Category: Books

A couple of months ago, I made a very modest resolution to read twelve books by the end of the year. By the beginning of March, I was already starting to lag behind, so I decided to cheat a little by reading something that was quick and “easy.” I’ve been seeing plenty of positive-bordering-on-breathless reviews, both professional and from friends, for The Hunger Games, describing it with all the standard book review catch phrases like “a page-turner” and “addictive” and “I couldn’t put it down.”

They may have been under-selling it. I read the book over two days, and I can’t remember the last time I finished a book — “young adult” or not — that quickly. I actually found myself getting nervous when I wasn’t reading it, anxious to get back into the story.

What’s most remarkable to me is that it was so compelling even as I spent the entire time second-guessing it and mentally criticizing it. It wasn’t the cliffhangers that kept me going, since I was able to predict most of what was going to happen. Reading the blurbs for the sequel had already spoiled the broad strokes of the ending, but until the last couple of chapters (which were very well done) I’d been able to see all of the plot developments coming from several pages away. So it wasn’t gimmickry or cheap tricks, but just some damn good writing.

At first I was a little annoyed that the book seemed so light on descriptions — for a book that spends so much of its time “world building,” most of the places and characters received just a cursory description. But I soon realized that the depth was sacrificed in favor of near-perfect pacing. Slower moments take time to set the scene and even meander into a flashback, while the action-filled scenes have sentences that crash into each other in their eagerness to reach the climax. Entire days pass between one sentence and the next. Events that change the course of the entire story are tacked onto the end of an otherwise unassuming paragraph.

And the book is very sparing in its use of melodramatic one-sentence paragraphs.

In fact, the story is told so well that I quickly forgot any uneasiness I was feeling about how derivative it is. It feels like a mash-up of Battle Royale, The Lottery, the story of Theseus and the Minotaur, Lord of the Flies, The Running Man, and 1984, comparing favorably to some of its sources while being less resonant than others. Unlike Battle Royale — and to be fair I’ve only seen the movie and not yet read the book — Suzanne Collins wisely chose to keep most of the “tributes” nameless and unidentified, and not to focus on the brutality of their deaths. This keeps it from feeling too exploitative, but it also loses most of its impact as dark satire.

It’s also frequently, and unfortunately, compared to the Twilight series. I suppose it’s inevitable, since it’s a popular young adult series with a young woman as the protagonist. And that’s the first point where I agree completely with my friend Daniel Herrera’s review: there’s no comparison. The Twilight books seem like even more of an embarrassment when you see an author create a young female protagonist as interesting as Katniss Everdeen. In fact, I have to wonder whether Suzanne Collins was taking digs at the Twilight books when she described a young male character as “sparkling,” and then later when Katniss thinks, “Twilight is closing in and I am ill at ease.” It makes me extremely ill at ease to see such a simpering, vapid, and downright unlikable character as Bella Swan become popular with so many girls, when Katniss is fully-realized, capable, independent, interesting, and flawed.

But that leads directly to my biggest problem with the book: whether it’s a requirement for young adult books, or whether The Hunger Games was intended to be a novel take on it, the book still puts so much of its focus on a teen love triangle. It’s frustrating, because the book handles it as well as possible — Katniss is anything but lovestruck and flighty; she’s even precociously cynical about the whole idea of romance. But romance still dominates the story. It sends a mixed signal — even a girl as strong as Katniss is still somehow incomplete without the right man.

And going back to the complaint about its being derivative: while I spent most of the book wishing that the romantic angle had been omitted or downplayed, I was still impressed that it was handled so cleverly. Throughout, it’s unclear to everyone, even to Katniss herself, whether she’s acting out of genuine feelings or just putting on a show for the audience. But reading reviews of The Hunger Games, I learned that even that is an idea already explored by They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?

My other complaint is that the story seems to go out of its way to undermine what Katniss accomplishes. She’s established as extremely capable on her own, but then is given exactly what she needs at exactly the right moment — either by another character, or literally by a silver parachute falling from the sky. Of course it’s good to keep her realistically a human teenager instead of a super-hero, but each time another plot contrivance came along, I wished the deus ex machina were better hidden.

Ultimately, none of my criticisms of the book invalidate it. If anything, it’s more a case of two leaps forward followed by a step back. As far as best-selling young adult series go, I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it: it’s clearly aimed at a different audience from the Harry Potter series, but it’s still better written and full of much, much better characterizations. And of course, I’d gladly slap copies of the Twilight books out of young girls’ hands (and their mothers’) and replace them with a copy of The Hunger Games.

With the movie series starting later this month, I’m looking forward to seeing audiences go crazy for a genuinely strong and capable character. (Which reminds me: Brave is later this year as well. It’s finally a good year for daughters!) I’m also looking forward to seeing the sponsorships and corporate tie-ins: maybe The Hunger Games brought to you by Snickers?

But I’m still not sure whether I liked the book enough to dive right into the sequels. It’s probably ghoulish to admit that I’m more eager to read about kids killing each other than I’m interested in reading about a girl deciding which non-threatening boy to go steady with. But it’s a stupid question anyway; obviously I’m team Gale all the way.

Over the last week or so, I’ve seen several people linking to this review of Hamlet’s Father on the Rain Taxi website. The situation is this: virulent homophobe Orson Scott Card took it upon himself to “translate” Hamlet, rewriting both the events of the play (in modern prose form) and finally giving us the long-missing backstory which explains the events. As the publisher’s blurb says: “Once you’ve read Orson Scott Card’s revelatory version of the Hamlet story, Shakespeare’s play will be much more fun to watch — because now you’ll know what’s really going on.”

Apparently, what’s really going on is that Hamlet’s father was a total homo. As I understand it from the review, Claudius comes out blameless in this version; the real bad guys were Gay Absentee Dad Hamlet and all the prince’s friends that he molested.

Whenever I read another example of Card’s pathological homophobia, I’m reminded of my first (and as far as I’m aware, only) exposure to Card’s writing: it’s a short story called “Fat Farm” that appeared in OMNI magazine in 1980. I must’ve been around 11 or 12 when I read it, and I’ll never forget it, partly because I’d never before seen such a dark and nasty piece of work.

The story is this: a morbidly obese man returns to the clinic he visits every few years, checking in as a fat man and leaving in perfect physical shape to begin the cycle once again. But this isn’t any normal clinic; this is a clinic in the future in a sci-fi anthology magazine! Instead of giving you a workout, the clinic actually transfers your consciousness into a younger, fresher, slimmer body.

What our protagonist doesn’t realized, however, is that his consciousness isn’t just transferred, but copied. His “old” body still lives, but without any of the legal rights to his identity that he had when checking in. He’s sent to a work farm, where he’s subjected to manual labor and abuse from a brutal overseer who absolutely despises him for some unknown reason. After years of working at a potato farm, he finally earns the lean, muscular (and tanned!) body he’d always wanted, buried under layers of flab. When another, disgustingly fat version of himself is brought in to work, he can feel nothing but hatred and disgust for what that version had done to himself in so short a time. And he finally learns why the overseer always hated him so much: the overseer was the original version!

The moral of the story is obvious: even with future technology, fat people will still be lazy and awful. As an impressionable pre-teen who was still wearing pants sized “Husky,” that stuck with me for a long time.

The other reason it stuck with me so much is that it was the first time I’d read anything that gay. Card spends paragraphs describing the main character seeing his younger self — he’s brought in naked, they caress, they embrace — in great detail. The protagonist works the farm naked, and Card describes lots of tight hard muscles and sun-browned flesh. And it’s not just gay, it’s 80s gay, equal parts self-loathing and cartoonish debauchery:

Somewhere, the man who would be J was dancing, was playing polo, was seducing and perverting and being delighted by every woman and boy and, God knows, sheep that he could find; somewhere the man who would be J dined.

[…]

The helicopter turned then, so that Barth could see nothing but sky from his window. He never saw the whip fall. But he imagined the whip falling, imagined and relished it, longed to feel the heaviness of the blow flowing from his own arm. Hit him again! he cried out inside himself. Hit him for me! And inside himself he made the whip fall a dozen times more.

Not just boys, but sheep! Whip harder!

For those who aren’t familiar with OMNI magazine: it was a science fiction anthology published by Bob Guccione of Penthouse fame. It had some amazing paintings for the stories, which were a combination of “hard” science fiction and sex. Keep in mind this was before the internet, when we pre-teens were still resorting to fiddling the dial on the cable box to try and get a fleeting, blurry glimpse of a tit. The stories in OMNI were usually dark, nihilistic, and with an unhealthy descriptions of sex-to-psychological horror ratio, but in those days we took what we could get.

So Card’s story was my first exposure to dudes making out with each other. (Which I suppose would now make him King Hamlet to my Horatio). And, unfortunately, it fit in with how I wanted to think of homosexuality: synonymous with irresponsibility, hedonism, excess. I wanted to reinforce that I wasn’t like those people; I was better than that. And once that was straightened up, I went back to reading about the dudes making out with each other.

It’s become a trend to suggest that the most vocal anti-gay types are all latent homosexuals themselves. Of course there’s plenty of evidence for that, provided by pastors and Republican representatives, with their work-out regimens and luggage handlers and unconventional notions of restroom etiquette. But I think that’s way too simple, if only because there can’t possibly be enough gay people to account for all of the anti-gay sentiment. The species would go extinct if there were. Fear and mistrust of people who are different, that’s much more universal.

That said, though, Card has spent a lot of time thinking and writing about gay men.

When I was searching for a copy of the story online, I turned up this article by Card saying that all the so-called “research” about the health risks of obesity are invalid. It’s a complete reversal from the guy who wrote “Fat Farm” 25 years earlier, a diatribe about how fat people are repulsive and also they have heart disease and are impotent. What’s galling is his hypocrisy in decrying prejudice against people who are overweight and the tendency to treat obesity as a moral failing. That conclusion is valid, of course, but he deserves no praise for it: Card didn’t grow a conscience over 25 years; he grew fat.

Card continues to speak and write of homosexuality as a moral failing. Maybe it really is a sign of latent homosexuality; all I can see is arrogance. He’s not so much a caricature of the self-loathing homophobe as a caricature of the modern self-described conservative. He understands science better than any politically correct “studies,” and he uses his own perverted version of “science” to support what his common sense and upbringing tell him are true. Things are so much simpler when you can reduce complex biological and sociological systems to trite conclusions and claim they’re based on evolutionary adaptation.

Ultimately, I feel the same way about the cause of Card’s homophobia as I do about the cause of homosexuality itself: it doesn’t matter. What matters is whether you’re a force for good or evil in the world. Technically, I’m supposed to feel some measure of sympathy for self-loathing homosexuals, since I used to be one, but then I remember how I never actively campaigned to treat gay people as morally and legally inferior. And I’ve got even less sympathy for anybody who claims to know what life is like for me without even knowing me. But then, I wouldn’t be arrogant enough to rewrite Shakespeare, either.

What I don’t understand is why this clown keeps getting work.

Book
Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter by Seth Grahame-Smith

Synopsis
The author of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies discovers Abraham Lincoln’s private journal, detailing his history as the greatest vampire hunter of the 1800s.

Futility Disclaimer
The book was by most accounts a big success, a movie’s already in the works, and nobody expects great literature from a book called Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.

Pros
No-brainer of a can’t-fail concept. Well researched (or at least Wikipediaed) enough to avoid being completely frivolous. Lincoln’s ally Henry Sturges is a fairly compelling character. Character voice and journal entries feel authentic enough. There are a few pretty good action sequences, and some pretty horrifying slavery-as-vampirism sequences. Has the same fortifying-by-proxy effect as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: if reading easily-accessible history is as abhorrent to you as reading Jane Austen is to me, you might get something useful out of the book. Abraham Lincoln killing vampires with an axe is what’s promised on the cover, and there’s plenty of that in the book.

Cons
Absolutely no surprises — spoiler warning, John Wilkes Booth is a vampire! — and it takes no risks with the material. Almost all of the vampire-killing stops once Lincoln gets into office, and the book loses most of its punch. The clumsily-Photoshopped period photos don’t add anything, and actually stand out against the attempts at authenticity in the text. So much of the book feels like a novelization of a made-for-TV biopic, as if the author took a list of names and places from a cursory biography of Lincoln and used it as his outline, without making it feel like everything flowed together naturally. (There are occasional exceptions, for instance with Lincoln’s friendship with Joshua Speed, where the author puts a little bit of effort into making Speed feel like a real character).

Synopsis
On the surface, it seems like Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter is less of the search-and-replace job that Pride and Prejudice and Zombies was, but ultimately it’s the exact same concept: take “supposed to be good for you” source material, add internet-meme-inspired action sequences, and cash in from folks like me who’ll buy a book based on the title alone. This isn’t a bad book by any stretch, and it’s got more heft than the goofy title would suggest. But the gimmick is starting to feel more than a little crass, when the book takes a concept and does so little to expand on it. I’m feeling less like I’m in on the joke, riffing with the author on a wacky idea, and more like I’m being sold a T-shirt with an ironic slogan.

Ultimately, the book is too goofy to qualify as “real” literature, but too dry to qualify as action-horror-comedy. There are enough passages in the book — the embellished story of the Roanoake colony, for instance — that are just on the cusp of being interesting on their own merits, that I wish the author would try to write a book from scratch.