The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

I know that I said I didn't want to read anything completely depressing or disturbing or post-apocalyptic BUT my son is reading these books and I want to be able to talk to him about them. I read them years ago when they came out and honestly, remembered the first one pretty well, but not the subsequent books, so I'm re-reading them now so that I may be able to talk to my son about them. They're SUPER quick reads - I read this one in about 1.5 days - so I don't feel too badly reading them and the best part is that I get to talk to my kid about them.

The Hunger Games is a Young Adult book that was written maybe ten years or so ago - and the movies catapulted Jennifer Lawrence to fame. It is a dystopian Young Adult book where the world is post-apocalyptic for lack of a better way of describing it. The novel takes place in the United States and the country is governed by an authoritarian regime that has divided the country into 13 Districts. Each district is known for something - District 12, where our main characters hail from - is Appalachia and is known, therefore, for coal mining.  Young people - children anywhere from 10 through 18 - are forced to compete in the annual Hunger Games tournament, where they have to kill each other in order to win basic necessities for their respective districts.  The whole point is to remind the inhabitants of the punishment that they must endure for rebelling in previous years.  The main character - Katniss - volunteers to be the tribute from District 12 so that her younger sister Prim doesn't have to go. The rest of the novel follows Katniss as she tries to stay alive during the Hunger Games.

This is a typical Young Adult novel.  I generally enjoyed it but am now surprised that it was geared towards the age group that it was, and deals with the topics that it does.  Literally, the age group the novel was written for is reading about their peers killing each other off for entertainment of rich government types.  It's not a book I would let my child read alone, obviously. Read along and talk about the themes with your reader on this one!  I generally liked it. It moved quickly and really hooks you.  Definitely read it but tread with caution with your child as it is VERY intense.

Lyle

I first met Lyle the summer when I was on the North Shore in Massachusetts.  Until recently, Rockport had been a dry town, even though selling alcohol would have made the local eateries a lot of money from the tourists during the summer and the locals during the long winters, when the nights were long, dark and quiet. Once the town decided to start selling alcohol, the locals came out of the woodwork but none so much as Lyle and his two buddies.

Lyle was famous - infamous actually.  He and his red "Make America Great Again" hat were practically permanent fixtures in the seafood joint a block away from the one bedroom apartment he shared with the girlfriend 20 years his junior.  I never understood why she was with him and she never explained it to me.  Lyle didn't seem to have money and with the amount he drank, he was unlikely to do much in bed besides snore loudly and keep her awake.

I met him on a Saturday afternoon in late June.  I was in the middle of a two week sabbatical from my policy wonk job in a northern, landlocked, mountainous city and was enjoying the sun, white wine, early morning runs and the company.  I had wanted to do some writing, but nothing was forthcoming so instead, I spent my time reading, doing long training runs in anticipation of a half-marathon in the fall, and observing the people around me.

My attention was immediately drawn to Lyle in large part because of the bright red hat that he wore.  Die-hard, proud Republicans were few and far between in what we Northern New Englanders called "The People's Republic of Massachusetts." He was wearing a wrinkled white golf shirt and white shorts, that contrasted with the almost offensively bright red of his hat and face. His personality was bigger than his physical being - he wasn't much taller than my 5 foot 2 frame but his chi took up nearly all of the space around him.

Lyle was old, but in a well-preserved way likely due to the embalming effects of the quantity of alcohol that he drank - which seemingly was by the gallon.  When I first met him that mid-afternoon, he was already half in the bag and bragging about how he had been drinking since mid-morning to celebrate how the Red Sox were 2 games up on the Yankees and how Trump's approval rating was at its peak - the impeachment scandal was not on anyone's radar at that time.

Lyle was loud and I could hear him over the low din that was a busy bar in a tourist beach town during the summer.  Luckily, he was with Lou and Sam - a trio that affectionately called themselves the Three Amigos after the Chevy Chase, Steve Martin and Martin Short comedic tag team.  There was a distinct space around them, as if the tourists knew not to come too close or they would become targets of what they instinctively knew would be a local's ire at having to share their watering hole with the people that kept the town afloat.

"Do you think that I would be able to get a word in edgewise with that one," I asked my wine sipping partner, also a local.  "He seems like he'd be a fascinating one to talk to, his political judgment aside."

My drinking partner snorted and looked at me dubiously.  "Good luck with that. I'd pay to have your car detailed if you so much as got him to even answer a question coherently," he said, in a tone of voice that was laden with doubt.

Never one to turn down a challenge, particularly where a much needed car detailing was on the line, I responded "It's on," as I got up and sidled down to the other end of the bar.  And boy did I learn some stuff....

Maine by J. Courtney Sullivan

I enjoyed Sullivan's novel, Commencement, so I wanted to try this novel by her and it has the added benefit of taking place in areas that I'm familiar with and have visited. 

In this novel, we meet at least three generations of Kelleher women that all have strong, strong personalities that make them both resilient and difficult to get along with.  Alice is the matriarch of the family who has no qualms about calling her granddaughter a tramp during an argument and then laying into her granddaughter's mother (yes, Alice's own daughter!). Kathleen, another of the Kelleher women, is a recovering alcoholic who moved to California with her partner and became a worm farmer.  The family owns a compound in Cape Neddick that Alice has decided to majorly change and all hell breaks loose as a result.

Please don't think that this is a "beach" book.  It's not because firstly, it's 500 pages, which I absolutely love.  I love big books and I can't lie. It's about Catholicism and how each generation has viewed it and internalized it, or not. It looks at how Catholicism has impacted or fostered guilt and how the family lives. The secret that this family harbors that impacts the generations and how Sullivan demonstrates that is masterful and ruthless at the same time.  It's such a work of absolute genius.

Sullivan alternated between four narrators and I found this to be a very effective way to convey flaws, secrets and to forward the plot as well as the themes.  I don't know how else she could have done so in a novel such as this. Quite frankly, I love how the book is written from the perspectives of four women and how it's about women's lives.  While there are more and more books like this nowadays, not many are as effective as this one in conveying not only the "in your face themes" but also the subtle nuances and pressures that women often put on each other.  

This books is a must read. 

What Should I Read Next?

I recently read a blog post about reading books that are outside of your comfort zone and how this particular blogger found herself consistently reading the same sort of book and it got me to thinking.  I looked at my reading history and found that I definitely read the same sorts of books: feminist dystopian fiction, dystopian fiction, biography and memoir, gender studies, history, literature that deals with toxic (OK, dysfunctional and f***** up families) people and relationships as a way of making a point about society.  I don't learn anything that I really don't already know. It's not pushing me to learn anything new.  I read because yes, I enjoy it VERY much but I read because I like to learn.  It's very satisfying to me.  And I can't do that with reading the same sorts of books over and over again.

So, in that vein, I am looking for reading recommendations.  What should I read next?  I DO have one request though. Because of my job, I'm looking to avoid legal commentary right now.  I use reading also to re-charge my brain after a long day of work in the legal community and I would prefer to use my limited free time to do something besides that. Please put your thoughts into the comments. 

I cannot WAIT to see what everyone puts in the comments!

The Angel's Game by Carlos Ruis Zafon

I first fell in love with Zafon earlier this year when I read The Shadow of the Wind, Zafon's most famous work, as translated into English. I bought the next installment in the series, The Angel's Game, right away in spite of my better judgement (at the time!) because I have a history of not enjoying subsequent books in the series.  And I'm glad that I did.

The novel is about David Martin, a young man born into poverty into Barcelona and his desire to be a master storyteller and novel writer. At the start of the novel, David is living in a boarding house and is writing penny, murder mysteries for a sketchy duo of publishers that have, essentially, enslaved him. He then receives an invitation from a mysterious Parisian publisher and eventually meets the publisher, who is well-dressed, well educated and well spoken and, as the Mafia is wont to do, who makes David an offer he can't refuse. David has learned that he has a terminal brain tumor right around the time that he accepts the proposal and accepts the proposal in large part because this mysterious publisher has promised that David will live if David writes the novel. David begins the research for the book and becomes slowly consumed by the process, descending into a complex mix of mystery and gothic.

The book started slowly.  There is a lot of laying the groundwork and there are also parts where Zafon is laying the plot and religious and historical groundwork for the action that occurs in the second half of the book.  There is no doubt in my mind that Zafon is a master storyteller in any language.  I read the English translation and it was a divine story and translation.  I was engaged in large part because the book is about characters that love everything about books: reading them, writing them, consuming them at any cost.  And Zafon's style is wonderful.  I thoroughly enjoyed all parts of this book.  

Local Bookstores Rock!

So, I read this story in The Guardian and it made me so happy.  Jeff Kinney is most famous for writing The Diary of a Wimpy Kid books. My son absolutely loves them.  It turns out that his love for books extends to selling them in independent bookstores too - he opened up (or helped to open up) a bookstore in Massachusetts.  It's a little less than 90 minutes from here, on a good day, so I'm considering bringing the kids there because both of them like the Wimpy Kids books.  But that's not the purpose of this post.

I love me a good independent bookstore.  I've always been a reader so that shouldn't be a surprise, but most people don't know that I have my own brand of tourism.  In each place I go to, I try to visit the city's or locale's independent bookstore if one has them.  It started when I was in Portland, Oregon for work and one of my co-workers suggested I visit Powell's, which I of course did, at 7 months pregnant and waddling.  It was the best thing I had ever done and I haven't stopped since and it's been 12 years (well, nearly - I was pregnant with my son).

Anyways, I am looking forward to seeing this new store.  My favorite local indies are:

1. Gibson's in Concord.  So dangerous when I used to work in Concord.
2. The Toadstool in Milford.

Please, please, please pay them a visit.