When I introduced my daughter to the dystopian perils of Katniss Everdeen a couple years ago, I was warned. The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins, was tough stuff and filled with terrible situations and violence that may too much for young readers like her.
I have since spent my days hearing all about how fantastic and smart Katniss is, how my daughter likes anything to do with archery, and why I’m a terrible father for not yet pre-approving her attendance at the midnight debut of The Hunger Games movie this March.
I may have to relent.
On a whim, and only slightly pressured by the women in my house to read it before the movie arrives, I picked up Collins’ young adult sensation.
The book is the sometimes delicate, sometimes cold, and always cautious narration of Katniss Everdeen, a teenager living in the vague dystopian future of Appalachia. She survives for two reasons. She can hunt and scrounge in the forests (illegally, that is), and she lets almost no one close to her. And, she does it all for Prim, her precious and much less rugged younger sister.
Their Appalachia is District 12, the coal mining center of a centrally controlled totalitarian state referred to simply as the Capitol. The book reveals little about this awful dystopian state, as Collins prefers instead to let the perspectives of a shell-shocked young Katniss and her small community reveal the effects of oppression. The choice is odd, given the tradition of dystopian science fiction as political commentary. Collins has much to say here, though, particularly about young women, their obsessions with appearances, and also about how popular media – especially reality television — shapes our minds. Collins made exactly the right choices, I think, in presenting a largely faceless oppression. Yes, yes, of course the bad government is bad. But that’s not the point she’s after, and it makes The Hunger Games a sharper, more widely appealing book to young readers. Dare I suggest, a classic?
The Hunger Games are, of course, the centerpiece of it all. They are annual tribute by the 12 districts, and an obscene reminder by the Capitol of who’s in charge. Echoing the myth of Theseus and the minotaur, each district holds a lottery to send off one unlucky boy and girl to compete in these gladiatorial games, televised for all to watch. Katniss volunteers for the almost certain death in an effort to save her sister; it’s the first of many bold, heroic moves she makes.
They are nothing if not spectacle, these games. Katniss and her District 12 partner, Peeta, begin a feigned romance for the Capitol audiences, but it gives way to terror as the games begin, and Collins unveils her violent vision. She tortures all participants with gruesome injury and heartbreaking deaths. The death of one particular girl, whom Katniss befriends, is Collins wake-up call that this profoundly sad moment is no mere young adult page-turner.
Katniss excels in the game not really because she’s a bow hunter and survivor, but because she understands, even obsesses about how she appears. At every critical move, she considers and reconsiders not only what her young opponents must be thinking and planning, but what the watchers in the Capitol and her own sponsor must be thinking.
When the game announcer’s disembodied voice explains that the game rules have changed, she teams up with lovestruck Peeta, and quickly realizes that to survive and win, they must appear to be two lovers fighting to survive together. She knows the audience is wild for it, and Katniss learns to use this as a weapon of survival, and even as a weapon of political defiance. And survive she does at the cost of terrible injury and pretensions she can’t unravel.
Collins published her work as a trilogy, one of the hottest fiction series in many years. The hype has some merit. On its own terms, this first novel is a well done piece of fiction with a solid, if hard-edged, heroine that I’m proud to have my daughter admire. She can’t wait for me to read Catching Fire and Mockingjay.
For now, I’ll wait at least a little while to savor one of the finest young adult fiction books I’ve ever read.
The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins: A+
Tags: dystopian, dystopian fiction, Katniss Everdeen, Peeta, Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games, young adult
Steven Pressfield gathered acclaim for his novel Gates of Fire (among other works). There, he tells the militaristic tale of the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae. In The Profession: A Thriller, Pressfield fasts forwards to the near future. It’s still a mess of oil, sand, Islam, and mass media. His twist is the evolution of warfare to private armies – the good old mercenary.
The book centers on Gilbert “Gent” Gentilhomme, an accomplished ex-marine from cajun country who rides the literally bleeding edge of Force Insertion, a mercenary conglomerate that makes real world Black Water look like a lemonade stand. Gent is the best of the best, a stand out who glides through terrifying combat action and ethnic strife. Gent narrates in the present tense, adding to the kinetic flair. Pressfield’s flashbacks work well as Gent reveals his history with one General Salter, his lifetime leader and mentor.
With Gent, we begin to side with Salter, an apparently principled soul who defies bureaucrats in Washington to do the right thing in Eastern Africa. Pressfield’s heart-wrenching details give the novel punch, setting up up a tense, engrossing first half of the novel. Here, he creates plausible situations, tense action, and sympathetic reactions.
Less punchy is Gent’s relationship with his estranged wife, A.D. She’s a tenacious reporter, a cross between Christiane Amanpour and Lara Logan (complete with South African background, a la Logan). It’s clear Gent’s still smitten, but she’s after her next big story. What’s much less clear is why she leaves Gent in the lurch at a crucial point. It’s the single biggest head-scratcher in the novel, and comes at an absolutely critical point in the story.
From events in eastern Africa, the novel builds skillfully to an incredible, implausible climax. The larger-than-life Gen. Salter, thrusts himself and his mercenary super army into the role of American Caesar. It puts Gent into a frantic realization he’s propped up the elite who will dismantle the United States Constitution and with it the republic. Gent comes to this realization too late, uncovering gruesome conspiracy inside the Beltway. He’s party to Salter’s rise to power, believing more in a near-mystical warrior poet ethic than any liberal values he once fought for.
The inevitable confrontation between soldiers gives lie to Gent’s penchant for superstition, visions of himself as an ancient warrior on an ancient battlefield. Somehow, amid the hyper-real setting, the visions aren’t bunk.
Throughout the novel, Pressfield tosses in amusing commentary as color for his near-future landscape. Digital media is ubiquitous, subsuming information brands with The New York Google Times, and a hint of Amazon store fronts. He imagines the macho life of future mercenary warriors, rich with enough details to please military fiction aficionados. And, despite a relatively tidy cast of characters manipulating complex oil markets and the fickle U.S. electorate, the future is a well-realized home for Gent.
If Pressfield’s biggest sin here is flying to close to the sun with a over-reaching plot, the story survives (Gent’s wife’s baffling turn is part and parcel of the big event). Gent’s perspective and the well-paced chapters are a pleasure, and I happily recommend the book. Pressfield can definitely do thrillers.
The Profession: A Thriller by Steven Pressfield: B+
Tags: covert ops, Iraq, Steven Pressfield, The Profession, Thriller
Umberto Eco, famous for his medieval mystery The Name of the Rose and slightly less well known for occult classic Foucault’s Pendulum, managed to sneak in a different, remarkable book on my shelves.
The Island of the Day Before is Eco’s thorough exploration of an age of exploration and of the baroque. He navigates among a Europe on the verge of enlightenment, and the book spins lengthy ramblings on geography, religion, and science as the characters try, and often falter, to make sense of their world.
Young Italian aristocrat Roberto is a baroque paragon who absorbs shifting and contradictory worldviews as easily as he meets unusual characters on his travels. Roberto finds himself shipwrecked upon a ship, a turn within a turn. The ship is beeched on a coral reef within a bay or atoll. From its deck, he can see islands on either side of the ship, and later guesses they are the same island. There, he spends his days reminiscing about the travels that brought him to this end, and having a few odd adventures with a bizarre mystery shipmate.
Roberto’s flashbacks, told by the narrator who refers to Roberto’s journaling on the ship, comprise the meat of the novel, and certainly the most entertaining, even absurdly humorous episodes. Eco portrays Roberto as a noble’s son who, upon facing discipline from his hard farther, concocts tales of an evil twin, Ferrante, his ultimate foil, an evil mirror image whom Roberto repeatedly and imaginatively plots into wild romances to explain his own miseries and misfortunes.
Roberto battles the Spanish (where he watches his father die futilely, if somewhat valiantly), lounges with occult philosophers in Paris, learns sword dueling from an old atheist skeptic, and dabbles in espionage at the behest of the French cardinal. And, in each such episode, he encounters worldview after worldview, readily lapping up each one right after the contradictory other.
Roberto does show flourish – he absorbs those disparate philosophies and weaves in his own variations and swirls, a creative act that lands him at the mercy of the cardinal and puts him aboard a doomed ship destined for the titular island. Their mission? Discover what the British are up to in using a strange sympathetic magic to master measuring longitude at sea.
That mystery – the measurement of longitude – becomes Roberto’s obsession so he can return to his unrequited Parisian love. Once he discovers a mad old Jesuit who hides from him on the wrecked ship, the two set out with contraption after contraption to reach the shores of the island where the Jesuit has erected a device he claims proves the spot the antimeridian. Oddly enough, neither of them can swim.
Father Caspar is a mad genius, and wildly colorful character, who confounds Roberto into believing that God borrowed water from “the day before” by carrying it from beyond the antimeridian to carry out Noah’s flood. Here again, Roberto laps up apocalyptic notions from Caspar, and again rolls those into his amalgamated worldview even after Caspar perishes in a bit of black humor while trying to invent a diving bell contraption.
For all the color and absurdity (from a modern reader’s perspective, especially) of the cast of characters, Roberto is Eco’s accomplishment. Eco writes a novel in celebration of the baroque era, transforming his written narrative in substance and style as a baroque homage. It’s no small effort; today the word baroque is derogatory. But, importantly, Roberto is not merely the modern readers “eyes” to experience it all. In the end, he’s Eco’s triumph to reveal his genuine love for the art, and the soul of Roberto.
Despite challenging chapters, and ever expanding meanderings of philosophical fancy and minutiae, the book delivers in the end. It’s a flawed, but absolutely fascinating book.
The Island of the Day Before by Umberto Eco: B+
Rumors of my demise … probably never happened. Nonetheless! New book reviews coming up, including:
- The Island of the Day Before by Umberto Eco
- Purity of Blood by Arturo Perez-Reverte
- The Last Run by Greg Rucka
That means I’ve read the books already, and need to write up my reviews. Oddly, I have about the same reaction to all three books. I read each with very high expectations, and all three fell short of those, but barely. That’s a my critical way of saying these were pretty damn good, just not damn good enough.
Tags: Arturo Perez-Reverte, Purity of Blood, The Island of the Day Before, Umberto Eco
Canada came home today. I sloshed my way to the airport in a four-inch downpour. And, there she was riding down the escalator, looking a little weary and very much happy to see me. We’re pitiful old high school sweethearts and wouldn’t know what to do without each other. We don’t often spend more than a couple days apart.
Then, off on a pleasant post-rain ride to Barrata’s for lunch, where we each had a stiff drink (my usual — Southern Comfort), which made us both a bit bleary eyed and ready for a nap. Which we did!
We both needed the rest. She didn’t get much sleep in between marathon sessions of grading 700 test essays. For me, work has been unusually intense these past couple weeks.
When I finally managed to find my phone late in the afternoon, I glanced at work email out of sheer habit. There was big news from management, and I wanted to read the memo. The trick with those pep rallies in email form is reading between the lines. Then it occurred to me. I had managed to enjoy the afternoon without thinking about work at all. Without realizing, my brain unwound. It was that moment of release, as though life had unclenched its white-knuckle grip on my spinal column, that I realized I need to walk away and breathe much more often. It’s easy to miss that slowly tightening grip.
And, Canada had her own realization, ironically while working in Kentucky. She just said to me “I take myself way to seriously!” We both do that, love. We work hard, and then wonder why we’re worn out on weekends spent mostly at home. Hell, I’m not even sure what I want to do with most of my free time. Work’s constantly on my brain, even more so than last years.
Work to live, not live to work.
It’d D Day +2. One of my hobbies is WWII. I dabble rather than obsess, unlike some history buffs I’ve witnessed here and there. I’ve let the only magazine subscriptions I actually bother to pay for run out. That would be WWII magazine and World War II History magazine. And, I haven’t watched Saving Private Ryan in a while. I think I will tonight — I couldn’t find the DVD around the house on Monday.
It’s the heroic WWII moment for us Americans, and with good reason. It was a big gamble that changed the war, and lots of Allied soldiers paid the hard way for the action and ensuing campaigns. But, it also tends to shift our attention from other events of the war. We talk a lot about the casualties on Normandy or the Battle of the Bulge, but the numbers of dead on the Eastern Front are staggering by comparison.
The Allies involved around 175,000 men in the invasion, a campaign that lasted from June 6 to June 30. Somewhere around 5,558 Allies died during that time. German casualties were somewhere between 4,000 and 9,000. Neither figures include wounded casualties.
By comparison, the Battle of Stalingrad — which went on over a longer period from August 1942 to early February 1943 — was also a major turning point in the war. There, the Soviets fielded well over a million soliders. 478,741 were killed or missing. About 40,000 civilians — that’s about 9 of my home towns — died. The Germans had killed or wounded numbers around 750,000. Which means well over a million people died at Stalingrad, and easily more than another million were sick or wounded.
As hard a time as I have watching those jarring opening scenes of Saving Private Ryan, and as much as my insides bust up for those poor guys when I imagine what it must have been like — for all that, I can’t even wrap my head around a million people killing each other or shitting or starving themselves to death, literally. For us Americans, it just doesn’t have that heroic message, that bravery overcomes. But, without Stalingrad, there is no Normandy. It’s an easy thing for us to ignore, but it’s there. Spielberg put his camera in another direction, and that’s how we tend to think of it. (Who blames him? I don’t — the guy’s a genius.)
Real life heroism is never so simple, is it? We want stories, we don’t want muck and shit and dying.
So, I’m off to watch the movie that I find a little hard to watch. When I saw it in the theater — I’ll never forget this — I saw it at the theater in Indianola. I had a box of Runts candy in my hand. Next me me was some loud mouth asshole who was talking all kind of macho bullshit as the film started. I tried to ignore him.
So, the landing craft door opens up, and for about 20 minutes I was paralyzed. When I was over, I realized two things. First, that had that box of candy gripped tight as hell in my hand. I hadn’t touched a one, and I was motionless. Awestruck. The other thing I noticed was that asshole next to me finally shut the hell up. It took him about 30 seconds of watching to knock him down a peg.
Tags: D day, Eastern Front, normandy, Saving Private Ryan, Stalingrad, WWII
I’m into genre fiction. You know the place — that quirky section of the book store lumped along back walls labeled science fiction, fantasy and horror. Nearby, usually, are those kissing cousins– mystery & thrillers, graphic novels, and even a faint trace of young adult.
Right now I’m reading Purity of Blood, the second in Arturo Perez-Reverte’s Captain Alatriste books. It’s a book of pure entertainment, which probably means it hits all my buttons more so than it actually is a universally entertaining novel. It’s the kind of book my father would love. He’s old school, a real paperback cowboy who loves direct, well plotted books. Adventure books. Westerns. Thrillers. Naval fiction. He’s big into mysteries, especially detective stories. He doesn’t read much speculative fiction, but has a crazy knowledge of authors and lots of hours beating feet in the used book store.
And, something just struck me about all those books — the books my father loves, and the ones I enjoy as refreshing breather among more complicated or literary works. So much of those old tropes are guy stuff. I’m talking about the private detectives, the heroic naval scoundrels, the spies, the pirates, the superheroes, the vikings, barbarians, thieves, space farers, and on and on. We’re attracted to them because they’re powerful. Westerns aren’t popular because they happen to be part of American history. The Shakers are part of American history, but they’re not getting their own genre shelf at the book store. Westerns are popular because the edge the line of violence and power in America (and beyond, sometimes).
We read these kinds of tough guy things because their romantic, powerful figures. They pull more interest because they’re easily plotted, active and victorious ideals. We go in knowing this is exciting stuff. These tropes become assumptions, short hand for escape and suspension of disbelief. We just know Vikings are rough around the edges and mock those silly, girly Christian men. We just know spies just get into sexual tension. It’s not just part of the job, it’s part of the genre. And, to a genre, these things are populated foremost by narratively compelling, powerful guys.
Then sometimes a funny thing happens. Someone comes along and subverts those assumptions. It’s a sexually powerful spy, but she’s a woman. The gunsligner is a wronged woman.
And, still other times something comes along and tempts that allure and power in a new way. I can’t really unpack the subgenre of Steampunk, but it’s a fascinating case where things once silly and genteel and colonial get a grunged out glint, a hint of sex, and a lot of power and excitement. By jove, a new bookshelf category arrives.
All of which isn’t me saying much insightful. I’m certainly not critiquing those genre twists and turns. It helps me recognize why I’m drawn to the spectacular Captain Alatriste and not at all to, oh, Miss Marple.
Tags: Arturo Perez-Reverte, Captain Alatriste, genre ficiton, speculative fiction, steampunk, westerns
I caught bits and pieces of BBC interview George R.R. Martin did about his work and the new show. I’m a fan of his books, so it was fun to sneak in a few minutes of the interview to see what he thought about the show and how he writes organically. Martin explained to the enthusiastic interviewer that there are two kinds of writers – architects and gardeners.
An architect, he explained, is a writer who crafts in excruciating detail the skeleton of his narrative and the identities of his character. An architect outlines and revises before even putting prose on page.
Contrarily, a gardener is a writer who begins with a seed, an idea planted from their swirling subconscious on to the page, and then tends that idea as it courses on to completion. Martin identified himself, smiling from behind that bushy beard of his, as a gardener. And, my observation of many writers who discuss such things or pen instructional texts on fiction, are these seed planters. They seem to generally regard architect writers as oddities.
Martin’s dichotomy seems apt to me. I suspect there’s a tendency for writers to identify as gardeners, but I certainly don’t. When I try it, I suffer my greatest setbacks as a writer, meandering with decorative, but ultimately aimless prose. I paint myself into corners, and have no idea what I’m after. If I’m a gardener writer, I have a black thumb.
I think to myself, therefore, I must be an architect! A ha! Glorious! All I needed to do was prepare copiously, and then the writing will simply be laying the flesh on the bones I’ve so meticulously crafted. And, that may be so. But, there the tendency is to daydream, to outline or imagine elaborate settings that lack any actual narrative.
The dichotomy, like so many things, is easy to take too far, settling into prescriptive ideas about the process. Obviously, gardeners need to address plotting and planning at some point. And, architects have to inject some spontaneity along the way else they’ll craft wooden tales.
At the very least, it was helpful for me to hear someone like Martin acknowledge that his organic approach wasn’t the only path there is.
Tags: architect, gardener, George R. R. Martin, writing
It was a season-ender in every sense of the word. Given the schizophrenic Iowa weather these last few weeks, I’d say winter finally ended, and summer turned up the heat. Spring? We don’t need no stinking spring!
The kids soccer season is also finally here, which is cause for celebration all around. The kids now have a free and clear summer vacation on their hands. That’s nothing compared to Canada’s and my relief from soccer shuttle duties. With four dollar gas, we’d have to tap into college funds to keep this going much longer!
I don’t know what it is about the kids’ on-field performances when their mother’s out of town, but they were tearing up the pitch today. Riggen scored two goals, which lead to a couple cute comments, grins and a thumbs up at dad. Before that, Kate was up to her usual self as defender. Her ball handling skills really have improved, and she’s much more into the games.
Did I mention it was hot as hell out there? I mowed the lawn this morning in record time, trying to beat the heat. But still managed to sweat profusely. Canada says she loves this weather. I think she needs to be checked into a facility for psychiatric evaluation. Give me late fall any day.
Canada says it’s hot and humid in Kentucky, where she’s managed to run every day when not grading those essays. Apparently, the food’s also terrible, so she’s excited about losing a couple pounds. Women.
With Kate at an overnighter, that leaves me and Riggen for a rare guys’ night. Riggen’s all excited to play video games, maybe tinker with some Lego, and watch a movie. He asked me earlier, “Dad, does this mean we get our own man cave?” Yes, son. Yes it does.
Counldn’t come at a better time. I’m about shot from single parenthood after only a couple days. Worse, I have another longer stint as Mr. Mom in late June, when I’ll be starting up the new MBA class to boot. All I have to do is make it to August 1, right? Then some real R&R.
Getting down to business in a bleak economy
I’m a news junkie. Have been since I was a nerdy 80s kid watching the nightly news when things got exciting overseas. I remember spending the first part of my summer in ’89 watching Tiananmen Square unfold from my sweaty upstairs bedroom on the old Zenith. I really caught the bug in college as I went through j-school (that’s journalism school) and even my stint as college newpaper editor, where I was always angling for international news amid local bar scene hoopla.
Through those times, I had a deaf ear for business news. It was incomprehensible, to say nothing of stiff and boring. I still joke about how we journalism majors can’t even figure out a tip at lunch, let alone figure out business policy. That was, until I began working at a publicly traded corporation. Even then, it too me years to build an interest, mainly in digital tech.
When I finally took the plunge to get my MBA, it was inevitable. Accounting classes loomed, for crying out loud. If there was a polar opposite to the coursework I took in college, accounting was it. Not far behind was macroeconomics then finance.
I’ll be damned if I didn’t learn a thing or two, and it kindled my interest, especially in figuring out what the hell all this business news was really about. Until then, I pretty much understood bonds as those pesky certificates grandparents sometimes snuck in my birthday cards.
Looks like those grandparents knew what they were doing. Mom showed me a hand-written ledger the other day. It was all of Grandpa Riggen’s bond investments, split between his two surviving daughters. For a coal-miner-turned-farmer who weathered the Great Depression and fixed things more often than buying them, it’s pretty understandable why he put that kind of money in federal bonds rather than, say, stock in IBM. Even so, it’s an impressive ledger of investments. Hell, I think Mom even showed me because she was a little tickled by it.
So, now, when I hear about China worrying about the U.S. defaulting on its bonds, I actually have some sense what that means, and how it might affect the economy, at least in layman’s terms.
Maybe it’s one of those ignorance is bliss deals. There was a specific moment about three years ago. I was standing in line for lunch, carelessly staring at the news headlines on TV when I realized that no longer was my job a certainty, that money might not always be there. That things had shifted into a new era. It wasn’t the stuff in the news, not some abstraction about mortgages. It was a thing close to home, an aftershock of losing work colleagues to lean times, knowing my long tenure (if I can call it that) is no guarantee. This week that hint of worry came back as I gobbled up more bleak economy news about job reports and debt limits.
Before that moment, I was driven by the “inevitable” boons of getting an advanced degree and a promotion. After that moment — and ever since — I’m driven by a harder ethic. Call it perseverance over prosperity. There’s no sign it’ll pay off soon, and still I’m working harder than ever. The payoff may not be on my paycheck. But, it sure is nice to have Mom confide in me like a grown up.
Tags: bonds, business, economy, news