The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins

This is technically a re-read, my first re-read of the year, but certainly not my last, as I know that Justin Cronin's sequel to my new favorite book ever, The Passage, is coming out in August, I think, and I need to read that again for the THIRD time before it comes out. This, I read again because the movie is coming out soon and I wanted to refresh my memory on what went down so I can rip the movie to shreds when I see it.

To be honest with you, I think I enjoyed this book the second time around. It's sort of funny how it came about that I got the copy that I read, since I first read it on my Kindle over a year ago. 

The toy store that I work at was accidentally shipped a case of these books from Schoolastic, so I took a copy and laughed to myself, thinking that this really isn't an appropriate book for a kid's toy store where we cater to elementary students and younger. It's so violent, gory even, and has themes that are incredibly dynamic, intense, and adult.

But, whatever. Selling it wasn't my choice to make, and who am I to tell other people what their eight or nine year olds should be reading? (That's sarcasm, there.)

Part of the reason I enjoyed it more this time, I think, is just knowing that there is going to be a movie coming out. The first time I read it I kept imagining it in my head like I always do while reading, but I could never stop thinking, wow, this would be great on the big screen. I probably should have known even then, when this book was first released and turned into a sensation, that the film would shortly follow. 

But what will it be like, I wonder, watching these teenagers kill each other? This is one of those books where it's really HARD to put yourself in the character's shoes. I can't imagine being Katniss, having to sacrifice myself for my sister, having to enter an arena with twenty-three of my peers, knowing that only one of us would come out alive. Having to kill to survive. It's practically impossible to fathom. 

I thought Lord of the Flies was bad. Not bad as in terrible and I didn't enjoy it, but bad as in TERRIBLY HORRIFYING to read and put myself into the characters shoes. That was literature. But this is better... because it's worse. Get me? 

I've really been enjoying the young adult books that I've been reading so much of lately. I guess I never appreciated them when I was a young adult myself, because I was already reading Stephen King and Anne Rice and scoffing at my peers who were reading "kid" books at the time. Now, I envy today's teenagers for the amount of great books they have at their fingertips that they can relate to right now, ones that are so much deeper and better than I had offered to me at that age. 

This really deserves its own blog post, but I'd just like to say, I think that even with all of its violence and terror, The Hunger Games should be read by teens - all of them. On some level, it's a book that says:

The government may be in charge, but that doesn't mean they are right. You may think you are safe, but you aren't. You may think you know what love is, but you don't. You might think you know yourself, but of course you don't. How could you when you are only a teenager?

The Compound, by S.A. Bodeen

I picked this book up at the library a week or so ago without ever having read about it on a book blog or anywhere - I had never heard of it, never read any reviews, and in my mind I was really taking a chance. There are just SO MANY books that I want to read, I don't usually take chances on things that I might not like based on reviews and such, but I was intrigued by the book blurb so gave it a shot. I was not let down. Here's the blurb from Amazon: 

Eli and his family have lived in the underground Compound for six years. The world they knew is gone, and they’ve become accustomed to their new life. Accustomed, but not happy. No amount of luxury can stifle the dull routine of living in the same place, with only his two sisters, only his father and mother, doing the same thing day after day after day. As problems with their carefully planned existence threaten to destroy their sanctuary—and their sanity—Eli can’t help but wonder if he’d rather take his chances outside. Eli’s father built the Compound to keep them safe. But are they safe—really?

When I started reading this, I got a little nervous that it would be a boring book about a family in a compound, going about their day to day. Based on the fact that it was just a family in there I didn't expect any sort of Anne Frankish romance or anything, and there wasn't one - which, to be honest, was sort of refreshing. It's nice to read a book, especially a YA book, that doesn't revolve around teen romance. I don't think it would have worked at all in this story, and it didn't touch on it at all. Instead, it was more about the love between Eli and his twin brother Eddy who was lost outside of the compound, and the strange and tenuous relationship that Eli had with his two sisters and parents while in the compound.

Eli finds out pretty quickly that his father is hiding some big piece of information from the family about what is going on in the world outside of the compound, and there are many tense moments when Eli is searching for information, not trying to get caught. What was more interesting (surprisingly) was the descriptions of the compound itself, and the way Eli's billionaire father had prepared and stocked it for their duration inside. It came complete with an indoor farm, complete with livestock, and every amenity and more that you might enjoy on the outside. It was really pretty neat.

But then, there was an extremely dark twist to the story, something so (excuse me) FUCKED UP, that just made me appreciate the book even more. I say it a lot, but when I find something that is BRAVE in a story, I really admire it. I really admire the bravery this author took with what she was willing to put her characters through to get out and survive. 

This was a really quick and enjoyable read, I'd recommend it to anyone who wants a break from the mainstream young adult fiction that is out there right now.

Paper Towns, by John Green

I resisted reading anything by John Green because my sister is moderately obsessed with him. There, I said it. It's not that I don't think anything she likes can't be good, but she is twelve years my junior and re-reads the Harry Potter and Twilight series like they are going to be pulled from shelves the world over and never read again. I guess she does the same thing with John Green books. However, I wanted to give him a shot. I had started An Abundance of Katherines a few weeks ago and got annoyed by the characters in the first few chapters so I put it down, but then I went to the library and picked up a different title, and was promptly, seriously, blown away.

 

From John Green's website:

Quentin Jacobsen has spent a lifetime loving the magnificently adventurous Margo Roth Spiegelman from afar. So when she cracks open a window and climbs back into his life–dressed like a ninja and summoning him for an ingenious campaign of revenge–he follows.

After their all-nighter ends and a new day breaks, Q arrives at school to discover that Margo, always an enigma, has now become a mystery. But Q soon learns that there are clues–and they’re for him. Urged down a disconnected path, the closer he gets, the less Q sees of the girl he thought he knew.

First of all, this is unlike pretty much all of the young adult I've read in the last couple of years in that it's not in any way paranormal - it has no supernatural aspects or horror that I generally go for, but in a way it had its own horror, the horror being that it was so true to what high school experiences really are, it threw me back into thoughts of an uncertain time I call the teen years - scary stuff. 

These characters - Quentin especially - are real. I didn't feel it right off the bat with the two main characters in An Abundance of Katherines, but I am considering giving that book another chance after reading this. I feel like I have discovered something that I didn't really knew existed and (sorry Kayla, if you are reading) didn't think I'd find it in a pile of books my sister cherished - and that is honesty. Beautiful, unabashed honesty of what it is to feel when you don't really know a thing about love or feelings or relationships because you are just too damn young to have a clue what forever means. 

So Quentin is essentially in love with Margo Roth Spiegelman, but the thing is, he has no idea who she is. He is in love with the idea of her, with the idea that everyone had made in their own heads for the person she was - the paper girl living in the paper towns. She disappears after a wild adventure he never expected and Quentin makes it his mission to find her, along with his two best friends and one of Margo's, and really you learn that sometimes looking for something is better than what you actually find, such as in this case. 

This is true, this story. We never know anyone completely and we are fools to think we can. Sad, but true.

I'm going to read this book again, and I am going to read - probably - everything else that John Green has written. I am sorry that I had dismissed him for so long and that I've been missing such a great writer, because really he writes YA with such maturity, honesty and truth, I think his stories (at least this one) would be great reads no matter how old you are or where you are life. I loved this book. 

And as a bonus? It has one of the best lines I've ever read anywhere. Taken out of context:

Chuck Norris's tears cure cancer, but unfortunately he's never cried. 

Genius. Truth and genius.

Switched, by Amanda Hocking

So, this is a re-read. I read the entire Trylle trilogy this past spring, but I loved it so much, I had to get the paperback and read it again, and I dare say it was better the second time around. I suppose it's also worth mentioning that I re-read books a lot, and you probably should too if you really enjoy them - I find books that I re-read are more inspiring in my own life than ones I'm happy reading only once.

Here is the Amazon summary:

When Wendy Everly was six years old, her mother was convinced she was a monster and tried to kill her. Eleven years later, Wendy discovers her mother might have been right.  She’s not the person she’s always believed herself to be, and her whole life begins to unravel—all because of Finn Holmes.

Finn is a mysterious guy who always seems to be watching her.  Every encounter leaves her deeply shaken…though it has more to do with her fierce attraction to him than she’d ever admit.  But it isn’t long before he reveals the truth:  Wendy is a changeling who was switched at birth—and he’s come to take her home.   

Now Wendy’s about to journey to a magical world she never knew existed, one that’s both beautiful and frightening.  And where she must leave her old life behind to discover who she’s meant to become…

Well, I'll spoil it for you (let's face it, if you read book blogs or keep up with the young adult publishing industry, you know this already) it's about trolls. Wendy and Finn are trolls. Not the nasty under-the-bridge trolls you might imagine, but beautiful magical creatures, and Wendy is a princess in the Trylle kingdom. 

Guys? It's an awesome story. Just go Google "Amanda Hocking" and take a moment to read about her wild sucess in self publishing. That is how I found her, from reading book blogs and industry blogs back when Amanda's Kindle sales of her $.99 cent books were blowing her up and making her a millionaire. I, like many other writers at the time, were entralled by her success. I still am entralled by her success, but I heed what Amanda has to say about self-publishing. 

She did everything the way everyone else does when the self publish a book - she submitted it to Amazon, Smashwords, etc., she marketed on her blog and other social sites, and she waited for the money to come in. But it's what she did BEFORE she published that has made her a success. She wrote a goddamn wonderful story. 

When I read, especially when I read YA, I read to escape. I love the paranormal YA stories more than most lately, and the sci-fi and horror, because they are so far from my real life I can just slip into a book and totally drift away from anything that is bogging down my mind. Well, Amanda created a whole new world to slip into, a world of hot guys and magic and mystery and decadence with some intrigue and violence thrown in for good measure. It's a troll-filled treasure of a book, and an amazing start to a series. 

This girl, she's one young author who I can say for sure deserves every one of the millions of dollars she's making from her stories. Because really, they are that good. I promise.

Imaginary Girls, by Nova Ren Suma

I've mentioned author Nova Ren Suma quite a few times on this blog already, and believe it or not, I hadn't even read one of her books until now. She's just a great blogger, with an amazing blog for writers and readers, and is worth mentioning regardless of whether you've read her books, in my opinion. So, with my handy dandy Amazon gift certificates, I purchased her much talked about Imaginary Girls.

 Here's the synopsis from Amazon.com, because I'm no good at summarzing:

Chloe's older sister, Ruby, is the girl everyone looks to and longs for, who can't be captured or caged. When a night with Ruby's friends goes horribly wrong and Chloe discovers the dead body of her classmate London Hayes left floating in the reservoir, Chloe is sent away from town and away from Ruby.

But Ruby will do anything to get her sister back, and when Chloe returns to town two years later, deadly surprises await. As Chloe flirts with the truth that Ruby has hidden deeply away, the fragile line between life and death is redrawn by the complex bonds of sisterhood.

Okay, so. I read this summary over and over again  before buying this book, because I've seen reviews of this book everywhere, but no matter how many times I read it, I never could grasp what was actually going on in the book - and frankly, for most of the story, I STILL couldn't grasp what was going on. However, this didn't turn out to be a bad thing. At first, I was confused. Then, I was annoyed. Finally, in the last third of the book, I was enlightened - we were all enlightened as to what Ruby did and what it meant for Chloe and everyone else in the town. 

Really, this is a book about sisters. That fact won't get lost on anyone. However, it was a relationship that I was incapable of understanding. One sister idolizes the other... partly because she's..magical? It's hard to say, even up to the end. The truth was, I didn't like either of the characters. I hated Ruby - so full of herself, so sure that she could use and manipulate anyone she wanted - she's probably the biggest narcissist I've ever encountered in a book. Then, Chloe, the doting little sister. I wanted to grab her and shake her and say "You have to see through Ruby, you have to see that something is wrong with her and this isn't the way people should be!" And I was shocked that that was never a revelation that Chloe came to. 

Hm. It's going to be hard to write about this book without giving anything away. I don't know what I am trying to say at all, really, other than - despite me hating the characters, I loved this book and I loved this story, but most of all, I loved Nova's writing. It makes me want to ask her, "Did you read a lot of Alice Hoffman before writing this?" Because there is nothing else I can compare it to. 

Nova's writing GLOWS. It's beautiful, and lyrical, it's like poetry squished into prose, and as annoyed I was by the characters and what they chose to do and say to each other, I was thrown down the rabbit hole into Ruby's mystery and I didn't want the story to end - in fact, it took me damn near two weeks to read this, because I didn't binge it, I just kept sipping away little by little until I got to the epilogue, which is when I put the book down for two whole days, knowing I only had a chapter left, because I didn't want it to end. Not that I didn't want the story to end - it was done, I knew I'd be glad to be rid of Ruby, I knew that if she were my sister I would have rebelled against her and told her "You aren't so special," but I didn't want to stop reading the words that fit so beautifully together on the page. 

Nova's a good storyteller. The story kept me confused and guessing and intrigued, which is what good story tellers do with mysteries, and I suppose this was a mystery more than anything else, part paranormal, mostly contemporary, and sort of horrifying. So yeah, she's a good storyteller. But she's a BRILLIANT WRITER. She puts words together, ordinary words, and they sing like extraordinary songs.

Characters be damned - Ruby sure will be. The writing is where it's at, and Nova Ren Suma is definitely one to watch and follow, because she's going to be an even bigger name than she already is if she keeps it up to this level. 

The Unit, by Ninni Holmqvist

I really need to review these books as soon as I finish them, because I am pages away from finishing my third book of the year, AND halfway through another one. So far, the first twelve days of 2012 have been ones of voracious reading. 

The Unit is a book I've had on my Kindle for a while but never started for one reason or another - but once I did, I really couldn't stop reading it. This is a piece of speculative fiction, sort of like Never Let Me Go, but, in my humble opinion, much more fast paced and accessible. 

The Unit follows the story of a woman named Dorrit. She has reached her 50th birthday without having children, and so therefore in her society she is a dispensible person. She's sent to the Unit - the Second Reserve Bank Unit for Biological Material - because being her age, with no husband, no children, and no one out in the world who "needs" her, she has become a drain on societies' resources. Lucky for Dorrit and thousands of other elderly people, The Unit will make her quite useful. 

Upon arriving at The Unit, where she is never allowed to leave, even to go outside, she finds that her apartment is nice, luxurious even, and that she can pretty much do as she pleases there. The Unit has theatres, gyms, parks, libraries, stores, art galleries - plenty of things to keep people occupied and happy while they are undergoing extensive medical test, drug trials, and organ donations until they make their "final donation" usually before five years have passed in The Unit.

So yeah, it's all very macabre, very dark and makes you feel like an icky voyeur for reading something that is so terrible, but that's why I like it - and it gets worse - because Dorrit falls in love while she is in the Unit, and then something remarkable happens that makes her wonder whether she is really indispensable after all. 

---

I really enjoyed this book - more than most I have read recently. I find it very... fascinating when writers create a world that is just like ours but with one major (or even minor) variation that changes everything. It was like that, sort of, in A Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood, and that is one of my favorite of her books. 

Granted, the books I enjoy the most are the ones that most people read and say "This is FUCKED UP!" but at least I know there are others out there who feel the same way I do. These worlds that are created in books, these dystopias, they are horrifying - but just real enough that it is easy to suspend your disbelief for just a little while and in that time maybe you might think, like I do, that this is just all too possible....

RUN, by Blake Crouch

Reading 52 books in a year is a huge task. That's one per week if you do things right, and even if I read like a maniac I don't think that this is going to be easy for me - but it's possible, and it's something that I want to accomplish so much, I even added it to my Life List. 

Anyway, here we are three days into the new year and I HAVE finished my first book of the year, so this is as good of a start as one could get, in my humble opinion. That it was a great book is just another plus. 

RUN, is the first book I've read by Blake Crouch. I was able to score it for free when he was offering it on Amazon just before the new year, and I started reading it while recovering from my New Year Hangover. That I blew through this in about a day and a half is a testament to how enjoyable this book was to me. I know that the dark and apocalyptic isn't for everyone, but it really is what I have been enjoying most these days.

RUN was about a family on the run from the vast majority of the American population. An event has turned people hostile and violent, and this is the story of one family who is trying to find a safe place to figure out how they will put their lives back together after society has collapsed. Unfortunately, the family runs into quite a few obstacles. 

From being chased down and shot at on roads, from avoiding concentration camp style execution, from spending a week without food and barely any water on a freezing mountain in the middle of winter with no shelter and barely any hope, I really didn't think this family was going to make it. The total breakdown of the world was too much, in my opinion, to ever be able to recover from, and a little unprepared family with two young children weren't the strongest heroes. 

However, it was the family that shone in this story - the way they struggled and got through danger, wounds, sickness, and loneliness when they were apart - it was a touching family story of survival with the extra goodness of pure, horrifying evil overtaking the rest of the world. 

(Have I ever mentioned that I suck at reviewing books? Like, SUCK at it?)

This was, as far as I am aware, the first independently published book Crouch has put out. I decided I wanted to read it because Crouch has often paired up with Joe Konrath to write books, do interviews, and contribute heavily to the indie publishing scene that I have found myself becoming a part of online. He's one of the ones who have done it right, and it's good to learn from the "pros", if you will, and I see here that RUN would probably have been a great seller if he'd published traditionally, it was just that good.

I'd really recommend this book to anyone who likes horror and intense emotional thrillers, with just the slightest hint of the supernatural.