28. Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins

Thought I'd jump right into the next and latest Hunger Games book, Haymitch's origin story (he is the trainer played by Woody Harrelson).  It is another page-turner but I have to say I was disappointed with Sunrise on the Reaping and found it wanting on many levels.

This Hunger games is the second Quarter Quell, so the 50th one and 40 years after The Ballad of Snakes and Songbirds.  It's very similar to the first Hunger Games book in that you see it all from the perspective of a District citizen, how the games and the oppression of The Capitol impacts his world.  It's dark stuff.  Collins does not pull her punches and I have to always respect her for that.  This is Haymitch's origin story, the second District 12 Tribute to win and it fills a narrative gap between Snow's romance with Lucy Gray and the main saga with Katniss Everdeen.  From that perspective and for those kinds of fans, this book does a serviceable job of showing how all the strands connect, especially in the District 12 community (Haymitch's love is Lucy Gray's daughter and his friend Burdock is Katniss' dad).

Unfortunately, the overall plot and portrayal of the Capitol and the Games are not that innovative.  Snow, in particular, is the full-fledged omnipotent evil he is in the main series.  It would have been nice to see a bit more of his evolution to this insane levels of control and cruelty.  Likewise, the plot is not really that interesting.  Haymitch stumbles his way to victory, being confused and bummed most of the time.  There is no real moment of victory or even any kind of catharsis for him or the reader.  And then he just gots screwed and screwed and screwed at the very end.  Again, Collins does not hesitate to portray evil, but I just wish there had been some more development in his personality or some way that he irked Snow and forced a change in the system or something.  If he wasn't from District 12, this story would have just been a basic Hunger Games underdog victory story where the upstart gets punished and we learn that if you try to confront the Capitol you and everyone you love will be destroyed.

Another annoyance for me was that the ending basically reprints almost the entirety of Poe's The Raven.  There is some clever plotting of Snow's evil manipulations but it felt lost in a very long denouement interspersed with way too many stanzas that didn't seem all that relevant.  Kind of felt like Collins was either trying to pad it out or just loves the poem so much she wanted to force it down her readers' throats. 

I hate to say it, but it felt like fan service drove the need for this latest book rather than a true inspiration to to tell Haymitch's story and open up the history of the Games.   

27. The Ballad of Snakes and Songbirds by Suzanne Collins

A couple of days ago, I complained out loud to my family that I wanted a book whose world and story I would get totally absorbed in and would be bummed when it came to an end.  The next day my daughter put The Ballads of Snakes and Songbirds on my place at the dining room table.  I have read the first Hunger Games book back before the movies came out, quite enjoyed it, but didn't continue and then lost interest after seeing the movies (which I quite enjoyed, other than the major flaw of Katniss' unrelenting miserableness).  However, we dump a lot of culture on our child and I thought it was only fair to follow some of her recommendations.  I can't say that I got the full absorption I wanted, but I was definitely caught up in the story and really appreciated the world and history building of this book, which is a prequel and President Coriolanus Snow's (played so well by Donald Sutherland in the movies) origin story.

The setting is 10 years after the war against the Districts that put Panem back in power and instilled an even more ferocious regime as well as The Hunger Games, as punishment and reminder to the Districts for their "rebellion".  Coriolanus Snow is a top student from a famous high-born family, now struggling with poverty and trying to hide it among his wealthy classmates.  As an experiment, the Hunger Games planners have come up with the idea of each tribute getting a mentor from the Academy.  Right from the beginning, Snow forges a special bond with his tribute, Lucy Gray, who is a "Covey" which are sort of like the Romani people of the districts, but now forced to stay in District 12.   She is a performer and her charm and his initiative put them at the top of the popularity.  Snow and his classmates also come up with the idea of gambling on the games and for fans to be able to sponsor the tributes with gifts of food and water.

It's cool to see the early version of the Games, which are super bootleg, in a crumbling arena and bad communications and visuals.  Nobody really wants to watch them in the Capitol as they are so depressing and the Districts don't really have enough access to TV to make them ubiquitous.  We see the seeds of the sophisticated entertainment machine it becomes by the time of the original trilogy (40 years later).  It's all quite well thought out and darkly realistic.  I note that this book was published 2 years after sports betting became legal in North America. And now that we are in the early stages of an authoritarian takeover of the US government, which is as clownishly unrealistic as the goofiest 1980s graphic novel, the Hunger Games does not seem like that much of a stretch.

Ultimately, this is both a bildungsroman and a star-crossed romance and both narratives are woven effectively to satisfying (though not happy) conclusions.  I found the ending a bit rushed, but still believable. It is always tricky to take a major antagonist, who is almost cartoonish in their evil and then go back in time and show them as a decent person to begin with.  Here, you sympathize with Snow because his situation is so shitty, but he displays a coldness and ambition from the beginning that coalesces into a scary worldview and the ultimate betrayal of his love and youthful ideals.  By the end, you can see how he becomes President Snow and how Panem gets to the time of Katniss high-production value Hunger Games.  Note, another advantage to reading books your kids recommend is you can lean on their excellent memories.  Saves so much time to just ask them about some side character or past event than having to flip back through the book.  They remember every scene!

26. The Dervish House by Ian McDonald

Years ago, after reading River of Gods, I had said that I would look for more Ian McDonald books.  I clearly did not live up to my word, as my excellent gift-giver brother-in-law, gave me this one last xmas and I had completely forgotten about who the author was.  I actually didn't really make the connection until after I was finished this one and I went back and searched my own blog.  My overall feelings were very similar for this book as well.  I quite enjoyed it, though without the excitement I had for River of Gods, but in the end it felt a bit somehow empty to me.  That's not entirely fair, as I really got into the narrative of Can, the adventurous 9 year-old boy with the heart condition and to some degree, that of his older friend, disgraced and failed professor Georgios Ferentinou.

The story takes place in near future Istanbul.  Turkey has joined the EU and nanotech is the big technology shift.  We follow several different characters on various quests, the two mentioned above, as well as a young gas commodities trader plotting a secret deal, an art dealer looking for the Mellified Man (this is a really cool concept), a young woman marketing graduate trying to find deals for her cousins' new bionanotech and a broken young man caught in a suicide bomber nano attack.  It's a lot to take in at the beginning.  The organizing motif is the Dervish House, which is a centuries old building they all live in.  It took me a while to figure that out, as well as what was going on.  The writing is really dense at times, almost too much so to my taste, so that it is slow going for the first half.

The portrayal of Istanbul (though I've read it may be somewhat inaccurate in many details that might almost make it laughable to actual people who live there) was what kept it going for me.  Even in the current times, it is a city that has always interested me.  I'd love to go visit there someday.  You really get a sense of the density and chaos and smells and feelings of this complex, layered historical bridge between Europe and Asia.

Once you finally figure out what is going on, the narrative definitely picks up and the book becomes quite fun. The last quarter is a real page-turner, though I could have gone with a bit more of a bang at the end.  

I realize that McDonald's thing is to sci-fi up different countries and cultures.  I guess that's a cool endeavour and I have had fun reading two of them, but it also feels a bit cultural appropriational.  I would prefer to read a sci-fi book about Istanbul by a Turkish sci-fi author, which I bet there are out there.  That being said, McDonald has a lot of intriguing other books out there, including his Luna series, which is supposed to be like a sci-fi Game of Thrones on the moon.  I'm not going to hunt these down because my on-deck shelf is almost spilling off the edge, but if they come to me in the future, I will read them.