Blood and roses

Book: Catching Fire

Author: Suzanne Collins

Published: 2009 (Scholastic)

Pages: 391

I read this entire book in one non-moving Sunday when I woke up at 7am without any provocation. To compress the frustration I feel at my body for adjusting to an early-bird work schedule, I made it sit still and plow through this second book in the series. 

As far as punishment being something unpleasant, this failed miserably.

It's a great ratcheting up of the tension that was sometimes lacking in the first. It's a good, paced-out reveal of the governmental underpinnings and the revolutionary unease that I wanted to see more of in the first. It's an awesome rebuilding of the Games--remember my complaint from last time that the first described Games arena could've been in my old back yard? Yeah, well, they fixed that. With water. And specifically sectioned torments. And really effective use of--how much can I reveal without giving the whole shebang away? I sort of assume that everyone's read this before me, because that's generally just how these things work in my reading habits of waiting until entire series is out/at the library/in really cheap paperback. 

Mild spoilers ahoy, okay?

Anyway, the arena is amped UP to Death by Tropical Island and they manage to punish Katniss for her rebellion by pulling some convoluted strings in the next Games to get her in them and of course Peeta jumps in there with her, somewhat unnecessarily, but whatever, they work well together in a survivalist way. 

They are still each a little bland for me to care about his declarations of love and her confusion, but like I said about the first one, at least when Katniss's thoughts go around and around, it's about survival and not manufactured torment over something that won't matter in a week. IN A WEEK SHE COULD BE DEAD.

My absolute favorite scene is when President Snow comes to visit Katniss at her winner's house and he pretends it's to congratulate her but it's really to intimidate her and she notices he smells like blood and roses. That is her first whiff of a rebellion that's raging out of control and that he holds her responsible for and oh shit, she's going to have to nut up or shut up in a huge, world-changing way.

...And then the rebellion kind of puts her up as a martyr without asking first, and it's sort of awkward and terrifying to her to see mockingjays flashed all over the place out of her control, and neither one of us (her as a character or me as a reader) ever gets even a quarter picture of the rebellion, which is annoying but I think will be address in Book 3 after the return of Gail and his announcement at the end of this Book 2. 

Side note: Still no annoying love triangle angst! Woo! But, again, I think that is going to get segued the hell into it in Book 3. Sigh. BUT I WANT TO KNOW WHAT HAPPENS (to everything else).

Crazypants tour of Arkham part 1!

Book: Batman: Joker’s Asylum

Writers: Arvid Nelson, Jason Aaron, JT Krul, Joe Harris, and David Hine

Artists: Alex Sanchez, Jason Pearson, Guillem March, Juan Doe, and Andy Clarke

Published: 2008 (DC)

Pages: 124

From my limited first-hand (first-eyes?) experience with comics, I know that I like the Batman universe. I also know that the Joker is my favorite villain and Arkham Asylum is my favorite setting because they’re both so damn gleefully creepy. Therefore, I thought this slim volume of Joker-narrated, one-off villain-led tales would be a good start as my own venture into the gi-fucking-normous continuity, the first superhero comic I have not read by trading off on my boyfriend’s assurance that it’s awesome. (Although I still love those recommendations because 1. he’s always right about them and 2. they mean I get to make him read lit fic novels that he will end up enjoying too.)

I was right! Although such choosing logic doesn’t allow for the unexpected emotional left hook I’m always looking for, I did get several expected taps to the chin from this. Each story is drawn and written by different people, so the weak morality tale of the first story (everybody fears the Joker but he’s not the monster this time! It’s YOU PEOPLE and all he’s doing is exposing your own bloodlust through reality TV!) and the Lady or the Tiger? ending of the last (the reader flips a coin to see how deeply Two-Face has affected a guy with his same burn condition!) are isolated incidents. The Penguin’s story is my favorite, drawn rounded with parallels that visually connect his past and present in an obvious psychological path without getting him monologing. Oh, except for these couple of panels where he’s talking about this girl he’s fallen in love with while his henchmen get thrown around in front of him, and then Batman drops down and says he’ll be watching him and the Penguin goes, all day-dreamy distracted, “Yes, yes, see you next week.”

But then he discovers that he can’t, in fact, overcome his past after all, and he returns to form by taking out his anger on the one thing that was starting to rebuild his humanity. It was pretty sweet.

Poison Ivy’s is basically an origin story with naked leafy ass, and the Scarecrow gets some neat deco art but a disappointingly thin connection between his talk about harnessing fear and the actual action. All enjoyable, and I believe there is a Volume II on the shelves. 

The movie might be better.

Book: Election

Author: Tom Perrotta

Published: Damn. I don’t know.

Pages: 200

Well, that was sort of shitty.

I’ve wanted to read Election for awhile, ever since I heard about the movie version and how good it’s supposed to be. Of course my first instinct was to think “I bet the book’s better” and then avoid both until I saw the book in a secondhand store and sat down to read the whole thing during the four hours I thought I had work which is actually tomorrow but I was already out and what the hell, home didn’t expect me back until 5 p.m.

This story’s concept is interesting and has a lot of natural dramatic potential. A well-liked high school teacher throws away two ballots to let his favorite student candidate win the election for school president. The story unfolds from all the major character’s perspectives, in clumps that were nicely organized by person but too short to allow any real characterization growth. (The janitor who finds the thrown-away ballots is more effective in his two or three paragraphs than the other characters who’ve had the whole book to stretch out.)

But Perrotta once again disappointed me with his lack of depth and subtle details that would’ve made everything way more dynamic. His Little Children is like this, too, another tension-filled conceit fumbled through flat characters and an environment just a little too generic to care about. And in both books, the characters are largely defined through badly timed sex with the wrong people.

That last would be a good thing, except it’s both non-explicit and has nothing to do with advancing the main plot. I require at least one kind of cheap thrills from marginal writing.

Sigh. Maybe the movie’s better. (Books, you make me sad when you make me say that.)  

Robots...

Book: The Destroyer #47: Dying Space

Author: Warren Murphy

Published: 1982 (Pinnacle Books)

Pages: 196

Can fun writing be automatically thought of as good because it makes the reading experience a pleasure, even if that pleasure is laughing hard at seriously-meant dialogue and plot twists?

I think there’s inherent value in something like that, mostly because this book kept me very amused for a couple hours. It’s pure paperback pulp about a missile-controlling robot that is accidentally brought to life by two garbage men. The robot skins (!) one of the garbage men and takes his form to stay unnoticed while he goes to destroy Remo, a wiseass assassin who…you know, I don’t know what Remo did to the robot to piss him off so much. It was covered in previous books.

Anyway, they all end up in Moscow so the robot can stop the Russians from firing a nuclear missile—at the moon. The moon. Not at anything more alarming. Which, to whatever astrophysicists are reading this to keep their minds off NASA, I know blowing up the moon would screw us over down here. But in an indirect way that I’m sure y’all could figure out how we could live with. In this book, Russia is just so jealous of the US’s moon-conquering abilities that it wants to destroy the moon so we won’t have anywhere else to expand our empire. It apparently never crosses their minds to blow up our direct, terrestrial, and no doubt much easier because much closer nerve systems of big cities on either of our coasts.

So that was dumb and took all the tension out of the final couple chapters, which were action-packed and included a drunk randy scientist trying to make up for her unappreciated habits by helping the robot she built and a Russian commander who likes the “kinky boom-boom” Remo apparently stumbled into when he was trying to escape her room.

Two women in power; both of their sexualities are used as jokes meant to break tension. At least they’re both brilliant (when a man isn’t around to make them feel good). Hmpht.

They don’t get to live happily ever after, either, but everybody else does except in the epilogue the robot comes back to life and resolves anew to kill Remo. Of course he does.    

Drunken adventures in going blind

Book: Slackjaw

Author: Jim Knipfel

Pages: 231

Published: 1999 (Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putman)

I like Jim Knipel, starting with his last name (you pronounce the K) and ending with the narrow fedora-shaded face in his author photo. He sounds like an excellent person to take to a bar and get drunk on a boring midweek night.

Which is exactly what his book feels like, a long tale spun frankly and wryly somewhere dark and smoky that tastes like beer. According to his roughly chronological stories, that’s exactly where most of them start or end up, launching or killing a long day of the author bouncing his cynical personal struggle against weird characters on his way to get things done that may or may not be illegal.

Knipfel gives the standard self-destruction narrative unexpected texture with normal loving parents, a genetic disease that makes him start going blind by age twenty, deft and liberal touches of black humor, a frank understanding of his own suicidal impulses (every year or eighteen months, he says, living just gets too much), and, eventually, a foldout cane that goes “flubbity-flubbity.”

It’s hilarious and compulsive and peters out into cranky optimism that feels well-earned by the end. 

Under darkest night

Book: Absolute Batman Hush

Writer: Jeph Loeb

Penciller: Jim Lee

Inker: Scott Williams

Letterer: Richard Starkings

Colorist: Alex Sinclair

Original Batman creator: Bob Kane

Published: 2005 (DC Comics)

Pages: not numbered. Lots, again.

I like to tell myself that I’ve started reading comics to study epic, crime-fighting story arcs. You know, for the superhero novel that’s my own current writing project. Research!

But it’s really because I like the big exciting pictures, I have A Source who hand-picks his best series for me to borrow (hi Thomas!), and sometimes I’m tired and my head hurts and I just want to watch Batman kick ass or chase Catwoman for a couple dozen pages before I go to sleep.

And Hush is a great vehicle for that. I think the darker, lined art style really helps reflect Batman’s hero persona; there are rough edges and complex details that go into both to bring to life a regular (well, sort of) guy who hones his own skills and his own motivations to get shit done. That’s why I like Batman.

Favorite enemy, based on their linear meet-greet-‘n’-mess-the-streets appearances in this series: the Joker. He’s a little bit too fond of bad puns, but he’s drawn as absolutely maniacal and it’s awesome. Least favorite: oh, Harley Quinn. I wanted to love you, but every time you said something, your written speech pattern made me hear it in the most obnoxious fake Brooklyn accent ever. And again with the not-so-funny one-liners.   

I am glad I was able to borrow an omnibus copy of all the issues because I could plow through the whole storyline and get to the reveal at the end which, for me, as a new reader to the specifics of Batman’s universe and rogue’s gallery, felt much too shallow to hold all the intrigue and misdirection that went into it. Minor spoiler: I was so hoping Thomas Eliot was gonna go evil in a much bigger way.

And I read the extra material, the notes on creating each panel and the IM conversation with DC and the notes on what they had to change. Normally I love peeking behind the curtain. But when the curtain is hiding non-gems such as, “We made this guy Hush because I like him so much as a character” and not, like, a detailed, foot-noted explanation of why said character fits perfectly into the story they wanted to tell, the ending I didn’t like got spoiled just a little bit more.

Also. DC Comics. I am calling you out for letting a series sell out a few times over with AN IMPROPER USE OF ITS/IT’S RIGHT SMACK IN THE MIDDLE OF IT. SHAME.

Ahem. But carry on the good storytelling.     

Return your books or you won't go to heaven.

Book: Library Mascot Cage Match: an Unshelved Collection

Authors: Bill Barnes and Gene Ambaum

Publication: 2005 (Overdue Media)

Pages: 120

When I walk my books into the library instead of using the book drop outside, I get distracted by stuff like this.

It’s a collection of the comic strip Unshelved (which is online and updates five days a week; your move, xkcd), so there’s no overarching plotline except that library life is crazy, so to sum up why I love this, just read the dialogue of this particular strip.

Patron: Those teenagers are talking on the pay phone!

Dewey (teen librarian): Sorry, that’s allowed.

Patron: And playing games on the computer!

Dewey: Also okay.

Patron: Now they’re tearing up library books!

Dewey: No they’re not.

Patron: How did you know?

Dewey: We can sense it. Part of our training on Dagobah.