Monday, 4 June 2012
Search engines - BAH!
Another very quick 'fill in' post, because I'm cramming madly to get an assignment in, but also because my librarian friend posted this on Facebook and it cracked me up, so I had to share it. Enjoy:
Saturday, 2 June 2012
The rest of The Hunger Games
Well, I did it - I read the rest of the trilogy. Like the first book, Catching Fire and Mockingjay have left searing visual images in my head. They're not giving me nightmares, although I wouldn't mind betting that younger, more impressionable readers may not be so lucky.
There is no arguing that Susan Collins is an excellent story-teller. These books are hard to put down once you get started with them. As it happened, I was confined to the couch on Friday, recovering from a minor procedure, so I didn't have to put them down. Even so, the compulsion to stay with the story and keep turning pages was very strong. Dearly Beloved looked at me with Mockingjay later in the day, asking whether it wasn't one of the Hunger Games books, and was a bit startled when I told him it was the last one and I'd read the second one already that day...
However, when I go back - as I did when I first wrote on this topic - and compare them with YA dystopian fiction that was written when I was the age of the current generation for whom this trilogy is intended, I am still struck by just how incredibly violent and lacking in hope these books are in comparison. I've recently re-read The Chrysalids and wrote about it not long ago - see here. I did make the point in that post that John Wyndham is unusual, given his focus on the human and emotional experience of his protagonists, but I'd also like to qualify that a bit by adding that in the course of his narrative, when there are acts of violence - and there are - there is a context for them that is part of a real life and death struggle for the characters. At the end of The Chrysalids, while David and his friends have had to face many ordeals and losses, they have a future ahead of them that pays tribute to their past while promising better things.
Catching Fire, the second of Collins' trilogy, sees Katniss and Peeta on the publicity juggernaut in the wake of their victory in the Hunger Games. It is far from a simple victory tour though, as Katniss has inspired the people by her attitude in playing the Games - her final stance which forced a situation that brought both herself and Peeta back alive at the end, being just one incident of perceived rebellion. In response, the people of the different sections are beginning to fight back, and the powers that be insist that Katniss downplay her inherent character, become again the soft, feminine part of the romantic duo that captured everyone's imagination, and do nothing to further inflame the people - with dire consequences to her mother, Prim, Gale, and his family if she transgresses. It doesn't work out that way - her impromptu eulogy to the people in Rue's section, results in the outbreak of what was clearly a preplanned protest - which both Katniss and Peeta witness, alerting them both to what they may not be seeing in other districts.
In a shocking departure from regular tradition, the Hunger Games in this next year, where Katniss and Peeta expect to be mentors for the tributes from Section 12, are twisted so that the tributes are to be chosen from all the winners from previous Games. For Section 12, that means Katniss, as the only female winner will definitely be going back into the arena, and then there is the choice between Haymitch and Peeta. Haymitch is chosen, and predictably, Peeta volunteers in his stead, in order to continue to protect Katniss. Katniss has other ideas though, and plots with Haymitch for support to ensure that it is Peeta who will make it home, resigning herself, this time, to death. However, there are many other agendas running beneath the main narrative, and ultimately, what emerges is a deeply laid plot to make sure that Katniss, the girl on fire, who has become the emblem of resistance, makes it out of the arena alive.
Inevitably, in the third book, there is a full scale uprising, masterminded from the bunkers of Section 13 - a section believed, until then, to have been destroyed many years previously. They are behind Katniss' survival and extraction from the arena, aided and assisted by those who have been operating covertly in The Capitol and other sections for years, awaiting the right time to move. It is this last book that I found dragging me down, as it seemed that for every gain there were far greater losses - and for Katniss, everything she has every held dear and fought for on a personal level, seems to be taken from her.
The rebels win, in the end. But Katniss has lost Prim, her stylist Cinna - one of the few whom she trusted throughout the artificiality of the Games - her mother, still alive but who, in the face of Prim's death takes herself to a distant section away from Katniss to work as a healer, Gale, who, while loving her, cannot live with the fact that she can't love him the way he wants to be loved, and dozens of others who, she feels have sacrificed themselves for her - even though as The Mockingjay, she represented something far more than just herself. She marries Peeta in the end, and a very long time later - because he wants them so much - they have two children. But, the tone at the end of the book is laced with pain, regret and a sense of enormous loss, and Katniss' vision of the future seems to be more about what her children will never know or understand. It's almost as if there is nothing from her past that was good that can be brought forward to her present. As if, due to the enormity of her loss, even the good things are tainted.
Other people may come away from this trilogy with a different sense, but that's how the books have left me. I wouldn't say don't read them. I would say, read them with some caution perhaps, and if your children are reading them, read them together. I would also still maintain, as I did in my earlier posts on the first book, that they are not books for kids under fifteen or sixteen... They may have sanitised the screenplay and made the first film softer than the book, and in all likelihood, to retain the PG rating, they'll do the same with the sequels. However, the Collins doesn't pull her punches in the books, and that's something of which to be mindful.
There is no arguing that Susan Collins is an excellent story-teller. These books are hard to put down once you get started with them. As it happened, I was confined to the couch on Friday, recovering from a minor procedure, so I didn't have to put them down. Even so, the compulsion to stay with the story and keep turning pages was very strong. Dearly Beloved looked at me with Mockingjay later in the day, asking whether it wasn't one of the Hunger Games books, and was a bit startled when I told him it was the last one and I'd read the second one already that day...
However, when I go back - as I did when I first wrote on this topic - and compare them with YA dystopian fiction that was written when I was the age of the current generation for whom this trilogy is intended, I am still struck by just how incredibly violent and lacking in hope these books are in comparison. I've recently re-read The Chrysalids and wrote about it not long ago - see here. I did make the point in that post that John Wyndham is unusual, given his focus on the human and emotional experience of his protagonists, but I'd also like to qualify that a bit by adding that in the course of his narrative, when there are acts of violence - and there are - there is a context for them that is part of a real life and death struggle for the characters. At the end of The Chrysalids, while David and his friends have had to face many ordeals and losses, they have a future ahead of them that pays tribute to their past while promising better things.
Catching Fire, the second of Collins' trilogy, sees Katniss and Peeta on the publicity juggernaut in the wake of their victory in the Hunger Games. It is far from a simple victory tour though, as Katniss has inspired the people by her attitude in playing the Games - her final stance which forced a situation that brought both herself and Peeta back alive at the end, being just one incident of perceived rebellion. In response, the people of the different sections are beginning to fight back, and the powers that be insist that Katniss downplay her inherent character, become again the soft, feminine part of the romantic duo that captured everyone's imagination, and do nothing to further inflame the people - with dire consequences to her mother, Prim, Gale, and his family if she transgresses. It doesn't work out that way - her impromptu eulogy to the people in Rue's section, results in the outbreak of what was clearly a preplanned protest - which both Katniss and Peeta witness, alerting them both to what they may not be seeing in other districts.
In a shocking departure from regular tradition, the Hunger Games in this next year, where Katniss and Peeta expect to be mentors for the tributes from Section 12, are twisted so that the tributes are to be chosen from all the winners from previous Games. For Section 12, that means Katniss, as the only female winner will definitely be going back into the arena, and then there is the choice between Haymitch and Peeta. Haymitch is chosen, and predictably, Peeta volunteers in his stead, in order to continue to protect Katniss. Katniss has other ideas though, and plots with Haymitch for support to ensure that it is Peeta who will make it home, resigning herself, this time, to death. However, there are many other agendas running beneath the main narrative, and ultimately, what emerges is a deeply laid plot to make sure that Katniss, the girl on fire, who has become the emblem of resistance, makes it out of the arena alive.
Inevitably, in the third book, there is a full scale uprising, masterminded from the bunkers of Section 13 - a section believed, until then, to have been destroyed many years previously. They are behind Katniss' survival and extraction from the arena, aided and assisted by those who have been operating covertly in The Capitol and other sections for years, awaiting the right time to move. It is this last book that I found dragging me down, as it seemed that for every gain there were far greater losses - and for Katniss, everything she has every held dear and fought for on a personal level, seems to be taken from her.
The rebels win, in the end. But Katniss has lost Prim, her stylist Cinna - one of the few whom she trusted throughout the artificiality of the Games - her mother, still alive but who, in the face of Prim's death takes herself to a distant section away from Katniss to work as a healer, Gale, who, while loving her, cannot live with the fact that she can't love him the way he wants to be loved, and dozens of others who, she feels have sacrificed themselves for her - even though as The Mockingjay, she represented something far more than just herself. She marries Peeta in the end, and a very long time later - because he wants them so much - they have two children. But, the tone at the end of the book is laced with pain, regret and a sense of enormous loss, and Katniss' vision of the future seems to be more about what her children will never know or understand. It's almost as if there is nothing from her past that was good that can be brought forward to her present. As if, due to the enormity of her loss, even the good things are tainted.
Other people may come away from this trilogy with a different sense, but that's how the books have left me. I wouldn't say don't read them. I would say, read them with some caution perhaps, and if your children are reading them, read them together. I would also still maintain, as I did in my earlier posts on the first book, that they are not books for kids under fifteen or sixteen... They may have sanitised the screenplay and made the first film softer than the book, and in all likelihood, to retain the PG rating, they'll do the same with the sequels. However, the Collins doesn't pull her punches in the books, and that's something of which to be mindful.
Friday, 1 June 2012
Extra-curriculars...
One of my followers - Peter, over at KyusiReader - has a long running project, posting photos of people's book shelves. I don't want to tread on your toes Peter, but my friend Mark, who collects many things vintage just posted this photo on Facebook of his collection of Victorian children's books in the cutest little bookcase - I want it!!! With his permission - thank you Mark - here they are:
And a close up:
Latest acquisitions
Two weeks into the new place, and the re-reading engendered by re-familiarising myself with my collection through re-stacking the bookcases kind of done with, it was definitely time for some new books. As if I need to justify buying books with any of my regular readers...! Anyhow, in two separate sorties that were serendipitous in their own way, here's the new pile:
The top two come from a newly discovered secondhand bookshop in Newtown - Elizabeth's - which says on its sign that they've been trading since the late seventies. It's HUGE! It's a good thing that I had a fixed period of time available in which to find some food before I had to be somewhere, otherwise, I may have had enough time to do much more damage. The Kellermans were parked on a table right at the front with staff recommendation tags attached and were both under $10. For those of you who haven't discovered Faye Kellerman and like crime fiction, she's very good. She's married to Jonathan Kellerman, but hers are less dark than his books - which I've tried to read but have never really got into.
I'd never really read much crime fiction, it really isn't my thing at all. My mother got me into these ones by handing me a copy of the first one - Ritual Bath - and saying, "You should read this, it's crime fiction and I know you don't like it, but it's Jewish." So I did, and found myself in the middle of the maddest mixture of LA crime and the Orthodox Jewish world. Ritual Bath is the beginning of a series with Peter Decker as the central character. He's divorced with a teenage daughter, ex army, a bar qualified lawyer, a detective with the LAPD, Southern Baptist raised and, something he only discovered as an adult, Jewish by birth. The crime scene he's called to is in an Ultra-Orthodox enclave, where a woman has been raped on her way back from the mikvah (ritual bath). Central to the people who provide him with information is the widowed Rina Lazarus, who is n charge of the mikvah. And, as tantalising as that may sound, I'll leave it there...! There is a long journey for Peter to become an acceptable Jew in the eyes of the Rosh Yeshivah and Rina herself; there are her two young sons to consider; and there is a crime to solve. Kellerman has written a whole series of books based around these two, and Peter's partner, Marge. They're well written, and have all sorts of lovely quirky combinations of the crime story itself and the private lives of the Deckers, as Peter navigates the two wholly disparate parts of his life - the observant Orthodox Jew and the LAPD detective.
Next was the rest of The Hunger Games. I'll post about them soon - I read them both yesterday as I was home sick and confined to the couch, and I'm still digesting. For those of you who were part of the large conversation about the first of the trilogy across two earlier posts - here, and here - I still haven't seen the movie, and may possibly not see it. That these sequels will be filmed is probably already in the bag, and reading them doesn't make me sit up with anticipation, to be honest.
The book at the bottom of the pile, Children's Exodus. A History of the Kindertransport, is a book I've been aware of, but hadn't found. When I worked as a Holocaust educator, some of the Survivors I worked with had been Kindertransport children. They have, as do most Survivors, many, many complex emotional issues to deal with. Some of them were fortunate, and were placed with loving families who did their best for them but others had very different stories. In the background of their relatively safe wartime was the worry about family, the fear once letters and postcards stopped coming, and eventually, for most of them, having to come to grips with the fact that their families were all dead at the end of the war. As is the case for of these people, they suffer from 'Survivor guilt' - that they're alive while their families perished - but with an added layer of having been safe while their families suffered and died the way they did.
So that's the new current stash. On another note all together, I found another literary blog that I'm now following, Book Snob - see here for the latest post. This is a beautifully written blog, with high quality reviews and other musings. I found it when I was looking for images to accompany my review of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, and Rachel's showed up in the search. If you go to the Reviews section of her site, you'll find the most enormous list of books she's read and reviewed - a wonderfully eclectic list of classics and new, adult and YA. I've emailed Rachel and had a reply back and she made the comment that one of the lovely things about writing her blog was that she'd met so many interesting people. She's been going for about three years now. I only started this year, but I have to say I'm totally with her on this. To all of you who have signed up, follow me, and comment - thank you - your presence, comments and discussions enrich the whole experience. For those of you who are lurking, don't be shy - join in, I don't bite!! If you don't feel comfortable commenting publicly, email me - you can do that via the blog.
Wednesday, 30 May 2012
Bookshops versus online shopping
A work colleague sent me a link to this article listing the author's pick of the twenty most beautiful bookshops in the world and I just had to share it. I reckon it would be possible to organise an interesting 'round the world trip based on these locations...with plenty of reading time in between - and lots of posting crates of books home as you go... I posted three crates of books back to Australia from Florence when I was there for a month in 2005!
Seriously though, I do get the convenience of shopping online. And I get that sometimes it's cheaper. And I get that there are some books you can't get easily and that offers a simple solution. However, I don't believe that browsing on a screen and 'adding to cart' can ever replace the multiple pleasures of browsing the shelves and stumbling across treasures you may not have expected to find - and we all know how guilty of that I can be... It's also about relationships. When we patronise a bookshop regularly, we build relationships with the staff, we preserve an element of the villages we have all but lost - particularly those of us who live in big cities. With our recent house move, I now need to get in the car and drive to Oscar and Friends, where I used to be able to walk around the corner. I don't have a neighbourhood book shop any more, and that's sad. I don't lack for bookshops, but it just takes more planning to get to them. However, that's not enogh reason for me to start shopping online - they're not that far away!
Seriously though, I do get the convenience of shopping online. And I get that sometimes it's cheaper. And I get that there are some books you can't get easily and that offers a simple solution. However, I don't believe that browsing on a screen and 'adding to cart' can ever replace the multiple pleasures of browsing the shelves and stumbling across treasures you may not have expected to find - and we all know how guilty of that I can be... It's also about relationships. When we patronise a bookshop regularly, we build relationships with the staff, we preserve an element of the villages we have all but lost - particularly those of us who live in big cities. With our recent house move, I now need to get in the car and drive to Oscar and Friends, where I used to be able to walk around the corner. I don't have a neighbourhood book shop any more, and that's sad. I don't lack for bookshops, but it just takes more planning to get to them. However, that's not enogh reason for me to start shopping online - they're not that far away!
This is Shakespeare and Company in Paris, France... Click on the link above to read the article and see the other places - they're just amazing... If you have a favourite bookshop, send me a pic and I'll post it!
Tuesday, 29 May 2012
I dream of a library
OK, I just found this amazing photo - when my bookshelves grow up, they want to look just like this:
To totally customise it, I would want to change the rug on the floor - it needs to be much bigger, and more luxurious. Then add a huge squashy couch with lots of cushions and a mohair rug, for curling up and reading on a chilly day. A few side tables for the current reading list... A couple of armchairs for visiting readers. Oh, and lamps - I love lamps. Although, the lighting on the bookshelves themselves is pretty cool.
I love that there is natural light from those wonderful windows - without sacrificing too much book space. And I just lust after the whole mezzanine, grown up library second level thing - hopefully there's a funky circular staircase to get up there.
A girl's gotta dream...
Monday, 28 May 2012
The Three 'Bs' of Reading - Books vs Kindles, iPads, etc...
I had a conversation yesterday with colleague that highlighted, yet again, the divide between all the new digital technology for reading against traditional books. She's an iPad user, with lots of books loaded onto her device, which she swears by for its portability and convenience. She said she's about to head off on a three week trip, and that means she needs to take a lot of books - and if it were actual books, that's a potential luggage issue - hence the value of her iPad. I get the convenience - I really do. However, I have a number of worries about all these devices.
As I've mentioned before - in my very first blog post - my No.2 son reads on his iPad. Prior to purchasing this little beast, he had books downloaded onto his iPhone and read them that way. Another friend of mine has a Kindle and gets nearly all her reading matter via eBook downloads to the Kindle.
Twenty - No.2 son - complains frequently of his disturbed and erratic sleep patterns and almost constant headaches. He takes his iPad to bed with him to read before lights out - as generations of us have done with books. However, I question the relaxation and wind-down factor when it is yet another screen that his eyes and brain are having to deal with late at night.
Like me, Twenty is in a job where he sits in front of a computer screen all day. He reads his iPad on the bus en route to work, and again going home at the end of the day. He then might watch some TV, or play some games on his home computer. And then to bed with the iPad. In my conversation with my colleague yesterday, I raised this - saying that for myself, apart from my love of actual books as objects, after looking at a screen all day, the last thing I want to do is be reading from another one at night... That smacks of more work! I even find myself loath to turn the TV on when I get home these days. We're saturated by digital media and it's well-nigh impossible to avoid it these days.
And so we come to the title of this post. The conversation yesterday wrapped up with what my colleague called 'The Three Bs of reading' - where an iPad, iPhone, Kindle, or any other electronic device is redundant. In bed, at the beach and in the bath. I don't know where all you other book junkies read. I tend not to read at the beach, mostly because I'm not a great beach person. I do read in bed and in the bath. The vulnerabilities of the digital devices to the latter two environments hardly needs to be spelled out - I'm sure you can all relate stories of your own, or of others, of the disastrous combination of water and these devices... And yes, a book dropped in the bath can be a fairly sorry object - but once dry, even if a bit wrinkled, it still works! As far as reading in bed is concerned, I still maintain that inflicting the phsical processing that has to go on in our brains to deal with yet another lot of pixels, versus the stability of a printed page has to be detrimental to our eyes, brains and subsequent ability to drift quietly into sleep.
Where and how do you all read? Any thoughts?
As I've mentioned before - in my very first blog post - my No.2 son reads on his iPad. Prior to purchasing this little beast, he had books downloaded onto his iPhone and read them that way. Another friend of mine has a Kindle and gets nearly all her reading matter via eBook downloads to the Kindle.
Twenty - No.2 son - complains frequently of his disturbed and erratic sleep patterns and almost constant headaches. He takes his iPad to bed with him to read before lights out - as generations of us have done with books. However, I question the relaxation and wind-down factor when it is yet another screen that his eyes and brain are having to deal with late at night.
Like me, Twenty is in a job where he sits in front of a computer screen all day. He reads his iPad on the bus en route to work, and again going home at the end of the day. He then might watch some TV, or play some games on his home computer. And then to bed with the iPad. In my conversation with my colleague yesterday, I raised this - saying that for myself, apart from my love of actual books as objects, after looking at a screen all day, the last thing I want to do is be reading from another one at night... That smacks of more work! I even find myself loath to turn the TV on when I get home these days. We're saturated by digital media and it's well-nigh impossible to avoid it these days.
And so we come to the title of this post. The conversation yesterday wrapped up with what my colleague called 'The Three Bs of reading' - where an iPad, iPhone, Kindle, or any other electronic device is redundant. In bed, at the beach and in the bath. I don't know where all you other book junkies read. I tend not to read at the beach, mostly because I'm not a great beach person. I do read in bed and in the bath. The vulnerabilities of the digital devices to the latter two environments hardly needs to be spelled out - I'm sure you can all relate stories of your own, or of others, of the disastrous combination of water and these devices... And yes, a book dropped in the bath can be a fairly sorry object - but once dry, even if a bit wrinkled, it still works! As far as reading in bed is concerned, I still maintain that inflicting the phsical processing that has to go on in our brains to deal with yet another lot of pixels, versus the stability of a printed page has to be detrimental to our eyes, brains and subsequent ability to drift quietly into sleep.
Where and how do you all read? Any thoughts?
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