Favorite Reads | Book Report

There and Back Again: J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Hobbit.”

By: carina

09-01-2012

There are a number of books I wish I had read earlier in life and “The Hobbit” is one such book. Like a lot of people, I was introduced to Tolkien’s world by Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings and have since tried to read the books that started it all. So far, I have finished “The Fellowship of the Ring,” about a third of “The Two Towers,” and fifty pages of “The Silmarillion.” And though I respect Tolkien for the excellent display of creativity and imagination, as well as his word-wieldy ways, in these books, it is in “The Hobbit” that I saw the care he gave his characters and how dear stories and adventures are to his heart.

¹ An introduction to hobbits can be found in the extended edition of The Fellowship of the Ring, which endeared me to them quite unexpectedly.

“The Hobbit” follows one Bilbo Baggins, a respectable hobbit who lives in a nice little hobbit-hole under-hill in the West. As everyone knows, hobbits, including Bilbo, are a peaceful folk¹, who like being left alone with their ale, food, and pipe-weed. One afternoon, Bilbo’s peace and quiet were disturbed by the wise wizard, Gandalf, and a gang of dwarves recruiting him for a treasure hunt.

With the job description of a “burglar,” Bilbo encounters mountain trolls, goblins, a slimy creature called Gollum, a terrifying but extraordinary creature named Beorn, a perfectly forest, as well as a lot of other wonders and misfortunes.

“The Hobbit” is arguably a children’s book, and the writing style is frankly more accessible and easy to read than my other ventures into Tolkien. I think it was written with that intention—to craft an exciting tale instead of just an account of events—and this makes me love it all the more. A friend and Tolkien-fan, Ching, said that this was the Tolkien work that had the most heart, and although quite new to everything, I would have to agree.

² A chapter I particularly enjoyed was the fifth called, “Riddles in the Dark,” which was full of suspense and was evidence of Tolkien’s excellence as a wordsmith.

It was an absolute page-turner² and a dream to read. Bilbo and his band of dwarves (Thorin Oakenshield, Balin, Dwalin, Bofur, Gloin, Fili, Kili, Dori, Nori, Ori, Oin, Bifur, and Bombur) went out one mishap into another and each time they emerged to be a little wiser and stronger and braver. It was clearly Bilbo’s story though, and it was such a joy to see him change and evolve into someone not quite so “hobbit-y”—for hobbits are generally predictable—but someone a million times better.

The thing of it is, is that “The Hobbit” is a tale for bravery, even in the face of dark times, even if you are so very small that people forget to respect you. Throughout this adventure, Bilbo is constantly underestimated, because of his size, until, of course he learned how to prove everybody—including himself—wrong.

“‘Well done! Mr. Baggins!’ he said, clapping Bilbo on the back. ‘There is always more about you than anyone expects!’ It was Gandalf.”

“The Elvenking looked at Bilbo with a new wonder. ‘Bilbo Baggins!’ he said. ‘You are more worthy to wear the armour of elf-princes than many that have looked more comely in it.’”

And I felt my heart swell every time the big folk look at the hobbit with a twinkle in their eyes and a surprise coating their tongue, because they see Bilbo for what he truly is: a brave soul that endured so much, despite his lack of inclination for adventurous things, and despite being so small. A favorite passage: “Gandalf looked at him. ‘My dear Bilbo!’ he said. ‘Something is the matter with you! You are not the hobbit that you were.’”

And when it all wound down to an ending, I found myself crying because the adventure had to end, and I had to leave Bilbo and all the others. It was a weird experience for me, as I had not felt so moved by a book, at least close to tears, in such a long time.

It was certainly a long and tiring journey, but one that I would take again, if I had somebody like Bilbo Baggins to take it with.

Passages I would like to remember:

“There is nothing like looking, if you want to find something (or so Thorin said to the young dwarves). You certainly usually find something, if you look, but it is not always quite the something you were after.”
“Then the hobbit slipped on his ring, and warned by the echoes to take more than hobbit’s care to make no sound, he crept noiselessly down, down, down into the dark. He was trembling with fear, but his little face was set and grim. Already he was a very different hobbit from the one that had run out without a pocket-handkerchief from Bag-End long ago.”
“It was at this point that Bilbo stopped. Going on from there was the bravest thing he ever did. The tremendous things that happened afterwards were as nothing compared to it. He fought the real battle in the tunnel alone, before he ever saw the vast danger that lay in wait.”
“‘Never laught at live dragons, Bilbo you fool!’” he said to himself, and it became a favorite saying of his later, and passed into a proverb. “You aren’t nearly through this adventure yet.”

I read this book on my new Kindle, which I will review one of these days. Some of the passages, I have saved on it and decided against posting. I love it, too, because it can display images such as these runes, and this rather beautiful illustration of Bilbo’s encounter with the trolls.

The Pleasure of Leaving: Aleksandar Hemon’s “The Lazarus Project.”

By: carina

29-12-2010

currently, Favorite Reads, fiction, main

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Aleksandar Hemon’s “The Lazarus Project” has been sitting by my bedside table for a couple of weeks (months?) before I had the time to pick it up. I was so very glad that I did. Friends had been recommending this book, and it interested me, because of the premise and the story it promised. The story circulates around one Lazarus Averbuch, a nineteen-year-old Bosnian immigrant who was killed in Chicago in 1908, under mysterious circumstances. We follow Vladimir Brik, a newspaper columnist, as he attempts to uncover the truth behind Lazarus’ death, intending to write a book about his findings. He travels back to his homeland, retracing Lazarus’ steps, hoping to dig up things he might have missed, fleshing out the story that he had been contemplating in his head.

I gave this book five stars (out of five!) on my GoodReads account, because I believed it to be gorgeous. However, I feel a sort of emptiness, due perhaps to the bubble of questions that Hemon’s story generated but didn’t quite answer. Much like Vladimir Brik, I am brimming with questions about the story, which answers I didn’t even get. And how to explain the five stars? I suppose that I’m just the kind of reader who can overlook the lack of a plot if the book is rife with good thought, articulation, an excellent depiction of situations and feelings and ideas—which is what Hemon seems to be really good at. A Bosnian US immigrant like Brik, Hemon has written several books in English (his second language), all of which had been praised and celebrated. This is the first one I’ve read, but it only makes me want to read the rest.

I admire his construction of his characters. The main ones on display are rich and original, and those we catch mere glimpses of seem to be complete, despite the sparse descriptions and the lone sentences dedicated to them. Hemon seems to pick the perfect ways by which to bring them to life. Brik, for one, shines in his endearing tiredness, where he seems at home with failure. Acutely self-aware, not overly sad, he seems to be the right amount of being ill-at-ease. He knows what to do, he just lacks the courage, the motivation and at times, the funds to do so. Rora, a photographer friend from Sarajevo that he takes along on his pilgrimage, is wild and brash, but lovable in being so.

There is an ease and an effortless quality to Hemon’s prose—one that I felt myself slide into almost immediately. He is at once humorous and painful, with a brutal honesty that seems neither staged nor forced. He knows how to uncover each layer of a story, and in the process, fleshes everything out. What I lacked was, perhaps, the understanding of what these layers had to do with anything. The story is told in alternating perspectives—sometimes bleeding into each other—and I am at a loss as to what they have to do with each other, and why the story means so much to Brik. (I hated the way the story is told—back-and-forth from the two narratives—but only because each was equally interesting and compelling, and I felt utterly sorry having to leave one story, especially when it was starting to get good.)

I appreciated the themes that he dwells on: thoughts of home, one’s roots, the leaving and arriving. A line is repeated, over and over, almost like a mantra: “Home is where somebody notices your absence.” During the course of the novel, Hemon confronts Brik with the glaring disparity of the difficulty of his life as a Chicagoan, married to an Irish neurosurgeon named Mary, and his past in Sarajevo, where everything seems to fit him properly. I don’t really have a particular affinity with my roots as a Filipino, so reading about Brik’s homecoming—the naturalness of it—was interesting to me. I wonder if it’s because I rarely ever leave this place, or if it’s because when I do, I never think that I am not coming back.

Hemon talks a lot about a person’s center (Brik’s was located somewhere about a foot above his asshole, relegated to his shirt pocket where his American passport and money was; Brik claimed that this one girl’s center was situated in her sea-foam green eyes) and I begin to think a lot about the broadness of the word “home” and how it can mean many things. Home is where somebody notices your absence. There are a lot of people and things, both physical and intangible, that are homes in which I have nested, that even though I have no affinity to geographical roots, I understand it completely when Hemon talks about “homes” and the feeling of displacement, and even moreso, the surge of peace upon arriving at your home’s doorstep.

There are so many parallels and references brought up by Hemon—a lot of which I couldn’t possibly talk about at length without maybe eliciting boredom or resentment. I especially loved it when he wrote about Brik’s marital problems with Mary, and his problems as a partly Americanized version of himself.

There are many moments, many jokes, many particularities that make this book, despite its lack of a clear plot and resolution (to my mind, at least), rich, stunning and certainly worth the read. Hemon is an excellent wordsmith, most of the time pitch-perfect, often honest and true.

Lazarus Averbuch is an actual person, and I think that the usage of historical images, as well as those that are personal to Hemon (I think he traveled to Sarajevo with a photographer friend, much like Rora, unless I am mistaken) lends to the honesty that I found so present in his writing.

The Age of Exaggerated Hopes: Jonathan Safran Foer’s “Tree of Codes”

By: carina

16-12-2010

currently, Favorite Reads, fiction, main

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If you are new here, you probably haven’t been acquainted with my incredibly biased love for Jonathan Safran Foer. Sure, he is an assface in interviews, and sure, most of his writing is geared towards making you feel like loneliest you’ve ever been, but I like it. I love it. Despite his “gimmickry” and his seemingly constant pursuit of strangers’ eyerolls, I dig all of it.

It’s kind of hard to write about anything Foer releases, because I know that at least a small part of me will love it, regardless, and I know that people know this and they might judge me. But, whatever. I have my reasons. I was really nervous about his latest “experiment,” just because I knew that people are going to write it off as another gimmick without even reading it. “Tree of Codes” is London-based publisher, Visual Editions’s first major title. According to an interview, they wrote him and said, “We can’t pay you, but you can make anything.” And Foer, always up to taking on challenges, didn’t hold back. What “Tree of Codes” is is a sculptural work, where Foer “erases” parts from Bruno Schulz’ “The Street of Crocodiles,” a collection of interconnected short stories.

Each page is then a reconstruction of what has already been built. Foer is quick to stress that the work belongs to him, because of accusations of potential plagiarism. I like how he puts it:

“It’s not really sampling, because that implies taking something out of its context and inserting it into a new context. A better analogy might be carving a stone. Of course one can carve any number of things from a block of marble, but one is still dependent on the marble. And marble is not like granite, which is not like chalk. Has a sculpture taken away from the block of marble? Not really. Has it added? Not really. “Tree of Codes” took “The Street of Crocodiles” as its starting point and made something new.”

And all biases aside, I can see what he meant by that. I haven’t personally read Schulz’ work, but I would wager that it is very different piece, and also creates a very different experience. Reading the book takes you about half an hour, even with the various causes for stopping and pausing. It’s a little difficult, but it lets you spend time with what you just read.

Story-wise, the plot is simple enough (yes, there’s a plot!) but it’s the turns of phrases, the way he connects words he chooses to leave behind, threading them across gaps of literal and metaphorical space. I like remembering what I read, and usually, I will just go ahead and write on a book. Obviously, I couldn’t do it with this one. It is such a special book, in the way it was made and the way it affects those that come across it.

Resurfacing from the initial shock and wonder caused by its physicality, I can honestly say that it was a good book, touching on a haunting narrative of loss, sadness, and familial relationships. The narrative itself is poetic, slightly less lucid than most fiction, but it retains the tone of most of Foer’s works, and fits the story it is telling. There is a certain sense of darkness and mystery, a surreal sort of quality fitting to the world he has created.

It’s difficult to comprehend how a work as breathtaking as this exists, but I guess with enough time, and dedication, as well as the presence of people who believe and support what you do, it is possible. Part of what makes this venture such an amazing one is the process behind it. This book was turned down by countless printers before they came across one in Belgium who saw it as a possibility, instead of writing it off as something that cannot be done. Foer went through many manuscripts of an English translation of Schulz’ work before he was able to create something that he was proud of. The process took at least a year.

I’ve been thinking a lot about things that concern technology and how it somehow (almost) dehumanizes our experiences as people. I think this book is relevant right now, and speaks volumes about how we create our connections and relationships, with the technology and the means we have at hand. Because of that, I do believe that it is really something worth looking into. Aside from coming up with a stunning, both in its tactility and its narrative, book, Foer raises questions about how we relate to the things that we encounter, and how different, still, it is to interact with an actual, physical object than with something over a screen.

From the write-up by Olaffur Eliasson:

In our world of screens, he welds narrative, materiality, and our reading experience into a book that remembers it actually has a body.

It also affected me on the level of craft and creative endeavors. For as long as I can remember, I have always wrestled between Carina the writer and Carina the designer. Whenever people asked me what I wanted to be, what I was, I always draw a blank. Am I a designer, as my day job dictates? Am I a writer, as what I do on my freedom says? Am I an artist (maybe only in my dreams)? Why couldn’t I just be Carina, the person who likes to make things? I’ve appended most of my business cards with “I make pretty things,” because I couldn’t succinctly explain what it was that I did. And you know, reading this New York Times interview with Foer made me wholly okay with that description:

After all this, do you see yourself as an author or a designer? Aren’t they often one and the same?

I see myself as someone who makes things. Definitions have never done anything but constrain.

And then I am suddenly so free, and suddenly so excited about everything I am about to do.

There are so many other things I can say about this book, but perhaps I’ll save that for another time. I hope that you get to experience this book, the way it was intended to be experienced, whether or not you get to buy the book. Please find someone you can borrow from, someone you can share with. It’s such a beautiful exercise and I am still reeling in awe.

(Vapid notes are vapid. I hope you are not able to read my messy handwriting.)

All She Wants Is: Rob Sheffield’s “Talking To Girls About Duran Duran”

By: carina

11-11-2010

currently, Favorite Reads, main

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I came upon this book by chance. I didn’t even know Rob Sheffield had another book out, but I saw it while browsing the autobiography section of Fully Booked in High Street. It’s not exactly a section I frequent, so I’m treating this as magical happenstance. This book, “Talking to Girls About Duran Duran,” had been calling out to me. Mystically.

I freaked out because one of my vivid experiences as a reader was going around Boston, buying Sheffield’s first book at a Border’s near BU, I think, and then reading it for the rest of the afternoon, as well as on the way home to New Jersey. So, obviously, I was going to buy this book. Even though it was only available as a hardbound and I am poor. Having been born in 1988, I missed most of the 80s, so in a growth-and-personal-experience-way, it didn’t make much sense for me to buy it. In all the other ways, it totally did.

While reading this collection of personal stories, I could not help but giggle (usually in solidarity, as Sheffield recounts a lot of his painful growing pains as an Irish Catholic teen), and I couldn’t wait until I finished it, so that I could type out this review. Right now, I feel a little at a loss for words—what did I want to say about this book again? Other than it was good?—but I’m going to try to collect my thoughts, anyway.

Let me get this out of the way: I loved the book. It is what I thought Nick Hornby’s “31 Songs” was going to be to me, but was not. “Talking to Girls About Duran Duran” starts off with an introduction about the importance of Duran Duran, the importance of Duran Duran to girls, and proceeds to list twenty-five songs from the 80s that act as chapters, connecting these songs to his personal experience, each track arranged chronologically, by year of release.

What I like about this book is that it’s deeply personal, while maintaining its complete geekery. I like that he doesn’t choose the most obvious songs, not to be deliberately obscure or elitist about his music knowledge, but because the hits were not what resonated with him. What I got from reading this was a crash course in 80s music, with a diversity that I could probably never get anywhere else. Rob Sheffield is so enamored with music—it doesn’t matter what kind it is, he will find a way to love it, somehow—and it shows through. (Luckily, he is a music journalist, so that funny little obsession worked out well for him.)

In many of the chapters, he explains the ritualistic nature of religion, and how his involvement with Catholicism sort of carried over to his involvement with music. He is so acutely aware of so many little details—the order of an artist’s hits, what book he was reading while waiting for a band to play, what song was playing when he decided to tell a girl he liked her, what the summer was like when she left—and he holds these memories in a sort of lofty reverence that you really can’t help but admire and be jealous of. Relics are to religion what cassingles are to him. Of course, he could be making up all these little details, but knowing Rob Sheffield, from what I have read about him, it doesn’t seem like the type of thing he would do, because he would be the type of person who would remember.

It is always remarkable to me how people can be so open and embracing of their embarrassing encounters and experiences, so that was one of the highlights of this book. It’s so honest—from his heartbreaks (both romantic and familial), to his failures and losses, to his not-so-guilty pleasures. It’s really, really gratifying to peek into the life of someone who is so unapologetic and unabashedly open about his past. It’s doubly so when it involves the kind of geekery that I can appreciate.

While this is largely a memoir, quite a bulk of it also involves the survey of popular culture at the time. Not just music or music videos (as MTV blew up during this decade), but also the “teen trash” that makes us love the 80s so much. I’m a big fan of the Molly trilogy, and Say Anything…, and the Brat Pack, and in one chapter detailing The Psychedelic Furs’ “Pretty in Pink,” Sheffield indulges that little 80s movie fangirl in me.

In one of my most favorite chapters, Sheffield writes about The Smiths’ “Ask,” which is one of my favorite songs by them. He talks about his mope-y teenage self finding a spirit animal in Steven Patrick Morrissey, his Ally Sheedy¹, their break-up, the inevitable betrayal, and finally, the resolution (in continuance of the Ally Sheedy-ness). I wish I could type out the entire chapter, and I have a feeling that at one point in the future, that is going to happen, but for now, I’m going to quote excerpts, in which Changes Begin To Happen Through The Author’s Hearing Of “Ask”:

“[Morrissey] was coming right out and saying that people being nice to one another was a good thing, not a sign of weakness or moral corruption. I was stunned to hear it, partly because it was my old nemesis Morrissey saying it but partly because I was hoping it was a lie. It sounded like so much work, I didn’t know if I could handle it. But he made it sounds like trying would be fun.

[...] I had big problems, and Morrissey wanted me to know that, but he also wanted me to know that they were temporary problems.”

I am jealous of Rob Sheffield and how profoundly music affects his life. I want something like that, to tie to my “human experiences,” to make some semblance of sense in my life. You can really tell how deeply rooted music is in his life—he begins the book with his experiences as a thirteen-year-old, and I’m guessing that he hasn’t stopped liking music, or fusing him with his life since. There are little bits of uneven writing here and there, an abrupt ending or two, but overall, I felt like this was a nice collection, and a good follow-up to “Love is a Mixtape,” one that is not so gut-wrenchingly sad. I’m not familiar with some of the songs, but a lot of people have criticized Sheffield for defending Haysi Fantayzee’s song “Shiny Shiny,” and to that I say, to each their own.

In the introduction, Sheffield writes, “Since I grew up with rock-and-roll parents, bonding over the songs that they loved, it never really occurred to me that love and music belonged in separate categories… I’m sure that my mom and my dad would fins lots of other ways to bond if they didn’t have music. But bringing people together is what music has always done best.” I was reading this during NU 107′s last show ever, and found it to be particularly true and poignant. That’s truly what it does best, and I’m glad that there are people like Rob Sheffield who get to write about it.

———
¹ This chapter opens with a reference to St. Elmo’s Fire. Our Ally Sheedys are essentially “the things that we cling to and do not leave behind at the bus station.” I have many Ally Sheedys in my life, but I do not know if they are all legitimate or if I am only making excuses for them.

Stuck: Michael Chabon’s “Wonder Boys”

By: carina

03-09-2010

currently, Favorite Reads, main

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Where do I even start with this book?

It is, quite honestly, one of the best-written books I have ever read, ever. I think it took me such a long time to read because the first few pages or so didn’t really attract me, in terms of plot, but Chabon’s sentences, my goodness. His sentences are flawless. I want to marry his sentences. Or, in the words of Tracy Jordan, I love his sentences so much, I want to take them behind the middle school and get them pregnant.

Chabon manages to craft a character completely the opposite of me—middle-aged, etc.—and still have me feel as though I related to him completely. He begins by talking about the “midnight disease,” described as such: “The midnight disease is a kind of emotional insomnia; at ever conscious moment its victim—even if he or she writes at dawn, or in the middle of the afternoon—feels like a person lying in a sweltering bedroom, with the window thrown open, looking up at a sky filled with stars and airplaines, listening to the narrative of a rattling blind, an ambulance, a fly trapped in a Coke bottle, while all around him the neighbors soundly sleep.” He begins by talking about the midnight disease, and lays out one of the biggest conflicts in the story, that Grady Tripp does not know how to write anymore. Yes, he manages a 2,611-page manuscript in seven years, but the “unknowing” he is facing, I feel, is the unknowing how to write well, how to write with a point, with a meaning, with a purpose. I think most of the book also deals with these issues, although not really applied to writing, but to the rest of the rickety life Grady Tripp lives.

It deals with the many complicated layers that are attached to issues of family and love. Of making difficult choices, of sticking by the decisions that you do choose to make in the end. The novel progresses in only a handful of days, but I think that the reader will have traveled across many deep realizations about and confrontations with himself, along with the characters and their own experience of “knowing.”

While the book itself and the events that transpired aren’t in themselves sad (in a way that eats you up inside for days, wondering why did this have to happen to them?), I have fallen into a depressive slump. One, because, like I said, I felt strangely like Grady Tripp, except I have nothing to write about. Whereas his misfortune was—SPOILER ALERT—having seven years of his life blown away, out of a moving vehicle, my misfortune lies in the fact that for the past seven years, I have been saying that I wanted to be a writer, and I have nothing to show for it. At least, Grady had 2,600+ pages to his name, even though the pages got eaten up by a violent wind.—END SPOILER.

Second reason for my pseudo-depression is the fact that this is a really frakking excellent book. It is perfect, almost. The way Chabon describes things and people, the way he describes events, the way he tells the whole story, the way he just writes everything to fit together. These things, this book, has shot me into some sort of state of paralysis where it seems that I cannot write anything that I can be happy about or proud of. I know that that’s probably not true, but it certainly feels this way right now. I don’t know how it is possible that I could ever write anything even half as brilliant as “Wonder Boys,” and this is a worrying, crippling fact to me. This was written in 1995; no doubt, he got even better since then.

That thought, that fear really keeps me up at night. Like a middle school bully, it just keeps on taunting me, Well, what have you been doing, exactly? It’s your fault you are a stagnant writer. What exactly do you feel like you deserve for slacking off?, et cetera, et cetera.

And the third reason why I am depressed is that the imaginary bully in my head is right. It is my fault that I haven’t been writing anything excellent, if only for the sole fact that I haven’t been writing any fiction at all.

How to recover from this book? I’m not exactly sure. And while it does end on a mostly positive note for stuck writers everywhere, I can’t help but feel even more helpless and, well, stuck, after reading this brilliant piece of literature. (See, I have even reached the point where I use generic polysyllabic words to convey whatever simple point, whatever simple feelings I have.) Despite it being almost encouraging, I still feel like it has hurled me into a pit of quicksand, and maybe, just maybe, if I stop moving, if I stop struggling, I can get out of there alive, with a not-so-damaged reputation as a writer.

I don’t quite know how to recover from this, exactly. All I know is that this is a terrific book, mirroring so very accurately the fears of someone who is lost in more ways than one. Writer or no, everyone should read it. In the words of my Tumblr friend, Alayna, “in a perfect world, this book would never end.”

This is in my opinion why writers—like insomniacs—are so accident-prone, so obsessed with the calculus of bad luck and missed opportunities, so liable to rumination and a concomitant inability to let go of a subject, even when urged repeatedly to do so.

I went through long stretches of underline overkill.

My notes!

…which graduated to indecipherable rabid scrawling.

Real or Not Real?: Suzanne Collins’ Mockingjay

By: carina

30-08-2010

currently, Favorite Reads, main

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It’s close to 4 in the morning and it’s difficult to write about Mockingjay, the third and final installment of Suzanne Collins’ celebrated series, The Hunger Games Trilogy. I’d been waiting for a fairly long time for this book to come out, and it just blew all of my expectations out of the water. If you haven’t read any of the books in the series, best stop reading now, and just take my word for it that the series is good. And then, you know, start reading it.

One of the things that I appreciate about this is that it mostly picks up where it left off. No trying to piece together basic background information to initiate The Lazy Ones who like to skip and read ahead of everybody. It just jumps right into the meat of things, and I like that. Mockingjay deals with another District uprising, triggered by the events of the last two books. In the first few pages, the ever-heroic Katniss Everdeen is forced to endure an agony a little bit different from the kind she experiences during the games—the kind that involves waiting and not knowing and not being in control. Peeta Mellark, one part of the Peeta-Katniss-Gale love triangle, has been captured by the Capitol and is being used to fight off the rebellion.

Judging from the near-incoherent scribblings that I’ve made, I would say that Collins really made a world that I lost myself in. From the setting to the history, to how she fleshed out her characters—their fears, their desires, their motivations, the inner-workings of their minds—they all suck you in. She crafts a beautiful story with characters that really bloom in the heat of battle. Because they’re thrown into a lot of crazy things, their best (and worst) sides come out, and it’s interesting to see how these people, with whom we’ve spent three books with, deal with what they are given. A lot of the time, I felt a little bit like Katniss, where I am restless and a little too eager to get to the end and find out the answer to the question: “Did they make it?”

To talk about the finer, more specific points of the novel: I think it’s ingenious how Collins tests the character of Peeta. From the first two books, he’s presented to us as a pristine, clear-headed, and really frakking pleasant boy, who loves Katniss without question or strong reason to, and Collins just alters him almost irrevocably, into someone unfamiliar and less endearing. I think it was important for him to undergo this transformation, to create this detachment from Katniss, so she can assess her feelings for him, without being the object of his winning charm and without the certainty that he would do anything for him. Their whole dynamic is thrown off-kilter and Katniss realizes, for herself, just what Peeta means to her, and what it means to potentially lose him for good.

I also appreciated the fact that we can see a little bit more of Gale here, and how he and Katniss work together. We see a bit of that in the first two books, but his interactions with Katniss definitely take monopoly of the book, this time around. I like the introduction of new figures—Boggs, Castor and Pollux, Plutarch—and the fleshing out of older ones—Finnick Odair, Johanna Mason, President Snow. I liked the setting a lot because it reminded me a little of Orson Scott Card’s “Ender’s Game,” from the precise scheduling to the uniformity of the citizens to the cold, almost clinical floor plan of District 13.

Stories written in the first person are, very often, off-putting to me, but Collins is a master at wielding Katniss’ voice. Because each reaction, narrative or otherwise, fits the image of Katniss that she has created. Many times, when the situation is terrible, the narration of events and commentary are so characteristically absurd and funny. A lot of the writing, I think, has also improved from the first two books; at least, I really found a lot of ‘gems’ in Mockingjay.

I felt that the ending was kind of rushed… I really didn’t see that resolution (i.e., the parachutes exploding) coming, like, at all, and I felt like a lot of the strategic planning and her being so worked up about President Snow kind of went to waste, but then I don’t think I would know how to infiltrate a president’s mansion either. I guess I just kind of expected a big pay-off, from all the planning they did. When it came down to it, we weren’t even really told what the plan was. But I suppose plans are really made to be broken, and I don’t know if Collins intended for that effect, but regardless of intent, the idea is planted and shown. I felt like there was a lot of sloppy resolutions that she could have spent more time on, instead of a lot of other aspects (i.e., District 13, her dress), because the ending really felt rushed.

The beauty behind The Hunger Games Trilogy is that it’s not at all a love story veiled as dystopian fiction. It’s a proper, plot-driven piece of science fiction that just happens to discuss love and loss, family and home, and hurt, pain, suffering, and everything, every little issue and aspect that comes tied with the subject of war. What do we do with power? Who do we give it to? Who do we give our trust to? What happens when we think we have lost everything? What happens when we don’t? How do we pick up the pieces after everything that happens?

Because of the reputation of the young adult genre, it seems to me a disservice to dismiss Mockingjay merely as such, but Mockingjay is a tight and incredible finish to a brilliant series that confronts so many human issues and reveals so much truth about the human condition. It’s a disservice to yourself if you write it off as just ta poorly veiled love story. That’s not what this is about. It’s about a girl who loses everything (even her sanity sometimes), and in the midst of the loss finds just what she needs. Despite the truly fictional aspects and the kind-of-too-spectacular parts of the novel, Mockingjay is as real as they come.

— Book Report

There and Back Again: J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Hobbit.”

¹ An introduction to hobbits can be found in the extended edition of The Fellowship of the Ring, which endeared me to them quite unexpectedly.

² A chapter I particularly enjoyed was the fifth called, “Riddles in the Dark,” which was full of suspense and was evidence of Tolkien’s excellence as a wordsmith.

I read this book on my new Kindle, which I will review one of these days. Some of the passages, I have saved on it and decided against posting. I love it, too, because it can display images such as these runes, and this rather beautiful illustration of Bilbo’s encounter with the trolls.

The Pleasure of Leaving: Aleksandar Hemon’s “The Lazarus Project.”

The Age of Exaggerated Hopes: Jonathan Safran Foer’s “Tree of Codes”

All She Wants Is: Rob Sheffield’s “Talking To Girls About Duran Duran”

Stuck: Michael Chabon’s “Wonder Boys”

Real or Not Real?: Suzanne Collins’ Mockingjay

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