2013 read #133: Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins.

Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins
392 pages
Published 2010
Read from October 16 to October 18
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

As is the norm with this series, I put lots of spoilers in this review. You know what to do.

While waiting an inordinate amount of time for my library to retrieve a dilapidated copy of this book from storage somewhere, I confided to a friend, "I'm GUESSING Snow captures her and sends her to an even bigger! even badder! even hungrier! game." Thankfully, this was not to be. I was amused by what we got instead, with Katniss, televised star of a propaganda reality show buttressing a dystopian tyranny, getting forcibly recruited to star in a televised propaganda reality show (of sorts) to stimulate the rebellion. I was also a fan of the rebellion being a bunch of tyrannical jerks themselves, just waiting for the other shoe to drop so they could do unto their enemies as they were done unto. And the ending was strong, thanks to that moral equivalency of the supposed good guys thing, and also moving in a little-sister-gets-incinerated-possibly-thanks-to-your-best-friend sort of way. Yeah, it was a bit heavy-handed, but this is a popcorn book, that's to be expected.

Some of the problems I had with this series, left hanging especially after Catching Fire, were resolved. President Snow isn't a vampire (thank Christ), he's merely an amateur hour Mithridates left suppurating after one too many sips of plausible deniability. The whole idea of District 13 still feels pretty silly to me, but at least they're evil totalitarians in their own right, instead of magical saviors out of nowhere. On the other hand, while I'm glad to learn Panem isn't an acronym (I was thinking "Pan-America," bastardized over generations of language drift), it isn't much of an improvement to learn it's literally a reference to bread and circuses. You don't name your evil empire after your favorite population pacification strategy; that's Scooby Doo level thinking. (Imagine naming America "Fox & Friends.") And I still have a problem with Snow (and now Coin as well) being personified versions of their respective evil empires, in the video game sense that if you take one down, you destroy the evil empire. I prefer my evil empires faceless and bureaucratic, metastasized throughout society and impossible to kill with just one arrow.

Nonetheless, this was an entertaining end to a mostly entertaining series. The biggest stumble was sending the gang back to the Games in Catching Fire, but that's behind us, and I'd say this all wrapped up nicely.

2013 read #132: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie.

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie
230 pages
Published 2007
Read from October 14 to October 16
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

Sometimes I hate reading paperback editions of popular books. A paperback edition has had time to nurture a thick crust of blind praise and critical blurbs on the back cover and several pages deep in the front. Even if you do your best to ignore them, the barnacles of praise emit and saturate you with a zooplankton soup of expectations. Like with this book. Sure, it won awards, and that's a promising sign, most of the time. But the whole thing is sticky with famous writers and newspaper critics spooging about how funny it is, how much they laughed from beginning to end, its hilarious language. And I hate knowing that Neil Gaiman and Amy Sedaris and Kirkus universally found Alexie's narrative voice hysterical, because to me, it just wasn't that funny. Certain characters were funny, certain events were hilarious, but the style did nothing for me. In fact, the narrative voice was the one and only thing I disliked about this book. It read like an actual teenager's absolutely true diary, or worse yet some wacky random blogger's output.

Full of, like, sentence fragments.

And one-liners.

And jeez, so much emphasis.

ALL THE TIME, you know?

It gets annoying.

Off-putting, even. Too flippant, you know? It's like, jeez, an awkward voice for a truly affecting story.

I don't know what other voice one would use for this sort of high school confessional. I haven't read... well, I haven't read any books of this genre before, at least none that come to mind. But the prose here kept me at arm's length, as if I were a stereotypical teen boy unable and unwilling to articulate an emotional attachment to my male friends. Which is a shame, because this story is a series of emotional punches to the face. My eyes swam in their sockets seemingly for half the book, despite the narrative style. So maybe the writing itself wasn't as much of a distraction as I thought, but whatever. I think I would have liked this book just a little bit better if it weren't so aggressively casual and OH MY GOD, right?

2013 read #131: A History of Warfare by John Keegan.

A History of Warfare by John Keegan
398 pages
Published 1993
Read from October 12 to October 15
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

The main gist of this book, repeated again and again in every chapter, is the insufficiency or outright incorrectness of the Clauswitzian analysis of war, "continuation of politics by other means." Keegan's essential idea seems to be that war is an element and extension of culture, its practice and purpose culturally bound, which as far as ideas go is pretty darn safe and unprovocative. Keegan's explorations of martial history have a slight tendency toward mechanistic, reductive explanations; he traces the ultimate cause of nomadic steppe people's willingness to fight and kill without compunction, their "dynamism and ruthlessness" in contrast to "primitive" and "oriental" warmaking, to their practice of slaughtering stock, for example. I do agree with Keegan's assertion that anthropologists (and conventional historians as well, though he doesn't single them out) have a tendency to ignore the actual prosecution of warfare in human society and history. Overall a stimulating, interesting read, rather tragicomically dated by its 1990s optimism regarding peacekeeping, the United Nations, and "neighbourliness" in the coming decades.

2013 read #130: Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins.

Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins
391 pages
Published 2009
Read from October 9 to October 11
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

I have the feeling that if I were to sleep on this review, to let my opinion of this book steep overnight, I'd be certain to mark down the rating I'm giving here. While almost as entertaining as The Hunger Games, Catching Fire is marred by structural and conceptual problems and a likely fatal case of "recapture the magic"/sequel malaise.

Extensive spoilers follow, do not read if etc.

One of my issues with The Hunger Games was how predictable it was. That book followed a tidy, self-contained plot arc, setting up Katniss' life and the titular sacrificial games, sending her to the Capitol, getting her into the arena, and following the televised bloodsport to its inevitable happy-but-not-quite ending, de rigueur for the first installment of a genre trilogy. I will admit that the major twist halfway through Catching Fire caught me totally off-guard... primarily because the twist was so goddamn stupid I never would've seen it coming. Seriously, sending Katniss and Peeta back for a second round in the Games? Right as the whole "overthrow the corrupt government, or maybe go full Logan's Run and light out for Sanctuary, because yeah, both are plausible options in a totally technocratic dictatorship" storyline was just starting to get interesting, you're gonna pull a Jaws 2 on me? Please.

Rare is the dystopian dictatorship that actually comes across as competent. The same goes for dark wizards and evil emperors in conventional fantasy -- the hero has to defeat them somehow, and figuring out a way to beat a competent evil empire is just too hard, so just make the foe mustache-twirling Evil and call it a day. Leaving aside the whole sequence where President Snow, his mouth reeking of blood (seriously, wtf is up with that dark wizardly cliche, I thought this was supposed to be sci-fi), comes to threaten Katniss personally and without subtlety, the last thing a technocratic dictatorship would do with a popular anti-authoritarian figurehead is put them back on Must-See TV. Ugh, the whole business is so clumsily contrived to get Katniss and Peeta back into a recapture-the-magic rehash of the first Hunger Games, I actually tossed the book aside at that point and began making cracks about The Hunger Games 2: Game Hungrier.

And then of course it turns out that Sanctuary District 13 is REAL and they have like all kinds of hoverships and shit waiting for our heroes, we were just sitting on it this whole time 'cause we're dicks, and oh, District 12 was destroyed but don't worry, everyone you cared about is safe for the next book in the series, and ugh, I kind of feel like marking down the grade I gave right now.

But I won't, because I was entertained, and even genuinely moved a couple times, and I'm still hoping the final book will redeem this disorganized middle-act mess and make it all worth my while. It's a dimishing hope, but it's still there.

2013 read #129: Among the Islands: Adventures in the Pacific by Tim Flannery.

Among the Islands: Adventures in the Pacific by Tim Flannery
236 pages
Published 2011
Read from October 10 to October 11
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

Some part of me has always wanted to be a field researcher. I don't like excessive heat, or cold, or damp; I don't care for blood-sucking parasites of any description; I would not like malaria or ghastly gastrointestinal diseases; I like my skin free of fungus and burrowing larvae whenever possible. Yet from a young age I've been drawn to stories of exploration, whether that meant climbing cliffs in Baffin Island or crossing Antarctica by dogsled or digging up early traces of agriculture in the hinterlands of New Guinea. If I had made other choices in life, I could conceivably be netting tropical birds or cataloging unusual conifers or chipping out samples from some Cretaceous lake bed even now. Who knows, if the country doesn't implode before my current wealth of debts is paid off, I might be able to go back to school and get a useful degree, one that lets me pursue my more quixotic and bug-infested ambitions in some unguessable corner of the world in years to come.

One such corner I've long daydreamed of is the strange scatter of islands east of New Guinea: the Bismarks, the Solomons, New Caledonia. I'm a sucker for living fossils, and the Antarctic plant kingdom hoards some of the largest and most visually striking living fossils of all, forests composed of conifers and primitive flowering plants dating back to the waning days of Gondwana, vegetative communities evolving largely along their own separate paths while the rest of the world got swept up by such fads as grasses and true pines and maple trees. It gives me a thrill to see pictures of New Caledonia's Araucaria forests, or Norfolk Island's "pines." I won't say anything silly like "It's an atavistic response," but I do find ancient flora damnably compelling.

On the strength of two of his books, Throwim Way Leg and The Eternal Frontier, I had decided that Tim Flannery was also compelling, albeit in the more limited arena of pop science and natural history writing. Among the Islands was rather less compelling than memories of those two books had led me to expect. It was a relaxed book, more like an evening of casual conversation and reminiscence than anything else, a chatty, rambly, somewhat shallow account of a series of ramshackle expeditions into my favorite corner of the Pacific. It was an enjoyable way to spend a few hours, but I left it feeling like I didn't learn much, aside from (alas) the depressingly inevitable sense of how much irreplaceable biological wealth has been gouged out and destroyed by unregulated exploitation, even in such remote regions.

2013 read #128: Kushiel's Dart by Jacqueline Carey.

Kushiel's Dart by Jacqueline Carey
701 pages
Published 2001
Read from September 30 to October 9
Rating: ★★★ out of 5

Some vague-ish spoilers ahead.

The first three hundred pages, I think, are the most interesting part of this book. Carey attempts to meld two distinct genres, game-of-thrones style fantasy and S&M porn, with mixed but generally encouraging results. Main characters die unexpectedly, which is always an intriguing sign. But around the three hundred page mark, the story abandons most of the bondage-courtesan spy angle and slips into something more comfortable, an unremarkable pseudo-medieval paladin and barbarian sword-swinger, with countless daring escapes and cunningly overheard conversations, bold journeys and innumerable sword battles against impossible odds, with a couple Ray Harryhausen god sequences thrown in, because why not. After the sex-spy motif dried up, I realized there wasn't much of substance left. Game-of-thrones fantasies (I use the term generically, though Carey does name-check that particular book here) work best when the contenders are realized, interesting characters with their own points of view and motivations. None of Carey's characters achieve that level of distinction, leaving all the maneuvering and double-crossing rather meaningless, lost in a tangle of interchangeable Francophone surnames and blandly masculine cardboard cutouts, positioned on a one-dimensional axis between Noble and Devious, as if George R. R. Martin were reduced to his D-list character backlog, scraping together a random Baratheon bastard here, a generic Florent cousin there. So, basically A Feast for Crows. OHHHHHHH SNAP I went there.

The characters outside the angel-begotten lineages of Terre D'Ange are worse in some ways, largely variations on stale ethnic stereotypes: violent, mead-swilling, poetry-loving German warriors; tattooed and Mother Earth-y Britons; boisterous and cunning Roma horse-dealers and gamblers; kindly, generous, persecuted Jews. Worst of all, after two particularly momentous main character deaths, everyone seemingly obtains indestructible plot armor, and every single plan and gambit the narrator embarks upon meets with ridiculous amounts of success. After that page three hundred watershed, Kushiel's Dart doesn't even try anymore; it settles into a travelogue of increasingly improbable peregrinations, touching on every corner of Carey's pseudo-medieval Europe, cramming in more events with less and less detail as if squeezed by a publication deadline or a hard page limit. Toward the end I was half-joking to myself, "Well, she's visited every named location now except not-Italy and not-Syria, those must be held in reserve for the sequels." And sure enough, the last chapter or two sets up the gang's next mystery in a back-stabby cliche of pseudo-Renaissance Italy.

I moderately enjoyed this book, and found myself sucked in whenever I happened to settle in to read it, but it failed to hold my interest whenever it wasn't physically in my hand. And oh my lord, the typos. At first I thought the embarrassing wealth of incorrect homophones was a stylistic choice, but when we read about the "souls" of someone's feet, you start to wonder if some copy editor wasn't paid enough.

2013 read #127: Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail by Cheryl Strayed.

Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail by Cheryl Strayed
315 pages
Published 2012
Read from September 30 to October 2
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

Goddamn it. All I want is a hiking book that meets these three criteria: 1) well-written, 2) written by a person who actually hiked the entirety of the featured trail, 3) not revolving around the author's bizarre neuroses and fucked up personal life. Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods meets criteria one and three, but the whole point of the book is how hilariously unprepared Bryson was to attempt the Appalachian Trail, and his washing out is anticlimactic, a foregone conclusion. The Cactus Eaters by Dan White barely squeaks by on points one and two, but the whole book is made awkward by White's one-that-got-away nostalgia-cum-exhibitionism regarding his future ex-girlfriend. David Brill's As Far as the Eye Can See checks off two and three, with the exception of the perhaps inevitable "finding myself" narrative, but was written with all the command of lyrical English one would expect from a community college writing center.

I want a book written with the glee of a Bryson or the passion of a Muir, by someone who managed to put one foot in front of the other from end to end, without any of the emotional exhibitionism that seems to win such critical acclaim. I want to luxuriate in the trail experience without slogging through all the crap better reserved for the author's therapist. I don't think that's a lot to ask, but then, pure hiking narratives are quite the niche product, so I'm probably doomed to perpetual disappointment.

Wild is one of those special books that somehow got marketed in just the right way to accumulate baffling amounts of critical support. It was the first pick of Oprah's Book Club 2.0, FFS, with three pages of glowing blurbs fronting the paperback edition. The key thing to remember is, Wild is not a hiking narrative as I would understand it. It is a soul-baring tell-all memoir -- well-written enough, sure, but a wholly different genre altogether.

I have an empathy deficiency when it comes to people with at least one relatively normal and wholesome parent who want to complain about their childhoods. Most times, when someone whines about how their dad left them, I'm like, "Oh yeah? So? At least your mother loved you and raised you properly. Come back to me when you got a sob-story like mine, champ." At least Strayed grew up poor, so I have some sympathy for her, but still. Every chapter of the book goes into some extended recitation of all the angst and agony she went through, a spiral of pain and heroin and bad choices and therapy persisting four years -- four years -- after her mother died. I know hangups about loving, caring parents are a common thing, but I just do not understand them. It is a blank spot in my brain. I have never in my life known what it is to have a loving, caring parent. I have never as an adult understood people who go into existential crises because their parents hid something from them or got sick or died young. I lack the emotional software to grok why a grown-ass adult should base so much of their identity and self-understanding on their parents. They are separate people. Get over it. Going into a four-year spiral of self-destruction because your mom died just sounds so goddamn codependent to me. If this is an emotional deficiency in me, I can't do anything about it; I literally cannot imagine giving so much of a shit about a parent.

That's not even getting to Strayed's description of swallowing chunks of her mother's cremated remains, so that her mom would always be "with" her, which... well, it made me dry heave while reading it, which is quite an accomplishment, I guess.

All that whining about how much her mother's loss devastated her, and yet the only time I was moved to tears in this entire book was in the acknowledgments, when she concisely describes how one of her trail friends died a few years later.

I can see how, on technical grounds, this is a "good" book. It was a fast and absorbing read, even as I rolled my eyes every time Strayed broke off from her trail narrative to do yet another flashback to depict how fucked up she was before the Pacific Crest Trail finally taught her acceptance. I enjoyed her trail narrative, which was decidedly dirty and unglamorous (and all the more evocative after my own single experience with backpacking, a month or so ago). All the parts about her self-destructive spiral, though, those weren't a good fit for me.

Plus, she only walked about a thousand miles of a 2,650 mile trail, so pffft.