind where you pick acres of one crop all day in the blistering heat--and it does not involve carefree days playing pipes. The smell of manure does not evoke thoughts of true wisdom and virtue. Rule of empires by city people with no connection to the soil may have its drawbacks, but so would rule by the supporting cast of Deliverance. The poems also depressed me moderately, with the constant reminder that art, like news, is bought and paid for by the 1% and must cater to their whims. Hence Emperors like Augustus get to enjoy flattering descriptions of themselves while being reassured that the peasants who grow their food are enjoying themselves. The poet says so.
The Sociopath You Married: Before the Fact, by Francis Iles
The long and short of it was that an unexpected audit of the estate accounts had revealed that Johnnie had been helping himself during the last few months to cash amounting to nearly two thousand pounds. Captain Melbeck had had to discharge him more than six weeks ago.
"Six weeks!" echoed Lina, aghast. "But he's never said a word to me. He pretended he was still with you."
"Rotten business altogether," muttered her guest, and gloomily swallowed some hock the wrong way.
After he had gone, Lina sat for two hours in her drawing room, too numbed even to weep, trying to face at last the fact that her husband was a liar, a thief, and an embezzler, and completely lacking in any sense of right or wrong.
See Malice Aforethought, above. Two crime thrillers that give the big reveal on page one, the first being that the protagonist is a murderer, the second being that the protagonist’s husband is a murderer. And then they both go back in time and spend a good amount of time describing how things got to that point And still it’s suspenseful. And they both completely blow it at the end.
I found Before the Fact to be the more gripping of the two books. It’s told from the point of view of a woman with a kind heart and low self-esteem, the kind of person whose vulnerability a manipulative predator can apparently smell. And the man who targets her is the classic sociopath. Popular with everyone, initially charming and attentive, he ingratiates himself with her circle of friends, marries her, and is gradually revealed to be a monster.
The book’s biggest failure is the way the victim persists in allowing herself to be preyed upon. She is portrayed as intelligent, in charge of her own considerable money, and with access to supportive friends and family she can turn to in a crisis. The husband is not a particularly bright bulb, and his early crimes are clumsy and detectable—in fact, the heroine learns of previous acts of dishonesty in which he had been caught before they met, so it isn’t as though She’s trapped, with no one to believe her over him. And yet, for chapter after chapter, she stays with him, even enables and covers up his behavior. It becomes clear early on that the story is going to be one long buildup to the husband’s inevitable attempt on the wife’s life, and the (effective in spite of it) suspense comes with wondering whether he’ll succeed in murdering her, or if she’ll be able to stop him. The resolution, as with that of Malice Aforethought, above, is one of the most unsatisfying I’ve ever encountered.
Eat less, Exercise more, lose weight. Neat, huh?: The Body Fat Solution, by Tom Venuto
Some goals take extreme physical effort, mental strength, and discipline, along with a different and unique set of beliefs and much higher standards. But you would probably live a lonely and isolated life of denial if you were nothing but an emotionless robot, feeding "the machine" for nothing but fuel and growth, 100 percent of the time.
You can achieve a healthy balance in life more easily when you understand and practice appropriate behavior. If you struggle with your weight, it's not because you eat ice cream once in a while with your kids or you want a piece of decadent chocolate cake when dining out in a nice restaurant on a special occasion. That's perfectly normal. Your troubles begin when you use ice cream and other comfort foods inappropriately as a coping mechanism, especially if you do it mindlessly and frequently.
Give yourself permission to enjoy foods that are outside your usual eating rules, provided you enjoy them appropriately, which means infrequently for special occasions and in a restrained manner. By doing so, you'll develop an exquisite balance between the health and fitness side of your life and the social and recreational side, and you'll never struggle with food again.
Yes, I have a weight-loss book included in here for completeness. I made a New Year resolution. Shut up.
One of the most succinct pieces of advice I ever received was that success is doing those things you already know you should be doing, and not doing those things you already know you shouldn’t be doing. Which is pretty simple, except that most of us can’t handle even that. Every fitness, nutrition, diet book around says that to achieve your ideal weight you should exercise more and eat less, and everything else is just details. A moment to learn, a lifetime to master.
Fine. What does this book do differently? It expands those two principles into five. The eat less part is still one principle. The exercise part is two principles: cardio and strength training. There’s a social support network (gathering around you people who support your goals and dropping the ones who sabotage you). And, first and foremost, Venuto stresses the psychology of it all. Reframing “weight loss” so that it doesn’t sound like a loss, making you a “loser”, but as “fat burning”. That makes a difference. Or not looking at those less healthy foods you crave as “forbidden”, which to born rebels like me is like dangling an apple before Adam, but acknowledging that a good diet really does let you eat any food you want—just not a whole lot of it, and not everything at once. It’s the calorie deficit that counts.
I didn’t find a whole lot of new information in here, exactly, but I did find a decent review of the basics, which is in many ways more important and valuable than the “new” secret. I’ve also lost burned 15 lbs in the last six weeks, as of this writing, doing what Venuto says. Draw your own conclusions.
Comedy of Bad Manners: The Pursuit of Love, and Love in a Cold Climate, by Nancy Mitford
Linda was notorious in the family for her unhandiness, she could never even tie her own stock, and on hunting days either Uncle Matthew or Josh always had to do it for her. I so well remember her standing in front of a looking glass in the hall, with Uncle Matthew tying it from behind, both the very picture of concentration, Linda sying, “Oh, now I see. Next time I know I shall be able to manage.” As she had never in her life done so much as make her own bed, I could not imagine that Christian’s flat could be very tidy or comfortable if it was being run by her.
“You are horrid. But oh how dreadful it is, cooking, I mean. That oven—Christian puts things in and says, ‘Now you take it out in about half an hour.’ I don’t dare tell him how terrified I am, and at the end of half an hour I summon up all my courage and open the oven, and there is that awful hot blast hitting onein the face. I don’t wonder people sometimes put their heads in and leave them out of sheer misery. Oh dear, and I wish you could have seen the Hoover running away with me, it suddenly took the bit between its teeth and made for the lift shaft. How I shrieked—Christian only just rescued me in time. I think housework is far more tiring and frightening than hunting is, no comparison, and yet after hunting we had eggs for tea and were made to rest for hours, but after housework, people expect one to go on just as if nothing special had happened.” She sighed.
Nancy is the sister of the amazing Jessica Mitford, whose muckraking books The American Way of Death and Kind and Usual Punishment changed my thinking at an impressionable age. These two novels in one volume don’t come up to Jessica’s level, but they’re entertaining nonetheless, and, I’m told, are autobiographical.
England in the early 20th Century, between Victoria and Elizabeth, is a gold mine for comedy. England is in the transition point between being the Empire ruling most of the world and being just an island near Europe. Centuries-old traditions are dead, and the older generations don’t know it. Leisure classes of landed aristocracy cling to privilege and look absolutely ridiculous, the equivalent of the U.S. Republican Party insisting that contraception should be banned. Hence the Col. Blimps and Bertie Woosters—and now, the Radlett Family, led by the incorrigible Uncle Matthew, whose living room displays the still-matted-with-blood-and-hair entrenching tool with which Matthew had singlehandedly brained a squad of Germans coming out of a foxhole during WWI.
The young Radletts, based on the Mitford girls, have little formal education and are a hybrid of old fashioned and modern upbringing. They are forever doing the unthinkable, like marrying (gasp) a foreigner and (even worse) divorcing him to run off with a communist, causing Uncle Matthew to storm up and down the hall, bellowing and writing various Radletts out of his will.This made for high drama in the 19th century and earlier. Today it looks downright idiotic. In Mitford’s time, it’s a little of both, but definitely skewed toward the ridiculous. Recommended for the comic hijinks and the snapshot of a bygone era.
Game of Thorns: Turn Coat, by Jim Butcher
”Harry”, he said finally. “You’re on the White Council, aren’t you?”
“Yeah.”
“And you are a Warden, aren’t you?”
“Yep.”
Butters shook his head. “So, your own people are after this guy. I can’t imagine that they’ll be very happy with you if they find him here.”
I shrugged. “They’re always upset about something.”
“I’m serious. This is nothing but trouble for you. So why help him?”
I was quiet for a moment, looking down at Morgan’s slack, pale, unconscious face.
“Because Morgan wouldn’t break the Laws of Magic,” I said quietly. “Not even if it cost him his life.”
“You sound pretty sure about that.”
I nodded. “I am. I’m helping him because I know what it feels like to have the Wardens on your ass for something you haven’t done.” I rose and looked away from the unconscious man on my bed. “I know it better than anyone alive.”
Butters shook his head. “You are a rare kind of crazy, man.”
“Thanks.
At this point in the Dresden Files, Jim Butcher is in his groove and the story arc has matured to the point of being a thing of beauty in the noir PI genre with monsters. Think of Spenser late in Robert B. Parker’s series, when he has his fictional Boston populated by a cast of dozens of goodies and baddies: police, assorted underworld mobsters, lawyers, wealthy people who know things, lowlife people who know different things, any of whom might team up with Spenser, be persuaded to provide information, or try to kill him if the case takes him someplace inconvenient. By now, Harry Dresden has all those connections, and faeries, vampires, werewolves, wizards and demons besides. The sight of Dresden going with, say, Officer Murphy to, say, the White Vampire Court on a lead, and deciding whether they need to threaten, cajole or bargain to get what they need, is the sort of thing I thrive on. So is the sudden reversal of fortune where Dresden suddenly finds himself in an uneasy alliance with a former deadly enemy or in a fight to the death with a former friend. And the quest to find a hidden Moriarty-figure who may have been manipulating matters behind the scenes all along, and who may turn out to have been a major recurring character all along, or someone who was just introduced in this volume, or maybe someone whose name never even appears in this book until the big reveal, but who played a big role in a previous book. Once you get the storyline advanced to the point where there are that many possibilities, you’re in a world of awesome.
And yet, it’s still a series for horny boys. Molly, thank God, is of age by now and not going Nabokov on Dresden’s skinny ass, but things continue to gobsmack me at inopportune moments. This time around, two nominally strong, intelligent female characters suddenly have an unnecessary bitchfight complete with snide comments about each others’ weight. Butcher tries to do for Dresden and Murphy what Parker did with Spenser and Hawk, using potentially offensive banter between the characters to show how the characters know each other well enough to make light of their differences without misunderstanding. In Butcher’s case, Dresden’s constant joking about Murphy’s gender and height, and Murphy’s responsive dumb-man jokes, fail, because Murphy gets annoyed, seems to be thinking about hitting him, and otherwise is uncomfortable with the whole routine. Hawk, on the other hand, always went along with the gag, unperturbed, gave as good as he got, and presented as Spenser's equal, and not just because he (like Murphy) could have physically clobbered the narrator. Murphy just doesn't come across as an equal, but is put down by the banter. And that makes all the difference.
At its best, it seems to me, Dresden transcends this limitation, just like Margaret Mitchell managed to mostly transcend the awful racism of Gone With the Wind. But that’s just one reader's take. If it’s too much for some other people, I’m not about to argue.
Days of Blood and Roses: Mockingjay, by Suzanne Collins
”Katniss...” The smell of blood and roses on President Snow’s breath is cloying as he brings his face inches from mine. “I am your true father. Join ME, and together we will rule the Districts as they were MEANT to be ruled!”
Noooooooo...
Oh all right, maybe I imagined that part.
A boy, probably about twelve years old, turns to us. Bandages obscure half of his face. The side of his mouth I can see opens as if to utter an exclamation. I go to him, push his damp brown curls back from his forehead. Murmur a greeting. He can't speak, but his one good eye fixes on me with such intensity, as if he's trying to memorize every detail of my face.
I hear my name rippling through the hot air, spreading out into the hospital. "Katniss! Katniss Everdeen!" The sounds of pain and grief begin to recede, to be replaced by words of anticipation. From all sides, voices beckon me. I begin to move, clasping the hands extended to me, touching the sound parts of those unable to move their limbs, saying hello, how are you, good to meet you. Nothing of importance, no amazing words of inspiration. But it doesn't matter. Boggs is right. It's the sight of me, alive, that is the inspiration.
Hungry fingers devour me, wanting to feel my flesh. As a stricken man clutches my face between his hands, I send a silent thank-you to Dalton for suggesting I wash off the makeup. How ridiculous, how perverse I would feel presenting that painted Capitol mask to these people. The damage, the fatigue, the imperfections. That's how they recognize me, why I belong to them.
Dang. I went completely verklempt at the end of the trilogy, tossed out the half-finished second Hunger Games song I had started before finishing the third book (it went somewhere completely different from what I had been expecting), and sighed. I wanted more.
It’s amazing. I read big, important, respected literature from Virgil to Doris Lessing, stuff that has been pronounced “powerful” for years, centuries even, and find them moderately interesting, in a cerebral sort of way, and then this YA series reaches out and grips me by the heart, brain and soul. Maybe I’m regressing. Maybe I’ve been a philistine the whole time. Maybe scholarly imaginative literature isn’t really all that moving. Or maybe those other authors spoke to eras gone by. We don’t live in ancient Rome or the 1950s. The Hunger Games books are meant for the here and now, for the TV viewers, the Tea Party, the 99% and the 1%, for anyone who has stood up to authority, and anyone who has wanted to stand up to authority but figured, what’s the use—one ordinary person can’t make a difference. Katniss, and Suzanne Collins, have something to say to all of you. All of us.
UPDATE: As it turns out, I have a different song from the one I had planned, this one to the tune of "The Merryman and his Maid" from The Yeomen of the Guard:
I have a song to sing-o
(Sing me your song-o....)
It’s a song people made for to be betrayed
On the ones who would do them wrong-o...
It’s a song of a Mockingjay bravely poised
Whose words were weapons and not mere noise
Who gave a voice to the girls and the boys
Who died in the depths of the Districts
Districts, Districts
Taking their licks. Crossing the Styx.
She gave a voice to the girls and the boys
Who died in the depths of the Districts.
I have my hands to wring-o
(Wring me your hands-o)
They are hands that can kill at the court’s commands
They’re the bane of the blighted lands-o...
They’re the hands of a populace beaten down
Who trickled their tears in their tinder towns
At the song of the Mockingjay bravely poised
Whose words were weapons and not mere noise
Who gave a voice to the girls and the boys
Who died in the depths of the Districts
Districts, Districts
Ignorant hicks. Houses of sticks.
She gave a voice to the girls and the boys
Who died in the depths of the Districts.
I have a bow to string-o
(String me your bow-o)
It was strung to be bent toward the One Percent
In revenge for a naughty no-no...
It was aimed at a Capitol decked with snow
Where they gorged themselves and enjoyed the show
Of the paupered populace beaten down
Who trickled their tears in their tinder towns
At the song of the Mockingjay bravely poised
Whose words were weapons and not mere noise
Who gave a voice to the girls and the boys
Who died in the depths of the Districts
Districts, Districts
Voting their picks. Fights that were fixed.
She gave a voice to the girls and the boys
Who died in the depths of the Districts.
I have a snare to spring-o
(Spring me your snare-o)
It was sprung in a parachute in the air
In a lesson that life's not fair-o...
It was sprung for a girl who could hit her mark
Who strung her bow and who struck the spark
That ignited the populace beaten down
And turned a torch to their tinder towns
That engulfed the Capitol’s melting snow
And put an end to their toxic show
To the song of the Mockingjay bravely poised
Whose words were weapons and not mere noise
Who gave a voice to the girls and the boys
Who died in the depths of the Districts.
Districts, Districts
Basket of tricks. Ton of whole bricks.
She sang a dirge for the ones with the courage
To live in the lands of the Districts.
Districts....Districts...
She sang a dirge for the ones with the courage
To live in the lands of the Districts.
And that’s nearly all I can say about it. I can’t really talk about the plot of book three, because it builds so on the books that came before that there would be spoilers for people who might not have started it—and I want you to start it. I can’t really talk about Katniss any more either. I’ve already said it, and the poor girl has already been pushed, pulled and defined enough by outside people with an agenda. Just read it. You’ll be glad you did. It satisfies. The character of Katniss captivated me to the point where I became a teenager with a crush again. She’s everything the girl from Twilight is not: capable, self reliant, strong as only one with no choice but to be strong can be, and yet heartbreakingly vulnerable. I wanted to be friends with such a heroine, to earn her trust and be worthy of it, and to have her back when the rest of the world has let her down.
Then I came to the end and was myself again and realized, I already have. :-)