Three Reads

Just because I haven't been posting here doesn't mean that I haven't been reading. But that wasn't the point, was it? Oops.

Most recently, I breezed through three books while I was laid-up in bed for a week recovering from gall bladder surgery. I'm not sure if I have ever read three consecutive books exclusively before; however, I gave each of these books my undivided attention for a few days at a time until I'd read each in its entirety.

Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins. The sequel to The Hunger Games is, as the reviewers have said, fantastic. It does exactly what the second book of a trilogy should do: Take the story from the first book to new, unforeseen-yet-totally-conceivable heights, prepare the reader for the crucial final installment, and tell an engaging story of its own. I thought I understood the cruelty of the Hunger Games before, but now I realize that the story of Katniss Everdeen and her dystopian society of Panem has only just begun. I want to be there for the end.

Neal Shusterman's Unwind is possibly the most disturbing book I've ever read. The story is set in an undated, though not so distant, future in which a compromise has been reached in the abortion debate: There are no abortions, but unwanted children between the ages of 13 and 18 may be unwound -- in other words, gotten rid of by means of harvesting their organs as donor tissue. Life is, therefore, preserved. In theory. This, my friends, is why I was disturbed, but I kept reading because the circumstances that lead to this society are our own circumstances. While I do not think the future represented in this book is conceivable for many reasons (namely and most disturbing of all, the sheer cost it would impose), it calls into question many related issues that we face or may face in the future and deals with them in a very unbiased way.

After all that mind-warping insanity, I needed a book that didn't give me nightmares. Luckily, I'd checked out Maureen Johnson's Suite Scarlett from our school library before I took my leave. The only other MJ book I've read is 13 Little Blue Envelopes, which was quite a while ago. Since then, I've followed her on Twitter, which is a true entertainment. She makes all 140 characters count in the most succinctly hilarious ways. So reading a full-length novel in which she has hundreds of pages to share a story was such a different experience. Not a bad one, just different. I enjoyed the story. I was every bit as much glued to this book as a I was to Catching Fire or Unwind, but it wasn't because I was waiting for the next government-imposed atrocity. I didn't even care so much about the girl-boy relationship developing on the page or the mysterious Mrs. Amberson who turns Scarlett's world upside-down. I was most intrigued by and invested in Scarlett's relationship with her brother Spencer. To me, this was the key relationship and conflict in the story. To me, this is why Maureen Johnson's Suite Scarlett is worth reading. Isn't she writing a sequel called Scarlett Fever? If so, I want more Scarlett and Spencer.

And now the pendulum swings. As it is getting closer to Christmas, I find myself knitting more than reading. If only these two endeavors were more compatible. When I do find myself awake enough before bed to do more than the USA Today QuickCross puzzle, I'm reading on The Mysterious Benedict Society or Madeleine L'Engle's second Crosswick Journal, The Summer of the Great-Grandmother.

Fall break is less than a week away. Perhaps that will help.

Interlude: A Circle of Quiet by Madeleine L'Engle

Between YA books, I'm reading on a Madeleine L'Engle book. A Circle of Quiet is the first of four Crosswicks Journals, thoughts she wrote while at her family's summer home in Connecticut.

Madeleine L'Engle is without a doubt one of my favorite writers of all time. (I would name a child after her.) I find affirmation, inspiration, and challenge in her words.

Some quotations from today's reading:

• If we are given minds we are required to use them, but not limit ourselves by them.
• The creative impulse, like love, cannot be taught. What a teacher or librarian or parent can do, in working with children, is to give the flame enough oxygen so that it can burn.
• In a good story we find out very quickly about the hero the things we want to know about ourselves.

And my favorite, her response to a student's question:

'Mrs. Franklin, do you really and truly believe in God with no doubts at all?'

'Oh, Una, I really and truly believe in God with all kinds of doubts.'

But I base my life on this belief.

Vote!

I'm doing my best to get Burned by Ellen Hopkins read by the weekend. I've already passed the one-week mark on this one, I'm sad to say. Even though the book is something like 500-pages long, it shouldn't take me any time to finish.

Hopkins writes free verse novels for young adults -- an interesting concept I'll deal with later in the blog dedicated to this book. As far as I can tell, all her books have tragic themes with tragic heroines with tragic endings. Drugs, abuse, prostitution, gun violence, the list goes on. And this just going off what she said during her presentation at the SoKy Book Fest. Apparently, her most popular novel, Crank, and its sequel, Glass, are heavily based on her own daughter's meth addiction. I'm not sure how I feel about the literal transposition from life to fiction. I mean, when speaking about her loved ones to her readers, the author refers to the real life people by their fictionalized names. I smell a law suit.

Anyway, once I'm finished with Burned, it'll be time to crack open another book. What should it be? I've put a poll in the sidebar for you to add your two cents. Only one person has chimed in, and that vote was cast for The Hunger Games. I bet I know who that was.

The run-down, going on book jackets, hearsay, and assumptions alone:

• Big Fat Manifesto by Susan Vaught is the fictional narrative of Jamie Carcaterra, a high school senior who writes an unapologetic column called "Fat Girl" in her school paper. I saw Susan Vaught last weekend, when I learned that she wrote this book I've been seeing on bookshelves everywhere. P. S. It says "SASSY" on the cover, among other random words.
• M. T. Anderson's Feed is one of those YA books that makes people give me funny looks when they learn I haven't read it. (Even Junior in The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian names it as one of his favorite books.) From what I gather, it's a futuristic novel in which society has gone and done what all the technological skeptics fear: put chips in our brains. Everyone has a live feed of info streaming at all times. I think the Brothers Green once compared it to having Wikipedia in your head.
• Victoria read The Hunger Games and immediately suggested I do the same. The premise alone is enough to spur an hour-long discussion. Suzanne Collins' futuristic version of the United States is divided up into something like 12 or 13 districts, and each year, each district pulls one boy and one girl's name out of a hat and enlists them in a televised fight-to-the-death competition. Think "The Lottery" meets the Tri-Wizard Tournament meets Survivor meets The Village. Or at least that's what I'm getting after about ten pages.
• Identical is Ellen Hopkins' (the author of Burned) latest book. It's about a set of twins. Something about sexual abuse. I don't know. Maybe I should've put a different book in this spot on the poll.

Suggestions?