The inevitable Hunger Games thread

i actually read two of the skulduggery pleasant stories, i quite liked them, it was a little odd that he was doing 'cthulhu ... y'know, for kids' but i gather that's a thing, right

i read daniel handler's grownup novel once, it wasn't very good

i associate the whole lemony snicket thing w/ the girls in my high school who were deeply in love with neutral milk hotel

I think I might have read the first Skullduggery but it was under complicated circumstances, and I didn't follow their success afterward.

Awww I was just going to say I wish D Handler would keep writing The Basic Eight only in a way that was eternally fresh and new!

Ha, on Wikipedia:

Bosch has been widely believed to be Megan McDonald, Rick Riordan, Heinrich Hoffmann, Daniel Handler (a.k.a. Lemony Snicket), Graeme Williams, Jon Scieszka, Trenton Lee Stewart, or Edie Bilmann.

That's pretty definitely non-commitmal.

Oh yeah, Trenton Lee Stewart, chalk up another one for the wacky hijinx.

the copyright is (c) daniel handler so i mean

Whoah that's funny, I'm holding 3 of the books right here and the copyright is under the pseudonym.

so the flashback-a-chapter rhythm is starting to wear on me. but she's maintaining a deep understanding of what it's like to grow up poor. starting to get curious about these underland books

so some spading reveals that handler isn't the author, and i'm kind of a chump. a handler friend/cohort (?) from WA named raphael simon is responsible

Haha I wd have been even more of a chump if I didn't realize one of my old idols was writing for us!

'the forest of hands and teeth' looks pretty interesting. i'm curious how you rate 'st. lucy's home for girls raised by wolves'

I wrote it down on my list but never got around to it, tbh. Seems like something I'd like if it's not too McSweeney's-y. I've enjoyed what I've read from Kelly Link, seems like this is in the same category?

I never read that Forest of Hands and Teeth, btw, or even heard of it -- I just googled "young adult" and "zombies" iirc!

the karen russell short stories have nothing to do w/ ya fiction?

depends on how you define it i guess

"Mr. Minotaur, could you kindly open this jar of love apples for us? Mr. Minotaur, when you have a moment, would you mind goring those wolves?"

but i'd define george saunders that way too, and flann o'brien. kids read wicked shit too

Oh sorry, I thought he was asking because they were cross-marketed or sort of "for girls of all ages" or something. Like that McSweeney's collection for kids. Uhh... Noisy Outlaws, Unfriendly Blobs, and Some Other Things That Aren't as Scary, Maybe, Depending on How You Feel About Lost Lands, Stray Cellphones, Creatures from the Sky, Parents Who Disappear in Peru, a Man Named Lars Farf, and One Other Story We Couldn't Quite Finish, So Maybe You Could Help Us Out - WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY LEMONY SNICKET

never heard of that. don't read much mcsweeney's

i was asking because it's next on a y/a recommendation list after 'the hunger games' a friend gave me

i think forest ov hands & teeth looks interesting too, if i get around to the rest of this reading list i'm constructing myself, i don't know, i'll put that on it i guess. i feel like having a binge on straightforward, like, stories and shit.

my objection is that these books are just ... easy fiction, kind of pandering 'boy stuff' w/ lots of graphic violence that milks video games and episodic TV for ideas and is otherwise woefully ignorant of the larger literary tradition or canon. it is written in present tense and basically free of any device or craft beyond basic storytelling aptitude. it perpetuates the same limerence-drenched soap-opera shit that's saturated YA for the past half-decade, and does a lot of the ham-fisted world-building that passes for 'imaginative' and refuses to allow the reader to experience wonder, confusion, or ambiguity.

Remy, I tried reading the first book in this series and did not finish it due to the reasons you have listed above. I found it to be astonishingly poor writing, the acclaim this series received is baffling to me.

Betrayal. That's the first thing I feel, which is ludicrous. For there to be betrayal, there would have to have been trust first. Between Peeta and me. And trust has not been part of the agreement. We're tributes. But the boy who risked a beating to give me bread, the one who steadied me in the chariot, who covered for me with the redheaded Avox girl, who insisted Haymitch know my hunting skills . . . was there some part of me that couldn't help trusting him?

On the other hand, I'm relieved that we can stop the pretense of being friends. Obviously, whatever thin connection we'd foolishly formed has been severed. And high time, too. The Games begin in two days, and trust will only be a weakness. Whatever triggered Peeta's decision -- and I suspect it had to do with my outperforming him in training -- I should be nothing but grateful for it. Maybe he's finally accepted the fact that the sooner we openly acknowledge that we are enemies, the better.

that whole chapter rules. nice end to part i

huh, i thought i'd revived this this morning but apparently i didn't

remy otm, though, basically

ambiguity is dripping off the page up in here. so is wonder. but whatever

i don't know if i've repped for this before, but paolo bacigalupi's 'shipbreaker' plays with the same themes as hunger games very effectively, and the writing quality is much, much better. the first half of shipbreaker is exceptional, and the second half is very good, but it's also a lot more of an interesting read, imho

thanks for the tip. i'll check that out

hunger games feels v schematic -- the world-building feels very back-of-an-envelope, and then katniss spends the entire time explaining it to the reader. all the character interactions suffer from the same -- this fear that a slow reader might miss something, somewhere along the way. everything bar the action feels like this; i'm confused what book qualmsley is reading

following recommendations itt will probably wait until i move house so as to not take a boxful of YA fiction w/me

xp Please also notice how nicely the jacket is printed -- over foil, no less! So much foil....

Shipbreaker excerpt:

Richard Lopez was a rib-thin conglomeration of ropy muscle and burning energy. Tattooed dragons ran the length of his arms and sent their tails curling up his neck to twine with the faded patterns of his own long-ago light crew tattoos. Fresher, and far more ominous, a whole series of victory scars gleamed on his chest, showing all the men he'd broken when he'd been a ring fighter. Thirteen red and angry slashes there. His very own baker's dozen, he would say, grinning. And then he'd ask Nailer if he was ever going to be as tough as his old man.

Richard lit the storm lamp that hung overhead, setting it swaying. Nailer held still, trying to guess his father's mood as the man pulled a scavenged chair around and straddled it. The lamp's swinging glare cast shadows across them both, looming and swooping shapes. Richard Lopez was sliding high, burning with amphetamines and liquor, His bloodshot eyes studied Nailer carefully, a snake waiting to strike.

"What the hell happened to you?"

Nailer tried not to show fear. THe man didn't have anything in his hands: no knife, no belt, no willow whip. His blue eyes might be crystal bright, but he was still a calm ocean.

"I had an accident on the job," Nailer said.

"An accident? Were you being stupid?"

i'm reading a book about a poor girl who gets fucked with and learns to fight back. i'm partial to books about poor kids that are sincere about how much poverty sucks. i rooted for steerpike, for instance. i like 'oliver twist.' and this isn't bad prose by any estimation ~

The next hours are agonizing. At once, it's clear I cannot gush. We try me playing cocky, but I just don't have the arrogance. Apparently, I'm too "vulnerable" for ferocity. I'm not witty. Funny. Sexy. Or mysterious.

By the end of the session, I am no one at all. Haymitch started drinking somewhere around witty, and a nasty edge has crept into his voice. "I give up, sweetheart. Just answer the questions and try not to let the audience see how openly you despise them."

xp

i'm with qwalmsley on this. loved the series.

and i'm looking forward to the movie.

Collins is not only in possession of the most gruesomely inventive imagination since Hieronymus Bosch. (As David Plotz noted in Slate's discussion of Mockingjay last summer, the series is practically a Kama Sutra of violence.) She also has a precision engineer's sense of how to make her complex narrative structures work: Action-movie directors could learn a thing or 10 from her about how to construct elaborate yet perfectly suspenseful plots. But more impressive is Collins' fierceness. No one is safe from the story she wants to tell, and if that means offing some beloved, underage characters in alarming fashion or ending the series on a note she must have known was going to be divisive among her fans, so be it. Collins doesn't talk down to her young readers or sugarcoat her plot for them; she knows they're as bloodthirsty as her adult fans. By combining a bracing ruthlessness with old-fashioned storytelling skills, Collins cracked the code for making truly compelling—-and profitable—-fiction for all ages.

http://www.slate.com/id/2299513/

ppl in mainstream media outlets writing about genre fiction: classic or dud?

although that's more of an advertising notice than anything, i suppose

the hostility to this book is more interesting than the substance of the complaints

no, you are

why don't you start an anti-hunger games thread, thomp?

that would be slightly less ridiculous

no, you're ridiculous

obviously

but you're out of line rude. on a young adult fiction thread. which is interesting to me

no, you're interesting

do you kick kids reading harry potter books, thomp?

how dare someone enjoy something you're too good for

a book you apparently couldn't be bother to finish, either. interesting!

where did i say that? also, please limit your posts in this thread to those i can respond to in the form "no, you're (x)"

"hunger games feels v schematic -- the world-building feels very back-of-an-envelope, and then katniss spends the entire time explaining it to the reader."

possibly accurate for the beginning?

you're wonderful, by the way

aw, thanks

& no, katniss (& collins) are guilty of that the whole way through: explaining every concept in the book's world as if they had been asked to explain it to a slow foreigner, rather than letting it be explained by the narrative. i.e. lots of narrative units along the lines of 'i went to the (whatever the black market is called) - that's the black market that exists in our town for reasons x and y.' 'i had been selected for the hunger games - that's the games that we have in which children are made to kill each other, which exist for reasons x and y and z.' even once it's just the children-kill-each-other part of the narrative there's still bits like this: 'i noticed i was next to a nest of (whatever the genetically modified bees were called) - those are some genetically modified bees that some guys made, once, that did this.' there's a lot of things you could call this: bad world-building, telling not showing, talking down.

the idea that there should be a thread for people who don't like the books because you don't want them on your thread is kind of a silly one. reminds me of this:

Lady Gaga needs her own thread

she only has two threads and they are both dedicated to metacritical analysis of her career in the context of contemporary pop mzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

― musically, Friday, November 13, 2009 1:24 AM (1 year ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i can't wait to read this thread of non-analytic posts

― see-those-tit-ies (J0rdan S.), Friday, November 13, 2009 1:27 AM (1 year ago) Bookmark

but, i mean, remy pretty much murks the first book here --"woefully ignorant of the larger literary tradition or canon. it is written in present tense and basically free of any device or craft beyond basic storytelling aptitude. it perpetuates the same limerence-drenched soap-opera shit that's saturated YA for the past half-decade, and does a lot of the ham-fisted world-building that passes for 'imaginative' and refuses to allow the reader to experience wonder, confusion, or ambiguity." these are not substance-free complaints! this is a fairly thorough summary of what is wrong with it!

'gravity's rainbow' is written in the present tense. 'war and peace' proceeds as though the reader knows nothing of napoleon's russian campaign. one of the joys of tolkien's work is his exposition. what is a tesseract? i'm curious what larger canon collins isn't referring to. it's easy to indulge animus

a tesseract is some kind of four-dimensional shape iirc, but i'm not entirely sure why that's relevant