The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

My rating: 5 of 5 stars



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.



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Ira Glass on Storytelling from David Shiyang Liu on Vimeo.

The Death Penalty

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.

GAH.

Forgot to write yesterday, when I was certain I had.

Streak starts over today, I guess. :(

Popcorn!

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.

How to Make Popcorn in a Pan

How to Fill the Days

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.

Wow, this got dusty in my last year of law school

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.

The Boleyn Inheritance by Philippa Gregory
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Far better, and more plausible, a book than most of her offerings. I enjoy them like a big, greasy bucket of popcorn, but like popcorn, there is often dissatisfaction or even disgust following rapid consumption. That said? No jarring anachronisms hopped out of this book and beat me over the head, so that makes it one of the best books of hers that I have ever read.

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The Riven Kingdom by Karen Miller

The Riven Kingdom by Karen Miller
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

So, this book was the sequel to Empress by Karen Miller, which I found very surprising. The first book introduced us to Hekat, who quickly became apparent as the villain of the trilogy's arc. I kept reading, despite disliking Hekat, in the hopes that someone--anyone!--would give her what was coming to her.

The second book in the series introduces us to Hekat's foil--the Princess Rhiann--and it tickled me a little that Rhiann doesn't actually start out all that likable. I'd read this as a criticism of the book, but I think it's a deliberate ploy on the part of the author. Rhiann really does grow and change and mature as the book progresses, and if she'd started out perfect (gag) the story would be substantially less interesting.

So this book sets up what should be a fascinating confrontation between Hekat and her scorpion god (really a sacrifice-fueled demon) and Rhiann and her kinder, gentler (pseudo-Christian, probably real if somewhat absent) god. There's a lot going on here, under the surface, about religion and the nature of faith, and I'm very curious to see how it plays out in book three.

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Half the Sky by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn

Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide by Nicholas D. Kristof

My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Kristof has long been one of my favorite columnists at the NYT, and many chapters in this book are expansions of editorials he's written for them over the years. Kristof's view of the world and how to make it better isn't knee-jerk liberalism. He offers solutions that are practical and even, at times, gritty. He points the finger of blame at governments and cultures, but cautions against top-down imposition of solutions from the West. Instead, he tells the stories of the women he's encountered and makes it impossible to discount the problem as too large to address. The reader is filled with hope, because every 10.00 donated or invested by the reader could go to help THAT woman improve her lot, and as a result, her country, and in turn the world. This is the manual, the handbook, for the Girl Effect, and they couldn't ask for a better one.

Highly recommended.

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Fallen by Lauren Kate

Fallen by Lauren Kate

My rating: 1 of 5 stars
I've been reading more YA since I have been in law school. It's digestible, undemanding, and lately has had a lot of promising titles in genre fiction. I have avoided the monster of the genre, since there's a lot about Twilight I know beforehand that I'll find objectionable. I had hoped that Fallen would be different.

But it's really not.

This was my first YA romance, and I found it really disturbing. The main character is flat, dimensionless--probably so that young women readers can project themselves onto her more completely. She's just a placeholder for both the author and the reader to get a little wish-fulfillment fix, since Luce can be just like ~anyone~ since she's not at all REAL. The love interests are a little more real, but that ends up being a bad thing. Luce is obsessed with one of them, to the point that even though he's a raging jerk to her she LOVES him from about page 100 on. For no reason. Though they've had no positive interactions. If literature teaches us how to act, and I believe that it does, then this book is teaching every young woman who reads it that social abuse is a marker that someone is your SOULMATE. UGH.

The idea was generally good. The execution leaves a lot to be desired. I suspect I won't pick up book two, even if it has a really gorgeous cover...

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Illusion by Paula Volsky

Illusion by Paula Volsky

My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is one of my very favorite comfort books. It's a retelling of the French Revolution, but with magic, and it's really well done on top of that. Lots of authors, in writing in historical or historically-based settings (I'm looking at you, Phillipa Gregory...) cheat on making their main characters likable by setting aside any and all inconvenient beliefs of the day. The hero or heroine is the Lone Voice of Morality, somehow living in a culture and never adopting ANY of its beliefs that might be unpalatable to a modern reader. Paula Volsky resists that urge, and Eliste is exactly a product of her upbringing and her culture. The lessons it takes to bring her around, to help her grow up, are the central story of the book. It's a story that couldn't be told if Eliste were already in possession of modern morality; it would be a BORING story.

But in this case, we get to watch this character change and grow as her refined society falls apart, crushed by the weight of its inherent injustice. It's a fascinating rendering. Highly recommended.


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Heat Wave by Richard Castle

Heat Wave by Richard Castle

My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is pretty much exactly the kind of book I expected Richard Castle to write. It's funny, it's short, and it has many sentences that start with "And." It also has more name dropping of consumer items--perfume, booze, etc--than any book I've read in recent memory.

That said, this book was an incredibly fast read, and I enjoyed the whole thing. It did prompt me to wonder, though, if I were Kate Beckett, and I read this book, how on earth would I face Richard Castle at work the next day? It's like finding out your work buddy writes slash about you that he posts on the Internet. :)

I'm not sure I would recommend anyone buy it, but to check out from the library or borrow from a friend? Sure!


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Horizon by Lois McMaster Bujold

Horizon by Lois McMaster Bujold

My rating: 5 of 5 stars
At last, I found books that made me really understand the scope and depth of Bujold's talent as an author.

This series did a lot of things right by me. It rejected the standard (tired) fantasy genre tropes right and left to tell a genuinely moving story about a small group of people committed to changing the world. There are no kingdoms. No nobility. No boy or girl with a special destiny or super-secret pedigree of awesomeness. It's not set in a medieval, white European setting. In short, it's a story created and told whole cloth, without any of the dumb, lazy shorthand that other authors rely on to give world-building short shrift. There's magic, but characters work out the particulars of it with actually scientific experiments. It's really quite something, and I was surprised nearly at every turn when Bujold rejected the standard fantasy trope to do something different.

The first book in the series is a romance, but the three novels after are post-consummation, and the characters have objectives and plans to change the world for the better. Book Four doesn't bring us fully to the new world our characters want to create, but like the real world, we see glimmers of hope in the changes they are successful in bringing about.

I can't recommend this enough to people who like the genre.


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The Sharing Knife: Passage

Passage by Lois McMaster Bujold

My rating: 4 of 5 stars
A friend of my commented that these books felt similar in tone to Firefly, and I have to agree. There's a folksiness to the tone and the dialogue that feels a great deal like the crew of Serenity, and Nathan Fillion would make an excellent Dag.

This book was a fairly seamless continuation of the story from the first two novels. Our protagonists have opted for a sort of self-banishment from the Lakewalker community where they had been living, and they join a riverboat crew, traveling south down a Mississippi-like river so that Fawn can see the sea for the first time. Of course, because it's an adventure story, that's only the beginning of their story, and hijinks ensue from there.

While I didn't enjoy it as much as I liked the first two books, it remains a solid installment in the series. I'm hopeful it's a transitional part of the story, and that the final volume in the series will return to the conflicts still unresolved from the first two books.

As always, Bujold's world building is as solid at just about anyone's, and unlike other novels of hers I have read, she's created two main characters it would be difficult not to like and cheer for.

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The Sharing Knife OR Beguilement and Legacy

The Sharing Knife: Beguilement and Legacy by Lois McMaster Bujold

My rating: 5 of 5 stars
So, I have read and enjoyed LMB books before, but this one really moved me in ways that the previous books have not. The writing is always solid, and she builds fantasy worlds like no one else, but I have often felt like the story or the characterization held the reader at arm's length. "Good idea," I would think, "but I never really felt welcome to share the joys and triumphs of the characters..."

But not this time.

Though I would characterize this book as a romance, it's not bodice-rippy. It's a sweet story about two people from very different, but overlapping, worlds, who want a chance to be together. There are a couple sex scenes that don't fade to grey, and unlike most books that include these sorts of explicit scenes, these managed to further both plot and characterization, in addition to being both sweet and pleasantly hot. I'm pretty sure that's not easy to do, given how few authors are successful at wedding plot furtherance with the sexy.

I'm relieved to be enjoying these, since I had purchased the whole series in hardback before I had even cracked the first one!


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Doing what you love? OR Loving what you do?

I have only occasionally talked about it here, but I am the Guild Leader of The Pentaverate on Thunderhorn, a casual guild on the Alliance side. I didn't start out as the guild leader of this guild, but since I had begged my friend Jared to do the founding of the guild, when he was ready to step down after two years, I felt obliged to step up and take on the role. It's mostly been good. It's had its challenges, like any change, but I've been doing it for about a year now, and I think I have a good groove going most of the time.

At first, we were small, and there was no officer corps but the GM and his lovely wife. But around the time that the guild grew enough to need an officer or two, I was it. I liked the acknowledgement of the work I had done to help the guild, and at the time, a promotion seemed the only way to do it. I loved the process of growing, and we were tiny for a long time. We weren't selective enough at first, though some might say EVER, and we paid a price for that in occasional flurries of immaturity and drama. I learned to use my /gkick, and eventually, we instituted a process of recruiting and introductory ranks that sorted a lot of that out.

I was playing a hunter then. It was easy to solo, and I assure you I was very much every bit the Bad Hunter of WoW stereotypes. I never really instanced on my hunter until 70, and certainly I never learned to TRAP or anything else that made for good hunters in BC. I wasn't all that wedded to playing her, which was good, because I was about to do my first main-switch for guild benefit.

We were talking about moving into doing a little casual raiding, but our guild lacked a tank at level 70. I had a paladin who I had leveled as holy, for whatever that means for someone who never really understood that holy was for healing, not soloing quests. Masochism comes in many, many forms, I guess. So I changed her spec to Protection and started learning, with the help of patient guildies, how to be a good tank. I took pride in being a woman in a role that many raiders thought were for guys only, and whenever someone assumed I was a man, I happily corrected them. I was a tank, damn it.

But come Wrath, many of our healers had decided to move to other servers, re-roll as DPS, or were taking the slow leveling route to 80. I had a healer-alt sitting at 70, and my guild needed me to heal more than they needed me to tank. So I main-swtiched again, first to a Holy Priest and then to Discipline. (I will NEVER go back to Holy having healed Ulduar on as Discipline. Bubbles! OMG, BUBBLES!) I have theory-crafted and "dug deep" with healing more than I ever did as a tank, and I think it's paid off. I am confident of my ability to heal anything in the game. Being good at healing has been a source of pride for me, but it's also kept me locked into doing that for my guild, sometimes when I couldn't get any benefit from the content we were running other than to help other people to gear up. I felt burn-out rearing its ugly head. I wasn't sure how to proceed. Insist that I get to tank the alts run? We had abundant tanks, even for the alts run. If I insisted, someone would be out a tanking slot on an alt, or the second run might not happen at all. That wasn't really any choice at all.

So I made a decision to more or less shelve my tank except for heroics. My current project is my Boomkin, who is needed to help make our second raiding team go. (Comprised both of alts like mine and the people who don't have a slot in the Tuesday/Thursday raiding from week to week. The perils of having about 15 people in the guild who want to raid regularly.) I've been learning what it takes to be good ranged DPS, and it's been really educational. I am loving Boomkin quite a bit, but I find that I am having a small identity crisis after all this divided focus.

Am I still a tank? A healer? Am I now a DPSer, obsessed with meters and crits? Is this masochism? Self-sacrifice? Am I happy even though I don't get to tank anymore? Do I do what I love? Or is my WoW experience entirely learning to love what I am doing?

None of my main-switches or leveling decisions were made out of a personal impetus beyond what the guild needed. I would NEVER have thought to try tanking without that need, but I loved doing it. I wouldn't have given up tanking but that we wouldn't have raided at all without more healers, and I really think now I identify as a healer about all else. The newest wrinkle is that I'm actually enjoying the Boomkin thing, and watching the big numbers roll in over my target.

So I am loving what I am doing, even if they weren't the choices I would have made for myself, absent the need of the people I play with, and finding satisfaction in that. But it's not the satisfaction that comes from a martyr's sacrifice, but genuinely loving roles I wouldn't have chosen for myself.

Her Fearful Symmetry

Her Fearful Symmetry: A Novel by Audrey Niffenegger

My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I borrowed this from Jenn to read over break, and while I didn't quite finish it during Winter Break, I managed to polish it off this morning. I had liked The Time Traveler's Wife reasonably well, but the back blurb for this one had generally excited me. Ghosts! Twins! London! Highgate Cemetary!

While some of that remained exciting (Niffenegger's fist chapter about Elspeth learning to be a ghost is particularly charming), I found I only empathized with a couple of the characters at all. Many of them I prayed would grow up or meet a bad end...and Niffenegger refused to deliver on that.

With the exception of Martin, I found that the likable characters in this book met the saddest ends, and the truly despicable characters, like Elspeth, got happier endings. In that sense, I found it ultimately unsatisfying, but there were many aspects of the book I found really enjoyable, and so I can still comfortably give it 3 stars.

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Re-greets

Well, I never intended this blog to become books only, but we've certainly made a slide that direction. Let's see what we can't do to rectify that, before law school erases good habits and good intentions!

Midnight Never Come

Midnight Never Come by Marie Brennan

My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I read this on the plane home for Christmas, and I found it completely engrossing despite a packed airplane and an uncomfortable seat.

The history is a little glossed, as other reviewers have alluded to, but had she offered the details of the lives discussed in the book, she could have easily doubled her number of pages. It reads as a fun supplement to the life of Queen Elizabeth I, but no one should expect that this novel will get you the full workings of Gloriana's court. Dissertations have been written about less. I suggest Alison Weir's excellent biography, if you want to know more.

This book is an excellent merging of the history with the fae, and the author's initial inspiration was the World of Darkness's Changeling role playing book. It was a fascinating example of a great story idea working in two venues (the game and the novel), and for fans of both story-telling vehicles, this is an interesting read.

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