Dystopia, Extinction, and Corpses. Oh my.

Where did I leave off. For some reason I'm not reading as fast as usual. Maybe it's the weather. Maybe it's the preoccupation with selling my own manuscript. Maybe it's the call to build epic Lego monuments with my son.

Still, I have finished three books in the past couple of weeks.

However, none of them are new! How useful am I? 

So. I finally read Catching Fire and Mockingjay, largely at the urging of the kids in the novel-writing class I was co-teaching. They all told me Catching Fire was amazing and Mockingjay bit the big one. I agree.

When I started the H.G. #2, I was concerned with the amount of back-story and internal dialogue and telling embedded in the narrative. In fact, I was getting darn sleepy right around the time when the whole plot exploded magnificently. After trudging through the first hundred pages or so I devoured the remains. Yum. Loved the ending. Hoped against reason that Peeta was done for. No such luck.

That said, #3 was dull, ridiculous, and I just didn't buy it. And I had finally truly bonded with a character, Finnick, and what happens? Well, I won't say. Except to mention that I was mightily distressed. He and his true love were/are essentially the only sympathetic characters in my opinion. Give me Finnick over Peeta any day. The ending was not satisfying in any way, and the whole District 13 issue was bizarre and underdeveloped. Enough said. Read it, disliked it, moving on...

...to Ship Breaker. This one had been on my radar for a while. I started it, realized it wasn't contemporary fiction about environmental issues and the Gulf Coast, and put it down. Then after reading a couple of hum-drum realistic volumes, I picked it up again. Overall, I very much enjoyed this book. I am completely intrigued with the near-future, not-quite-apocalyptic, very possible, not zombie-infested setting. I was 100% convinced that this could be the legacy we leave for the next generation or two. Nice.

My only issue was with the editing. Yes, I'm a language arts teacher. Compulsive editing is a curse, sort of like still having all 50 states memorized in alphabetical order in a musty pocket of my brain since 5th grade. Can't help it. Sometimes it just rears its ugly head.

So here's the thing. The protagonist in Ship Breaker "blossoms with pain" a disturbing number of times throughout the book. Indeed, the descriptions of Nailer's agony are almost identical in so many places that I became extremely annoyed at the interruption to the otherwise groovy flow of the book. Go ahead and read it if you haven't; try to restrain yourself from hi-liting thee offending phrases.

The author, Paolo Bacigalupi, lives in western Colorado, so we can assume he's pretty cool. Maybe he'll read this and tell me to stop being a blossoming pain in the rear. That would be awesome.

I would recommend Ship Breaker to most of my students.

Just realized that I've finished a couple of others.

Where Things Come Back (John Corey Whaley) was awfully disappointing. This makes me sad. I had this grand and amorphous idea blossoming (I couldn't help myself) that this was a novel about the fragility of human existence and our irrelevance in the grand scheme of the history (and the future) of the world. Now that I'm verbalizing this, I guess that is what the book was about...sort of. But I found the two narrative threads disjointed to the point that they never made sense together, in the end.

I am a huge fan of disjointed. But this wasn't believable disjointed for me. Maybe I need to read it again. Maybe you should read it and tell me what you think. Maybe I should go to bed.

And finally, I think, there's Dead End in Norvelt. Having heard Jack Gantos speak on Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me about his youthful exploits, I was rubbing my hands in gleeful anticipation when I opened this book. I expected it to be side-splittingly funny. But it wasn't. I like the morbid nature of the book, but it became a bit ludicrous after a while. And the plot was a bit tedious until the last 20 pages when everything speeds up and resolves in a bizarre manner. I do love the history lessons and the theme (again) of realizing one's place in the evolution of the universe. But I was not overwhelmed with joy, sadness, anger, or any other emotion at the end of the book. I was just done.

And I really am done, for now.