Still excellent, though not QUITE as good as the first one. The ending exposition felt sort of hand-wavey, to be honest. Nonetheless, the story is awfully good, and so on to Mockingjay!
Darker and sadder than I expected the final book in this series to be. It was still an enjoyable read, and I thought Katniss Everdeen a much more worthy protagonist than other, wimpier women in YA fiction.
Again, like in the second book, I felt like some of the major plotlines were tied up with a little too much hand-waving of particulars for me to feel really satisfied with the outcomes.
It's a sign of how good the story was that I have only one complaint about this book. There is a place, in the middle of the book, where the story's perspective switches from first person to second, and it was really jarring. The sentence was easily rewritable to correct this one line to prevent the sudden feeling that one had fallen into a chose-your-own-adventure story, and I wish that the author/editors would have done so. Otherwise, it reads like basic YA, and it's the strength of the plot and characters that pulls you through the novel more than the prose.
I was surprised at how inventive Katniss's survival tactics during the Hunger Games themselves were, and how much I came to care about Katniss and Peeta over the course of a fairly short story. Suzanne Collins is careful to present Katniss as a girl with flaws, not a Mary Sue. She grows and changes, and even her willful blindness about certain subjects seems plausible, given the nature that Suzanne Collins has given her.
I see why this was optioned to be made into a movie, and I am diving right in to Catching Fire.
There is no easy answer. There's not supposed to be.
I oppose the death penalty almost all of the time, but there have been a few men (it's almost always men) who I might have made an entirely emotion-based exception for, despite firm convictions that it's not a deterrent, that it's an abuse of the power of the state. Typically, those crimes are crimes of mass murder, like Timothy McVeigh, when one person took the lives of so many others that it's impossible not to think he deserves something terrible to balance out what he did.
But the problem is that there's no balancing a crime of the scope that crosses the threshold for me. Once you've killed enough people that I think you might not deserve to live, your death would never be enough to balance the scales. There's no justice and no reparations.
So watching Rick Perry talk about the death penalty in Texas, and hearing the crowd at the Reagan library cheer his dubious record as the killingest-governor of modern times, I felt cold. Chilled. A little disgusted by my fellow citizens. I don't believe that Christians, as the audience would surely identify themselves (though to be fair I do not), are to rejoice at the death of another person.
I've been thinking a lot about this clip from the West Wing episode "Take this Sabbath Day." In it, the President meets with his boyhood priest on the evening of the first federal execution to take place while he's been in office. The President, a Catholic, didn't believe in the death penalty, but politically there was no real cover for staying the execution. This scene was the last time Karl Malden would appear on film, and it's so powerful. I learned recently that it's based on the first execution that Ronald Reagan presided over, as governor of California.
Stupid thing won't embed for me: http://youtu.be/QfLZrPq136I
The contrast is telling, to me. I imagine Ronald Reagan, kneeling with a minister in the governor's office, seeking guidance or forgivenss. Ronald Reagan, the patron saint of the modern Republican party, was ambivalent about the death penalty, but now the people who profess to admire him would likely kick him out of the party for this view and others.
It's not supposed to be easy, though. Whatever else I believe, I know it's not ever supposed to be easy to end the life of another person.
ETA: This family leaves me speechless with their grace and their compassion.
So, it turns out that making popcorn at home, in a skillet/saucepan, might be really easy. I have been missing my popcorn popper for a while, and I intend to try the pan method as soon as possible.
I'm at loose ends of late, as I look for a law job and wait to hear if I passed the bar. It's a strange thing, to be looking for jobs that you're not entirely certain you'll be able to do in a few weeks, since certification hasn't come yet, but at the same time, you can't realistically look for "lesser" work, either, since you'd have to be honest with any other employer that they were just a stop-over on the way to the career you just spent three years and many thousands of dollars training for.
So I am polishing up the resume, working on finishing my last cases at legal aid, and considering what else to do. Come Tuesday I will be applying at more temp agencies in the hopes of finding short term work to pay my bills, which haven't stopped while everything else is on hold. It's hard to know what to do with myself otherwise when I wake up at 7:30 AM with an entire day stretching before me. I have watched a lot of MSNBC; even when I am not paying attention to the TV, I find the white noise comforting.
I've also returned to several resolutions that fell away while I was in law school, like blogging and writing three pages of fiction every day. Blogging obviously happens here, and I have been using the website 750 Words to do the fiction writing, rather than than doing it in Scrivener or Word. 750words has a lot of pretty nifty metrics built in that, while not always accurate, are sort of fascinating writing-process navel-gazing. I am hoping to do NaNoWriMo in November no matter what, so I have been thinking about the daily pages as training to write a little over twice that every day come November. I sort of miss the old Defunct Novel in 90 community at Live Journal, but it seems to have gone belly-up. It seemed like a more sustainable pace than NaNo, but then the frenetic pace of NaNo is in some ways the point.
So far, the writing continues apace. I'm only on a three day streak, but I am trying to keep it up, and to make myself write the pages before I get to engage in time-wasters like WoW. So far, so good.
So I'm reactivating the parts of my online life that fell away while I was trying to finish my JD, including this blog. Expect some revisions, and then more presence here, going forward!
ETA: I imported this blog back from Wordpress so that I could keep all my blogs in one place. Dressed it up in a new template. Fall, after so much schooling, always feels like new beginnings.
Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins
Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins
