23. The Hunger Games

The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins
Scholastic ePub edition, 275 pages, 2008


I know you have heard this from everyone and their mom by now but oh my God this was so good. SO GOOD. In case you live under a rock, it's a dystopian YA novel in which one boy and one girl from each of the 12 districts of Panem are selected as "tributes" and forced to participate in a televised battle to the death. This summary was, I'll admit, unappealing to me, but I read it anyway because of the buzz and I am completely won over. The suspense! The action! The romance! Agjsdlkgsfd! It stays far away from any kind of preachiness or political agenda, which I think was a smart move; instead it explores the choices and the sacrifices made by the tributes forced to participate in the brutal Games, all wrapped up in the most exciting adventure I've read since... I don't know, Harry Potter, maybe, but The Hunger Games sucked me in even more than that. I'm dyyyyying to read the next one but I don't want the series to end so I'm forcing myself to space it out. 


Next up: Small Gods by Terry Pratchett

22. East of Eden

East of Eden, John Steinbeck
Penguin Classics, 602 pages, 1952


Like most Americans my age, I read my fair share of Steinbeck in school--Of Mice and Men in the 9th grade (which was a total waste of time with the teacher I had) and The Grapes of Wrath in the 11th--but I must have been too young to appreciate it because I don't remember either of those novels being anywhere close to this stunning. Giants like this are hard for me to write blog posts about because I don't feel like I can say anything about a book so great and ambitious, but I can say that it made me so, so homesick for California, and proud to be from a state with such a rich and varied heritage, not to mention its literary tradition (Steinbeck! Henry Miller! The Beats! Just about every Asian American author I can think of!). Steinbeck is a master of the grand and the epic, and I think East of Eden also shows how well he knew and loved California and its history--the towns that sprang up out of nowhere overnight, the whorehouses, the character of its inhabitants. I loved Lee as a character--his insistence on being a servant for the Trask family despite other opportunities makes him less than ideal as a token minority, but what the hell, Steinbeck understood Asian Americans and their place in California history better than most white authors today. As he puts it: "Maybe it's true that we are all descended from the restless, the nervous, the criminals, the arguers and brawlers, but also the brave and independent and generous. If our ancestors had not been that, they would have stayed in their home plots in the other world and starved over the squeezed-out soil." It is probably a sign that I've been in Japan too long that that is getting me all choked up with patriotic fervor, that or I'm getting sentimental in my old age. 


Next up: The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

21. Sex and the City

Sex and the City, Candace Bushnell
Grove/Atlantic Kindle Edition, 240 pages, 1996


This probably would have jived (what is the past participle of jive anyway? Jove?) better with my frame of mind if I had picked it up during my failed attempt at dating in Japan and not right after embarking upon a new, sickeningly lovey-dovey relationship, but either way, it fucking sucked. The unrelenting cynicism was part of it, but it was really just ridiculous navel-gazing. I don't know anyone like the characters in this book and I doubt you do either. In fact, I had a really hard time keeping names straight because they were all just cardboard cutouts and none of them ever did anything interesting. For the most part I was reading the book as a completely separate entity from the TV show (which is loosely--key word loosely--based on it--some of the characters share names, it's set in New York; that's about it), but I was surprised to find that the Carrie in the book is self-destructive and, well, kind of a bitch. I think this whole mess might have actually worked with a likable heroine, but as it is I had to read it in tiny bits and pieces to even be able to stand it. 


Next up: East of Eden by John Steinbeck

20. Tales of the City

Tales of the City, Armistead Maupin
HarperPerennial ePub edition, 358 pages, 1978


Dang I need to catch up. I especially want to post more about Japan, but I have 4 book posts to get through too!


After reading this whole book I still can't decide if I liked it or not. It was originally serialized in the San Francisco Chronicle in the 1970s, and it is traaaash. It's very dated, I didn't like any of the characters, and it does this thing I hate where it pretends no one is born in San Francisco and everyone moved there to escape a stifling Midwestern upbringing. (Get out of my city, yo.) But it has its moments--the conversation between Anna Madrigal and Edgar Halcyon about how San Franciscans are reincarnations of the people of Atlantis got me right in the chest. And I still kind of love it in the way I love any book (movie, article) that lets me walk the streets of my beloved city and pass all the landmarks in my memory, not the touristy stuff that everyone knows but Mt. Davidson, Seal Rocks, Colma, the Marina Safeway.


This was also the first ebook I read on my new Kindle (more on that later), and while I absolutely love Kindle reading, my caveat for this particular ebook is that the text quality is HORRIBLE. Stray words at the end of paragraphs (widows and orphans for those knowledgeable about typesetting), weird spacing, question marks sprinkled throughout the text in place of various symbols, and at least one or two typos per chapter (and the chapters are like a page long). We're talking really bad typos here. The worst one was at the beginning of a chapter--a character's name, Beauchamp, was supposed to be the first word of the chapter but instead they wrote "eauchamp." With the lowercase "e" as a drop cap. I know I'm a copy editor but this goes beyond the kind of nitpicking I normally do; I think it would be distracting to the average person. I am actually embarrassed for the people who put this ebook together and I would not pay money for it again.


Next up: Sex and the City by Candace Bushnell

18. F. Scott Fitzgerald: This Side of Paradise and 19. Yukio Mishima: The Sound of Waves

This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald
Vintage (Random House), 264 pages, 1920

I read this as a pretentious 15-year-old and fully expected it to have failed the test of time eight years later. The only reason I wanted to read it again was because I was reading a biography of legendary Scribner editor Max Perkins before coming to Japan (which I never finished--might try to bring it back with me when I go on my trip home), and this was the novel that launched Perkins's (and Fitzgerald's) career. While rereading it I remembered how much it once meant to me, and discovered that even after college, the coming-of-age story of a self-absorbed, lazy, self-styled intellectual at Princeton wasn't half bad. I think I considered myself a female version of protagonist Amory Blaine when I first read it, and I want to be able to look back and say "Oh God, I was so full of it," but I kind of can't help but admire my teenage self for managing to be so damn earnest about this whole literature thing back when intellect was not considered a desirable trait by my peer group and Thursday Night Market was the closest thing to culture there was in town.
 

The Sound of Waves, Yukio Mishima
Vintage International (Random House), 183 pages, 1954, translated by Meredith Weatherby in 1956

After The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, reading a Mishima novel where both the hero and heroine are good, simple people and virtue triumphs over evil in the end was... strange, to say the least. I really enjoyed it, though! The writing is beautiful and it's full of all the now-familiar little details about Japanese village life (visiting the local shrine, meeting neighbors at the public bath, junior high school kids going on the yearly trip to Kyoto).

Next up: East of Eden by John Steinbeck