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.

25. Striding Folly by Dorothy L. Sayers

this image references
all 3 stories

I probably should not have read this book at this point in time, probably shouldn't have even picked it up, but here we are.  I say that because it is a collection of the final 3 Lord Peter Wimsey short stories with an essay about Sayers and Wimsey.  I was never going to be a completist with this character, so it's not a big deal, but I did feel a bit like I was cheating.  

The first story is about a retired man who is resenting the potential development of the estate land up which his small cottage looks.  When a stranger comes to visit and play chess with him (he is a known chess expert), it is actually an elaborate ruse to frame him for murder of said developer.  The chess match was cool, but they story and mystery were a bit pat and short to be satisfying, involving galosh prints in mud.

The second story has Wimsey, on the day of the birth of his first son, chatting with a perplexed police constable who thought he saw a murder through a mail slot and then returned to find nothing that he thought he saw to be anywhere near the truth.  I guessed this one but the answer seemed so silly that I dismissed it.  It was fun, though, to read the thoughts and dialogue of the aristocratic Wimsey thinking about being a new father.

The third story was the best, because of the funny way it captures the positive side of British upper class mores.  Wimsy is no on his third child, the first of which is accused of stealing prize peaches from a nearby neighbour.  The Wimseys also have a guest, the annoying Mrs. Quint, who keeps lecturing to them about child-rearing.  Wimsey and his son conspire her comeuppance as the former also solves the mystery, to the satisfaction and appreciation of the neighbour.  It's a lot of fun.

The essay by Janet Hitchman is okay.  It's an excellent reference if you want a summary of Wimsey's character and career as well as some biographical info on Sayers herself.  It doesn't have all that much interesting to say, though she tries, other than that.  The book itself is a nice NEL paperback and I hope that some Wimsey completist finds it when I give it away.

 

24. The Goodbye Look by Ross Macdonald

I was a bit wary about reading this one, as I understand there is a peak period with the Lew Archer novels. The Goodbye Look was published in 1969, on the later side and I suspected that this one might not be so great.  When an author works a certain specific style and themes their entire career, it can grow old and repetitive at the end of their work.  I didn’t want to expose myself to a lesser Lew Archer and then find that influencing my perception of his great books.  Nevertheless, it was thin and has a cool cover.  I was on a work trip and knew i could only read in snatches and thought a detective book would be an easily digestible follow.  I was correct on my first worry and incorrect on the second prediction.  The Goodbye Look is a decent read, but it does feel tired, dwelling overly and too heavily on the sins of the past and the lies of couples and parents.  It also had a complex mystery with too many characters so that I got quite confused at times.  This book should be read in one sitting or at least several chunks.  The plot is actually really well-constructed and clever (and messed up) but it takes some focus to keep it all together.

Archer gets hired by a lawyer, Trutwell to help his wealthy clients, the Chalmers, to recover a jewelry box filled with letters that was stolen from them.  The lawyer lives next door to the Chalmers and they have a long history together.  However, the Chalmers don’t seem keen on Archer’s involvement.  Right away, you can tell that there are secrets everywhere and everyone involved doesn’t want to say anything.  Archer, of course, plods along, continuing to probe until he finds out quite quickly that their son Nick is quite likely the culprit.   He has a history of psychological instability and there is a risk of suicide.  He has been hanging out with an older woman and a rougher young man, despite supposedly in love with Trutwell’s nice daughter.  Tracking them down, Archer finds the rougher young man shot to death in his car.  This is where things get complex and we get a bunch of storylines from the past including an embezzled bank (and the disappearance of the money), affairs while boyfriends are away at the war and just a whole lot of lying.

Now that we all know the sad history of the Millar’s, it is hard to extricate their personal struggles from the books.  The themes in The Goodbye Look seem to hit particularly hard in this area and it is troubling to think of the two writers working on this book together which discusses the crimes of wayward children and how their parents dealt with them.  I think part of what makes this book lacking is that there is so much focus on the family and very little on the time and place.  There is also more explicit pscyhological talk, both in the dialogue and Archer’s thoughts.  His metaphors as well were getting a bit forced at this point.

I know I’m sounding really critical.  On its own, it’s an impressively intricate mystery with a pretty good portrayal of the morally bankrupt bourgeoisie.  It just can’t compare to his earlier works and one risks perhaps enjoying them less if you read them after this one.  So I recommend it for Archer completists only.

 

23. Diplomatic Immunity by Lois McMaster Bujold (#12 in the Vorkosigan saga)

Still in catch-up mode, I went to the queen of fun and fulfilling (and quick to read), the Vorkosigan series.  Diplomatic Immunity thoroughly delivered.  It was as enjoyable and rich as the previous books with the added bonus that all the previous background to Miles and his various associates, and especially the galaxy-building all come into play here.  My old man memory has held up enough or perhaps after 11 books, I have internalized much of it, that I was able to stay entirely on top of the big-picture space strategy plot points that came up.  This was what I was looking for when I started researching a sci-fi series so long ago.  So very satisfying.

Here Miles is now newly-married, settling into his role as Imperial Auditor and seemingly a slight more staid life than before.  He and Ekaterina are returning from their honeymoom to prepare to settle down and welcome the birth of their son and daughter, in uterine containers back on Barrayar.  Of course, everything goes to shit when he gets a call to deal with a conflict between a Barrayar military escort with the local authorities of the remote Graf station, in Quaddiespace.  The Quaddies were genetically developed with four arms instead of two arms and two legs, specifically for construction and living in zero-gravity and due to persecution and exploitation set off centuries before to make their own colony. 

It's a complicated situation involving initially a disappeared, either deserted or kidnapped or murdered, security officer, plus an "overzealous" (or brutal) attack by Barrayan officers when they went to return to the ship a late-returning pilot.  Things get more and more complicated and risky as the situation continues to escalate to a galactic level.  I'm not going to say more than that.  This was another fun one, involving a great look at the Quaddie world and how they live, lots of gross bio-weapons and some cool, exciting last-minute space action.  I can't wait to see where they go next.

22. Closed Circuit by William Haggard

boring as hell for a photo cover
but still looks cool

Back to fiction and wow what a boost to my reading!  This book was thin and I burned through it in two days, thoroughly enjoying myself.  I love all kinds of reading but it sure is nice when you don't have to re-read passages, check the maps over and over again and even go to Wikipedia to try and figure out the historical context.  

It doesn't hurt how beautiful these Penguins are.  I'm not a massive Haggard fan, but I keep all of his that I find because the editions are so lovely and look great on my shelf.  I know it is pure snobbery, but I love the back tagline of this book "the 'adults' Ian Fleming".  It is so true.  These are smart espionage books.  Sometimes perhaps a bit too smart, as Haggard loves oblique conversations (and even sometimes narrative passages) where nothing specific is mentioned and the read has to infer what is actually going on.  I think this is often how intelligent spymasters do actually talk, but there are also elements that refer to subtle class distinctions in England that can be tough for a 21st century North American to parse.

The story here contains Haggard's usual elements: skullduggery involving a fictional foreign nation that somewhat implicates Britain as well.  However, it is off to the side from his usual sandbox, only indirectly involving the Security Executive branch.  The protagonist is Francis Mason, the heir of a multi-generational farming family of English descent from the South American country of Candoro (an analogue of paraguay perhaps).  His grandfather and the patriarch of the estancia (named "Seven" because it was the seventh plot of land granted to colonialists in the 19th century) drove off a local official in a humiliating way (knocking him down with bolas just after he had left the property) and that local has recently become the president of the country.  He is making serious trouble for Seven so Mason heads off to England in the hope of getting some support from the British Foreign Office and sympathetic people in the Candoran embassy.  His first "ally" is Kenneth Gibb, an ambitious and less than ethical middle ranking diplomat who also had an affair with Mason's wife.  Mason is portrayed initially as a bit soft and passive, but as the narrative unfolds, we of course see that he is made of sterner stuff, as he threads the needle of all the various enemies working around him.

It's a fun read, though I found the ending a bit too dependent on chance.  I didn't mind as there is an excellent scene here of the kind of subtle badassery that is why I read these books.  Just so fucking cool.  The whole thing about Mason is that he is descended from good British stock and his grandfather was a famous badass landowner.  So he inherited that toughness and also was raised on the estancia, learning to ride, work cattle, but he also grew up with the peons and learned all their sweet knife-fighting skills, which gets revealed to the reader at the best possible moment.  He is shown as deferring and polite, just trying to minimize trouble and save his Estancia, while all these nastier and seemingly more sophisticated players are maneuvering around him to screw him out of his money.  When things get nasty for real as an assassin is sent to take out one of those players (with whom he had become allied and started to respect) in a London park, suddenly Mason is whipping out a 14" facón that nobody knew he had on him and completely besting the assassin to the point where he discusses whether or not he should kill him and decides not to because the body would cause problems for them.

 

The Kenneth Gibb character is interesting as well as in some ways the book is more about him.  Haggard really has it in for him.  He starts out as seeming that he will be quite a problem for our protagonist but ends up just getting utterly screwed left and right, to the point where though he initiated much of it with bad selfish decisions, you start to feel bad for him.  By the end he goes out in the worst possible way.  One feels that he may have been a type that Haggard dealt with in his own life, so severe is his retribution.