The inevitable Hunger Games thread

remy, are you serious that you expect literary erudition to shine throughout young adult novels? i just want them to invoke the spirits of the greats, like mervyn peake and joy chant. so far, so good

absolutely, and i often find it. YA isn't the 'junk' genre it (largely) was 20 year ago. laurel wil back me up on this, i think, but there are a number of incredibly talented, capable, and innovative writers working in the field b/c its lack of pretension, willingness to bend genre and story conventions, and relative ease of getting published make it a good place to try out new ideas.

the girl who played mystique in the last x-men. that's who they cast, right?

Yeah, but I prefer to think of her as the girl from Winter's Bone, which makes her seem more promising, tbh.

well i avoided twilight so i might give these a go i guess

― thomp

Those two things need to be decoupled: Everyone should avoid Twilight no matter what you plan to do later in the day/month/year/life.

xp remy is right! Don't lower your standards for young peoples' sakes, they don't need it!

i don't consider young adult fiction junk or i wouldn't be reading it. but have you ever read harold bloom's young adult fantasy novel, 'a flight to lucifer'? yuck

remy, are you serious that you expect literary erudition to shine throughout young adult novels?

Also this is a patronizing and makes you sound like a jerk. Don't do that.

I don't see how a lifelong reader/critic not turning out to be a great YA author in the genre of fantasy is proof of anything, btw. False dichotomy, or at least an extremely lazy one.

the girl who played mystique in the last x-men. that's who they cast, right?

Yeah, but I prefer to think of her as the girl from Winter's Bone, which makes her seem more promising, tbh.

Yeah she really has nothing to prove in the confident-lead department.

like harry potter, i think these stories may succeed better as movies than books: there's very little in the story besides a kind of reportorial narrative.

laurel do you like hunger games

laurel & r.bean recommend two or three good YA novels i should read for contrast to 'hunger games', if i read 'hunger games'

Haven't read 'em. Storyline seemed a little too pat, and then they got the commercial success to match so I just didn't make the effort. remy is saving me from having to try again.

Remy already did!

Rick Yancey in his Will Henry series – 'The Monstrumologist' & 'Curse of the Wendigo'

@thomp, for the sci-fi/horror/gore/monster angle i'd recommend rick yancey's 'the monstrumologist.' it isn't really my cup of tea, but i think it is a well-written book and a good read for a certain type of kid. it introduces a lot of great elements, and ties well w/ frankenstein, lovecraft, etc.,

for total contrast w/in the genre i recommend peter cameron's 'someday this pain will be useful to you' for great, deceptively simple, characterization.

i've recently enjoyed green & levithan's 'will grayson, will grayson' and paolo bacigalupi's 'ship-breaker'

halfway through ellen klages 'the green glass sea' if historical fiction is your thing

Yay, Ship Breaker!!

so good, right?

thanking u

just out of curiosity, how would you rate the possibly-not-as-ubiquitous-as-i-think-they-are franchises:

i. artemis fowl
ii. diary of a wimpy kid
iii. skulduggery pleasant

Sorry, actually quite busy so reduced to being cheering section. Also in terms of new stuff, I get most of my reading from work these days and our YA is extremely "commercial" so apart from SB'er and some others, most of it isn't what you're asking for.

you attacked me for reading 'the hunger games.' then you call me a jerk? sorry if i offended you somehow

(my vested interest here is that my nephew is being put off reading by being deluged with brightly coloured FOR THE KIDS type books that people get him which largely appear to be .. kind of awful, and it is a lot harder to go into the bookstore and buy YA books than it was to buy picture books)

there's a general-purpose YA thread somewhere, isn't there? maybe i should revive that one

you attacked me for reading 'the hunger games.'

You can keep thinking that's what I was "attacking" you for, or you can re-consider about how dismissive you were about the literary "merit" of books for kids/young people.

thomp, honestly I haven't read any of any of those three. They give me the lip-curl when I see them around...hadn't realized Skullduggery Pleasant had become a thing?

There is an excellent YA sf/f thread somewhere but it's probably like 700 posts.

artemis fowl are kind of silly –- they've got some good ideas, but they seem a little too calibrated (?) cynical (?) for my taste. there's definitely an audience, but they're so commercial that they sometimes seem more like a product than a series of books in their own right. whenever i'm reading artemis fowl, i sort of wish i were reading diane wynn jones

diary of a wimpy kid is fluff, but its formatting is obv. very appealing for struggling readers (marginalia, text design, illustrations, limited words/page) and it's pretty funny, i think. they series isv. easy, and doesn't go to any depth or characterization so the books don't have a cross-generational appeal in the way they might the format was used to better, and more interesting effect in tom angleberger's 'the strange case of the origami yoda' which came out last year.

i haven't read skulduggery pleasant; it hardly made splash over here. i've got an ARC of it sitting on the sofa and i'm meaning to get to it.

sorry abt. poor editing above ^^^

@thomp: how old is your nephew? how is his reading?

I think the really good stuff ends up coming out in areas that aren't popular at the time, it just goes unnoticed a bit until things quiet down. I don't think the repetitive and increasingly sensational sf/f that's everywhere right now is going to be the stuff of this era that lasts -- not when we've got Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian and some gender-bendy/LGBTQ "issue" books by Julie Peters and others that are also v good and will probably burrow into kids' thinking more deeply and, one hopes, lastingly, but aren't going to make headlines now.

And I normally dislike like "issue" books, I'm just sayin'.

i sort of wish i were reading diane wynn jones is basically my motto in life.

when was i ever dismissive about the literary merit of books for kids/young people? i haven't said a single negative thing on this thread . . . that i revived! how very district one tribute of you

i'm sorry. i said something negative about harold bloom

well, help yourself to that. he's kind of a turd.

i'm reading his new book alongside 'the hunger games.' definitely prefer 'the hunger games'

black jelly bean: cold oatmeal

why people get so defensive about their aesthetic tastes i'll never understand

i really enjoyed patrick ness's 'chaos walking' trilogy despite some incompetent and repetitive plotting. certainly i think its a little more sophisticated in how it approaches its dystopia & the way it presents moral questions to the reader than hunger games.

good call, lamp: I am actually thinking of reading the first novel in the series w/ my class in the fall. I think Knife of Never Letting Go raises some really interesting ontological questions.

qualmsley:i'd say that maybe for a lot of people 'aesthetic taste' represents a cultural investment or a hard-won knowledge and experience, and there's a lot of ego bound up in what is a kind of half- arbitrary judgement.

It wasn't even about my taste so I'm not sure what that was? It was about remy, are you serious that you expect literary erudition to shine throughout young adult novels? But let's agree that you're not going to understand what I was saying and I'm not going to keep trying.

fwiw i liked the first hunger games book & read it in a single afternoon. its working w/in a structure that i really like tho & i thought the simple, direct language a point in its favor. i did sort of think it was interesting how it seemed to be geared at readers who needed to be able to visualize the action clearly, & think it suffers a little emotionally/psychologically for that.

but honestly idk for a reluctant reader i think theres also value just in 'reading what everyone else is reading', in being able to take part in the conversation surrounding the books. helps make it more social/interesting/compulsive? this is just an idea i have about ~culture~ tho idk

Definitely, there's always the argument for encouraging kids to read whatever they WILL read, and to get the habit of reading and talking about reading, which conveniently dovetails with publishers' desire to sell a great number of copies. My cynicism about the second part shouldn't negate the good stuff about the first part.

remy my nephew is actually only like nine. but he's actually a moderately advanced reader for his age -- it's just that he seems to be rapidly losing enthusiasm & it seems kind of hard to find stuff that's suitable, neither overly-childish nor alien in its concerns. i'm not about to get him the hunger games, i gotta say

like okay when i was a kid i was hooked on dragonlance and shit by that age, that was easy enough;
but i don't know what to do w/r/t the 'repetitive and increasingly sensational sf/f that's everywhere right now', as laurel puts it, which seems to be what kids want to actually read (how long until the first zombie series for kids) (brb, writing to a publisher) --

like what you say about a. fowl: they sometimes seem more like a product than a series of books in their own right: seems to apply to about 75% of what's in the kid's section of the bookstore at the moment

Thread's already too long, but I thought the "Lemony Snicket" books were among the most subversive, post-modern, just plain smart and funny YA-ish books I've ever read.

Lamp: Agreed. I'm approaching these books as a teacher, if that helps to qualify my bile. I'm all for kids reading what they'd like, when they'd like. I don't totally buy the 'as long as they're reading' line, but I do think that independent reading – especially in the case of reluctant readers / LD kids – should be self-directed for a start, and gradually channeled into a careful, but not oppressive, appreciation for good books.

thomp: there's a lot of great realistic fiction for boys that is not reductive or lame, or overly issues-driven (ugh), which has not always been the case. YA sci-fi/fantasy is a mixed bag at best, but I agree w/ Laurel that it is not mostly lasting and some of it is passing fun.

The Forest of Hands and Teeth beat you to it.

I'm tired of marketable book series-to-film. I got over Harry Potter ages ago and Twilight was a pitiful joke. Hunger Games doesn't look much different. I miss when authors used to write individual novels rather than serials, I get tired of the sameness after the second book.

xxxp lemony snicket was like thomas pynchon jr. plotwise but i could never quite handle the prose.

not cuz it was so bad just because it was Always On.

I think the Snicket prose is part of the joke. It'll suddenly digress into a discussion of King Lear or the water cycle with no warning, just to keep you on your toes. If anything, it reminded me a whole lot of Tristram Shandy, right down to the black page.

Like, wheel-spinning as an art.

xp

as i say BR is quite specifically Lord of the Flies reversed, and thus satirizes and not wholly unpopular opinion amongst a section of adults: kids are naturally wild beasts. BR turns that on its head by having an adult world that goes to elaborate lengths to transform its kids into wild beasts, simply to exorcize that underlying fear. not so much satire as documentary.

Hunger Games is obviously a mashup of a lot of tropes and clichés, but at heart it wants to be a epic of The Hero. The Evil Government trope is just there to give the Hero a nemesis, to throw obstacles at her and her fellow heros, and to be an evil counterpart to all that is Good and Clean and Loving and Human. Οὖτις has every right to find the HG a particularly unthinking and reactionary misuse of the trope of Evil Government, but the number of 13 year old girls who are into the politics of HG as opposed to the Hero Quest aspect (with super cool archery feats!) are probably not numerous enough to be worth worrying over.

ah great some ott misogyny

w/ it's war on terror metaphor. hunger games pretty openly and somewhat on the nose response to iraq war, poor youth being sent to their deaths in a spectacle for the benefit of the rich

idg this. American troops weren't forced to fight each other, they were fed a bunch of fictitious lies about a demonized, external enemy.

I don't think that word means quite what you think it means, balls.

I remember reading an interview with the author where she said the inspiration for HG was flipping the channel between Iraq War news reporting and a reality game show like Survivor... So I think it's meant more of a comment on poor kids killing poor kids, TV entertainment, and the rich and powerful using the reality of the poor's struggles as political theatre which they sell back to the poor as heroics... maybe a bit more a mix of ideas than a direct analogue to either Iraq or now.

I don't think that word means quite what you think it means, balls.

― Aimless, Monday, June 16, 2014 7:35 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

nah that's the correct usage

I just watched this. I kind of liked the set up and all the TV stuff, Truman-show-esque as it was. Ending is basically 'oh the people in charge changed their minds' and not really because she did anything mind-blowing or outwitted them particularly? just 'they probably won't like this because TV' - so a massive anti-climax. And yeah, she never really has to make a morally challenging decision. But I'm also glad there was no 'wake up sheeple!'.

much bigger problem during the action scenes is that when peetah and that vicious psychopath kid were fighting at the end they looked so much alike i couldn't tell who was who (blonde buff young caucasians all look the same to me i guess)

i could tell them apart but this was the only time the shakeycam got annoying for me too, because it was so jerky that you couldn't tell what katniss actually shot such that she'd hit cato without him taking peeta with him.

(i looked it up afterwards, she shoots cato's hand so he's forced to release peeta as he falls backwards.)

― lex pretend, Thursday, 29 March 2012 09:34 (2 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

See this is one of the very few bits of obvious 'strategy' or something: Peter spends ages pointing to that spot on his hand and gesturing!

Just watched Mockingjay Pt 1 last night, and holy hell, how in the world did this film get made? 2 hours long and virtually no action and very little happening at all. I liked the first two quite a bit and am amazed that they messed this one up so badly. Katniss, who was a great character in the other films, comes off in this one as basically useless. Why in the world do they stretch books into two long movies when the first one is nothing but set up for the second?

just standard operating procedure for these things - spin the last book into two films, the first one of which will always be fucked because it makes no structural sense. watched Part 1 when it came out and it's exactly as you describe, but exactly what i expected.

sorry, shd've just said "it's the money"

also tbh the second two books probably could have been one book and chopped out three or four story arcs and ten characters that didn't really add anything.

i never read the books, it was my daughter that persuaded me to watch the movies but i liked the first two. even tho she won't believe me that all the handsome young men look the same to me and i can't tell who the hell is who.

i have napped through all of these movies so far

reading this for the first time
do they have to list every time katniss goes to sleep

it's pretty good on the whole tho
i decided kids probably like it so much because, developmentally, they feel like their actions & their crazy new feelings are the focus of worldwide scrutiny, so it's a good parable for adolescent feelings (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imaginary_audience)

there are a lot of 'refrigerator moments' in these books for me, like, why does everyone go along with the games in the first place? what kind of government does this society have? why are there cars & hovercrafts & omniscient sky cams but no guns or lazers, only oldschool weapons (except the night vision sunglasses)?

i do like that it all take place in the woods -- i am imagining really scrappy crummy woods like burnt down yellowstone circa the late '80s, or new mexico's white mountains, or flagstaff. ariz. i want more descriptions of the climate & biome but i think all my criticisms just mean i'm a nerd

also a plus, i think it is cool that katniss's feelings for her sister (& affection xfer to rue as a result) are way more fleshed out than the boycrush feelings.

Tried to see Spectre tonight but the theater was a madhouse and everything was sold out so we did the opening weekend plunge on this one instead. I can see this ultimately resonating like a nu-school Star Wars for a younger generation. Except that they get a Star Wars that doesn't just peter out with a long wet fart full of teddy bears. I went very begrudgingly into the first movie but I've liked it and every installment since quite a bit. The ending was ultimately a little pat but satisfying nonetheless. The acting carries an awful lot of water, but it's a well-made package overall. Remains to be seen how it'll all hold up on a repeat viewing (although I'm looking forward to doing just that since I've spent too much time during every sequel trying to remember what had happened previously).

i've never realised how hateable the name 'peeta' is before

The character/actor himself is kind of a limp noodle and easily the weakest part of the film series. Perhaps the books provide more clarity as to why he wasn't mercifully chucked into a canyon as early as possible.

I've never read the books, but I have seen the movies multiple times, because of one of my teens, and they've grown on me, particularly the sequels. They're pretty well conceived and executed, especially the last one, which was iirc sort of dismissed at the time as being more conventionally action-y than the others but is actually full of long stretches of quiet or introspective bits. I assume it's from the source material, but some of the turns of the final installment are particularly dark and heavy, and ultimately subvert a lot of tropes in these sorts of dystopian films. I like that the surviving heroes all clearly end up damaged, and that there is no real sunrise over a new day conclusion.

This is all in the source material iirc! You might enjoy the books. I'll admit by the end I was getting a little weary of just how endless the conveyor belt of trauma and recovery seemed, but maybe I'd think about those themes differently today. And maybe I just read them in too quick a succession.

Aren't the books told in first person or something? I can imagine that being less effective. Or maybe just effective differently.