Radiant as the sun

I have loved distopian fiction ever since my dad stuck 1984 in my hands when I was twelve. I've heard things about the Hunger Games for a long time, but for whatever reason did not feel compelled to pick it up. However, after hearing for numerous people how great the sequel, Catching Fire, was, I check this one out from B&N.

The Hunger Games takes place in a futuristic country that was once America, where the land is divided into districts. These districts work for the Capital and are pretty destitute. Katniss is our main character and narrator, a young girl who breaks the law hunting to feed herself and her mother and sister. Every year two children (between the ages of 12-18) are chosen to compete in the Hunger Games, where they fight all of the other kids to the death. The winner is the only one to live and gets extra food for their district. Katniss takes her sister's place in the hunger games along with a boy named Peeta from district 12.

We follow Katniss from her district to the Capital where she is pampered and prepped before the games. The tributes are paraded in front of everyone in order to secure support from people donating. The tributes also have to sit through interviews and events that make the whole situation comparable to our current reality tv show "stars."

This book is amazing. I have been talking it up at work and all but shoved it into my brother's hands. I think that this book and The Book Thief are two of the best young adult fiction books I have read in a very, very long time. The book is smart, funny at times and heartbreaking at others. It seems like I'm one of the last people to jump on this book, but if you haven't read it then I would highly suggest it. This is a chilling look at what we currently think of entertainment and how easily that could progress, or regress, to a entertainment system that resembles Rome's hay-day.

Two quotes:

"I realize, for the first time, how very lonely I've been in the arena. How comforting the presence of another human being can be."


"You don’t forget the face of the person who was your last hope."

Graphic Novel Goodness

I've been checking out the graphic novel section of the bookstores more and more lately. I picked this one up the other day after reading some good reviews on amazon.

What would happen if all the males in the world died, all in an instant? All except for Yorrick and his pet monkey, Ampersand. That is the basic premise of this series.

Yorrick's mother is a congresswomen and his girlfriend is currently in Australia. Though he desperately wants to go find his gf, what's left of the American government wants to keep him on US soil. Yorrick and a guard woman, known only as 355, hit the trail to find a certain scientist that has been doing work with cloning to try and figure out what happened and why Yorrick is the only man left.

Typically when I think of comic books I think of superheroes, but the only thing out of the ordinary here is the fact that all the men are dead.

I really, really enjoyed this graphic novel. I can't wait to pick up the second one today. Highly recommend.

A steed, she said, is not a mouse

I picked up The Slynx by Tatyana Tolstaya because it caught my eye in Half Priced. I am drawn to Russian lit due to an amazing class I took in college. I just feel compelled to buy them.

Anyway, she is related to the Tolstoy and began publishing in the 1980s. The Slynx is a tale of post nuclear war in Russia, Moscow to be exact. People have "consequences" or mutations and even two hundred years after the Blast, everyone is wary about plants, animals, and any remnant of th past society. Our hero is Benedikt and we follow him through his life working as a scribe, scoffing at the Oldeners (those who survived the Blast and live without dying of natural death), and dreaming of being rich. The peasants live by capturing mice, using them as their main food source - along with worms (ew)- and as a commodity to trade.

Fyodor Kuzmich is the head of the government and Benedikt works at copying the leader's work, which is actually bits and pieces of our literature. Benedikt gets married and some creepier things start going down, which is saying a lot since this book starts off fairly creepy. Father-in-law scares me. Mother-in-law and Olenka are a little unsettling as well but Father-in-law is the worst to me. There is some great imagery with these characters.

Bendikt gets introduced to reading real books and falls in love with them. However, this love of knowledge isn't enough to bring him out of the ignorance that has been drummed into him.

The title comes from a creature that dwells in the woods hoping to prey on those who wander or spend too much time Free-thinking or partaking in feelosophy. I wished that we got a little bit more on this critter, is it real, unreal, who is to say?

I was blown away by this book. I think I will need to reread it again this year, but I need some time to digest it. The ending (the last few pages) didn't seem to be as strong as the rest of the book, but that I can forgive because the rest was so amazing.

Some quotes that moved me enough to write them down in my reading notebook (yes I have a reading notebook for such instances):

"And why is it that spritual life is called a higher life? It's because you put books up as high as you can, on the top floor, on a shelf, so that if misfortune strikes and the vermin get into the house the treasure will be safer. That's why."

"What love is his talking about? It was a book! What else could you love but a book? Huh?"

"There is no worse enemy than indifference! All evil in fact comes from the silent acquiscence of the indifferent."

"No more tryanny allowed! It was just getting too darn fashionable!"