January 2012: Books

Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins.  I started The Hunger Games trilogy over Christmas weekend and was hooked.  I technically began the second installment in 2011, but finished it in 2012 so am counting it as a book read in 2012.  Technically a Young Adult novel, Catching Fire finds protagonist Katniss Everdeen thrown back into the arena in Panem’s 75th Hunger Games, the quarter quell, which in a stroke of bad luck, requires the tributes be former victors.  It is unclear whether this was decided upon the establishment of the Hunger Games three quarters of a century ago or by the dictatorial President Snow in order to usurp Katniss and the rebellion she has inadvertently sparked throughout the twelve districts of Panem.  My boyfriend, whom I finally convinced to read the series, asked me which of the three novels is my favorite.  I thought about it and decided that I don’t really view The Hunger Games, Catching Fire, and Mockingjay as three distinct novels but rather as three parts of one cohesive whole.  Unlike Harry Potter, in which each book houses an insular plot (the Sorcerer’s Stone, Chamber of Secrets, Prisoner of Azkaban, etc.), the Hunger Games books are contiguous, each one picking up exactly where the prior one left us hanging.  This is especially true of the practically non-existent bridge between Catching Fire and Mockingjay.

Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins.  One of these things is not like the other, one of these things doesn’t belong.  While, as I previously mentioned, the Hunger Games trilogy is like three parts of one big novel, Mockingjay differs from the first two installments in that Katniss and company are not facing off in a Capitol-made and Capitol-manipulated arena for the entertainment of the privileged of Panem.  Mockingjay is about an actual uprising, the face of which is, at times, reluctantly, Katniss.  After finishing Mockingjay, I arrived at the conclusion that no, Collins’ masterful trilogy is not for children.  Too many good guys die too gruesome deaths, too many universal truths are revealed (e.g., “But collective thinking is usually short-lived. We’re fickle, stupid beings with poor memories and a great gift for self-destruction.”) for the eyes of babes.

Blue Angel by Francine Prose.  I’ve wanted to read Blue Angel since going to a Francine Prose reading of her latest novel, My New American Life, at Hunter College early last spring.  Prose mentioned that Blue Angel, a National Book Award finalist in 2000, was about a liberal arts college English and Creative Writing department.  As a former English (and American) Literature major at a liberal arts school, I just had to get my hands on Blue Angel, which I thoroughly enjoyed.  On the first page, I didn’t think I would have much in common or much sympathy for a middle-aged former novelist cum Creative Writing professor but I shortly fell for the quasi Humbert Humbert-esque Swenson and his neuroses.  Not a “monster,” as I once claimed Humbert Humbert is in a paper I wrote on Lolita for my freshman year Novel in English After 1945 course, Swenson is merely a victim of the ever-powerful co-ed in Prose’s satire on sexual harassment in the collegiate setting.

The Fault in Our Stars by John Green.  While I claim that the Hunger Games trilogy should not be classified as Young Adult fiction, I cannot deny that John Green’s work most definitely is for adolescents.  Despite this, I have thoroughly enjoyed (I hesitate to say “loved”) each one of his novels, including his collaboration with David Levithan, Will Grayson, Will Grayson (2011).  While Green usually writes about upper middle class teenage boys who think about indie music, video games, and their panoply of girl problems, he throws a curve ball with The Fault in Our Stars, which is written in the voice of Hazel Grace Lancaster, a sixteen year old girl with cancer.  The bare bones of the plot are boy-meets-girl, but Green paints the trope with a brush tinged with tragedy.  And it is tragic.  But also comic and also endearing and also beautiful.  Think of it as Love Story (1970) for the 21st century adolescent set.

Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn.  My boyfriend recommended this cute, lipogram of a novel to me and I read it in one day.  I don’t generally love epistolary novels and I didn’t love Ella Minnow Pea but it was enjoyable.  Set on an imaginary island off the coast of South Carolina where citizens worship Nevin Nollop, the inventor of the well-known pangram, “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy brown dog.”  As letters start to fall off the inscription beneath Nollop’s statue, the government starts to ban letters from both the written and spoken word.  And Mark Dunn, like a true law-abiding Nolloptian, eliminates the fallen letters from his writing as the novel progresses.  It’s a breezy commentary on censorship and language but certainly not worthy of the contemporary literary fiction title.

The Family Fang by Kevin Wilson.  As a woman in my late early twenties, I’m struggling with establishing my own life, my own identity beyond those of my parents.  This novel throws that trope into comic, larger than life relief.  The Fangs are an absurd take on the nuclear family.  Parents Caleb and Camille are performance artists whose canvases include malls and restaurants rather than galleries and museums.  They thrive on causing chaos in the most harmless and peaceful settings, observing how human beings react when things don’t go the way they’re supposed to.  The structure of the novel is interesting — the adult Fang children, Annie and Buster (or, Child A and Child B),  are the focus of alternating chapters, each of which ends with a description of a Fang Family performance, shedding some light on Annie’s and Buster’s childhoods.  Annie and Buster are stunted because of their upbringing, which they try to reconcile by developing their own identities, independent from the larger than life ones of their parents.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer.  I know this novel has a somewhat cult-like following and that JSF is supposedly some sort of literary wunderkind, but I guess I’m just not a believer.  I read Everything Is Illuminated when I was in high school and remember liking it well enough but being disappointed by the ending.  While I found Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close much more memorable, I was underwhelmed, given all the hype surrounding it as a novel that could change people’s lives.  Yes, there was a series of interesting excerpts that beautifully comment on human peril but beyond that, it’s meh.  I liked child protagonist Oskar Schell’s chapters but found myself rushing through the other historical ones.  But I’m no history buff.  It’s the present that interests me and Oskar’s chapters were pleasant to read.  But a great work of contemporary literary fiction?  Eh.  Not in my book.

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov.  This is my third read of Nabokov’s magnum opus and I loved it even more — third time’s the charm, right?  I initially read it as a sophomore in high school; then as a college freshman in my the Novel in English after 1945 course (brilliant class, by the way).  I have learned so much about literature between then and now and was truly able to appreciate Nabokov’s way with the English language — not even his mother tongue!  It is truly a masterpiece and I savored every delicious sentence.  I read it on my Kindle but I picked up the edition pictured to the left at the Edinburgh Book Festival in August.  I have three other editions of Lolita.  It truly is one of my favorite novels and in my mind, it’s a forerunner in the 20th century literary canon, breaking and bending any and all rules and taboos.