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By jamie, March 21, 2012 9:30 pm

Katniss Everdeen is what some might call a strong female character. While still a child, she managed to keep her family alive despite all odds (even her mother, who had mentally checked out) in a very treacherous world where many a strong person would have failed. That’s why it irks me that she is written to be so needy and clueless so much of the time. Had this book been centered around a boy instead, he would not have been at the center of a love triangle of girls willing to sacrifice themselves to keep her alive and safe. He would have probably done a better job at reading his potential enemies and allies (Hmm – these people I don’t know are willingly laying down their lives for me instead of killing me – that’s odd, I just can’t figure it out… Really?).

How I wish a writer would create a strong female character who doesn’t willingly surrender all of her power to a boy the first chance she gets (I’m looking at you, Bella Swan) or who isn’t referred to predominantly in terms of what boy she should choose (Team Gale!…no, Team Peeta!). Maybe someone already has, but no one is reading their books. That would be sad. Please let me know if I am missing any strong-girl gold. And maybe I’m being unfair – she is, after all, supposed to be a child.

The author works in television, so maybe her foreshadowing would be less “clobber the reader over the head” if we were viewing this on screen rather than just “hearing” the internal dialogue of a single character. And on a positive note, she does a fairly decent job of character description even with a single narrator – we know quite a bit about the main characters, and enough to care about several supporting characters as well. For example, I am crossing my fingers for Cinna, Haymitch, and Finnick.

Despite the teen romance angle, this book puts us smack dab into what the series is really about – war and revolution. And it’s not pleasant; it’s ugly and people die. Sometimes authors shy away from killing off characters we have come to like and, while it’s true she introduces people in this book just to off them in the arena, it’s uncomfortable to read about their passing (this is true of the first book as well). Also, even though we can be fairly certain of their ultimate survival, she does not make things easy for the main characters. At all. Those Gamemakers are some serious sadists – I had to quit reading for a day after the fog scene and I still haven’t quite recovered from the zombie mutts in Book 1, to be honest with you.

I really hope the final book does a decent job of answering the many lingering questions I have. I would like to know more about the roots of the rebellion – when it began, and what role Haymitch played in it (I like him). What really happened in the global war? The rest of the world was destroyed, right? Panem is the only inhabited place? Where did the idea for the medieval torture devices used by the peacekeepers come from? They have those fancy guns, but they shackle and whip people instead – did someone read about these techniques in a history book or on the Internet, because given the absurd level of stupidity displayed by the capitol (although perhaps it really is just arrogance), I kind of get the impression that no history books have survived the initial war or the “Dark Days.”

Oh, and what about the fact that Peeta can’t get a decent prosthetic, but Katniss can get high-tech body polishes which rid her body of all scars? I’m curious, because it’s the other way around in 2012. I guess all of the world’s medical technology must have been destroyed in the global war that took all of the history books and useful computer files. (I guess computer technology was completely obliterated, leaving the future with only land-line phones and old-school television, but I digress.) Or maybe it’s simply less objectionable to let the heroic pretend boyfriend have a potentially fatal disability than to allow our pretty strong girl to have a few battle scars.

I hope I haven’t given the impression that I’m not enjoying these books, because I am. I prefer Catching Fire to the first one, only partly because of that dreadful zombie mutt business. Katniss might not be the strong girl character I’ve been hoping for, but she has her moments. We can’t forget that she VOLUNTEERED for the Games in order to save her sister (and the scene where she goes over the electric fence and frustrates the peacekeepers – just, wow). And maybe she’s just socially inept because she has been so focused on survival for all these years. I quite literally have hundreds of papers to grade this week, but I have been trying to sneak a few minutes here and there to read The Mockingjay, and so far I am impressed with some of Collins’ choices in that novel.

On that note, I understand a trip to the cinema is in order this weekend – I am trying to remain hopeful about the film, even though I have already read a lousy review. Already I see the characters from the movie in my thoughts as I read the third installment. Especially Donald Sutherland – he is also haunting my dreams. (And he smells like blood and roses in my dreams – uh oh, please tell me he’s not a vampire.)

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By jamie, March 6, 2012 8:27 pm

I had heard, and seen on the movie previews, that this series is about a futuristic world where children are forced to participate in a fight to the death. My immediate assumption was that the book was going to be predictable – my first prediction was that the two lead characters, Katniss and Gale, would be chosen for this horrific tournament, and I wondered how they would both manage to make it out alive.

So much for that. In retrospect, I should have seen it coming, the love triangle. These books are all the rage right now, and it would be hard for a young adult series about class struggle and revolution to obtain this level of popularity without a love triangle.

Haymitch is the mentor for the District 12 Tribute tributes. I like him. Some might say his time in the arena ruined him, but I think he must have been a good and decent person when he went in, which is why he continues to struggle long after surviving the Hunger Games. How many children did he kill? Does he still dream about being hunted? I think that, for most people, being required to participate in such a horrific contest would be death sentence whether or not one survived – unlike war, where fighting is for a cause, the Games are for entertainment, as well as punishment for a revolution that happened long before these children were alive. Participants are turned into living chess pieces – someone dresses them, decorates them, and then they are told how to behave before they are paraded before potential sponsors who can help improve or destroy their odds of survival in this fight to the death.

Given the circumstances, the televised romance between Katniss and Peeta was hard to tolerate at first – obviously this was a dig at real life “reality television,” where we thrill to see “love” blossoming in the fishbowl. But these contestants could be murdered at any minute, which made the whole thing ring hollow, from the spectator’s viewpoint (but then, this reveals something we already knew about the residents of the Capital, doesn’t it?). Katniss is ever conscious of how her behavior is playing on TV, and “young love” turns out to be a brilliant strategy, leaving the young lovers conflicted, but alive.

The book sparks more questions than it answers, and hopefully this will change as the series progresses. Because it is told entirely from Katniss’ perspective, we aren’t privy to what is going on around in the rest of the country. I haven’t decided yet if I love this story. Despite any misgivings (or possibly because of them), the day after I finished this first installment, I crossed my fingers, took a deep breath, and began the second book.

The movie will be released soon, and it feels very morbid, watching all of the hoopla surrounding it – magazine covers, movie trailers, advertisements for various merchandise. Normally this would not seem inappropriate, but given the premise of the books, does this mean we are supposed to be the residents of the Capitol? Perhaps the worst advertisement:

Maybe I shouldn’t think about it too much, or I will talk myself out of going to see the film, and I am actually looking forward to it. I just won’t be wearing the nail polish.

It’s too bad, because “Dress me Up” and “Smoke and Ashes” really are quite lovely.

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By jamie, October 14, 2011 1:00 pm

Full disclosure – I am a fan of Jillian Michaels. One of the first books I read for this blog was her Master Your Metabolism, and my review is still one of my “greatest hits” over a year later.

If you are looking for weight loss tips, try her other book instead. This one is about changing bad habits in general in order to become more successful in life in general. Fears? Insecurities? Getting in your own way? Some of her advice might have been written before, but it’s worth reading in her “voice.” That said, she shares quite a bit of information about body and muscle development and uses it as a way to explain overall personal improvement. She also uses weight loss in some of her explanations about how to shift self-destructive thinking. One of my favorite examples is her trick to overcoming negative emotional attachments by substituting them with positive ones: rather than thinking of the treadmill as a torture device (or referring to is as a “dread-mill,” like so many of us do!), think about it as a means to “looking awesome in skinny jeans, more energy, better sex life” or some such. If fast food feels like comfort and convenience to you, concentrate on thinking about it as a ticket to “muffin tops, lethargy, self-loathing, muumuus” to help you break the habit.

Some of the advice comes straight from The Secret, and is all about keeping our thoughts positive and enlisting help from the universe to reach our goals. I am actually pretty happy that she includes this – people who have no plans to read the more popular text will be able to benefit from this strategy for eliminating negativity because they are fans of Jillian Michaels. It is no secret how she has helped numerous contestants deal with years of poor self esteem and feelings of failure – this is our chance to share some of that experience without going on television to get it (well, she has moved on to greener pastures anyway).

This book majorly emphasizes psychotherapy. She suggests finding a good therapist to help you overcome various mental obstacles, and hints that many of our problems are caused by being mistreated by someone in the past. I am all for getting help from experts, but I don’t think all of our challenges are caused by other people at the root.

Some of this is boiler-plate self-help book, snarked up by Jillian Michaels to sound less “fluffy” and more like a tough but caring friend is sharing life experience to help pull you out of your rut. She also spends a great deal of time describing her own pathway to success, and suggests that we should find a mentor and, in the absence of a “real life” guru, to read all we can about successful people we admire and copy their career trajectory. This advice lends itself well to work success, but can certainly be applied to home life, hobbies and, yes, even weight loss.

A lot of the anecdotes she gives come from the Biggest Loser show, where she was always a straight-shooter who practically bullied her team into overcoming their mental obstacles and achieving victory. (I miss her on the Biggest Loser and, no offense to Anna K., I think she would have been much tougher on the older group and they would not have lost three people the first four weeks.)

The book mentions accompanying exercises on her website. I have not looked at those. There are little icons in the margins of some of the pages that direct you to interactive content. This might be helpful to some, but I was focused more on what I could learn from the book by itself. Overall I think it’s a useful read for those who want to be better at anything they try and who need a bit of a push in the right direction.

Scroll down for other posts about Unlimited:

Review
Part 1: Unlimited: How to Build an Exceptional Life, by Jillian Michaels
Part 2: Anxiety and Fear
Part 3: Target Practice
Part 4: You Didn’t Mean Not To

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By jamie, October 11, 2011 7:46 pm

Claire Dederer is clever. After suffering chronic back pain, she took up yoga, and spent years at one studio or another, trying to improve her practice and her life at the same time. Now she has written a memoir using yoga poses to frame significant events in her life. For example, she describes a photo of her mother “flying” in crow pose with her father looking on in the background when she introduces the fact that her mother left her dad soon after that photo was taking.

She deftly weaves her story back and forth between childhood and adulthood. Both have their moments, and this is not one you should read in public if you are a closet crier. She mentions her long-term habit of keeping a journal, and her efforts certainly paid off here – she is able to capture the feeling of growing up at a very specific time in U.S. history (early 1970s, complete with hippies and challenging “traditional” models of family and gendered behavior).

The title of the book sounds mildly self-deprecating, and the book is too. She starts off portraying herself as somewhat of a “poseur” – trying to keep up with all the other liberal uber-moms in Seattle, with their attachment parenting (I think she actually drew the line before going full stop with that), baby-led weaning (which for her ended abruptly when the baby got too big and injured her mama’s back), and co-op preschool (so she could be as hands-on as possible). She compares herself to other moms, wears the uniform (evidently Danskin clogs are very important), and berates herself for not being better. We learn that she is a former “hipster” and I, who have never been a hipster, half expect her to start talking about dressing her kid in ironic t-shirts and introducing her to a world of music snobbery.

Then she starts providing more details about her life, and everything changes. Her kids both come home from the hospital by way of the NICU – one with her own oxygen tank, and Claire Dederer becomes a wounded mother employing a painful combination of rigid conformity and magical thinking to keep her babies from disappearing. And then we hear about her own tricky childhood – her mother moves in with a younger man but remains married to her father. The kids shuffle back and forth between parents (sometimes this involves a boat) and are constantly told that nothing is amiss in this family. It no longer seems surprising that this woman exerts and obscene amount of energy maintaining a particular sort of persona, one that appears strong and steady – she must have felt a lot of pressure as a kid trying to find her place in her broken (but not broken?) family which also included a shifting network of her mother’s friends.

She analyzes to what extent we are products of the choices our parents make but, as she moves from yoga class to yoga class she shares with us how she found her own identity. Her kids were hard-won, as was becoming a person she could be comfortable being. Her honesty is sometimes uncomfortable – far from being a poseur, she lets us in on her private insecurities, the types of things we ruminators get stuck on but would be loathe to share aloud.

Yoga, even in a room full of people, is really a very quiet, personal thing. Claire Dederer invites us to listen in on her thoughts as she twists and folds on the mat – sometimes cheating a bit – and manages to make the narrative almost worthy of reading out loud. By the end, and I am sure I am not the only one, I am tempted to look up a yoga studio and show up immediately with mat in hand.

Scroll down for other posts about Poser:

Review
Part 1: Poser: My Life in Twenty-Three Yoga Poses, by Claire Dederer
Part 2: Lonely Books
Part 3: Imperfect People are Just My Type
Part 4: Smashed Cupcakes and Date Night
Part 5: Running Away From Home
Part 6: Yoga Teachers, Feminism, and Big Words

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By jamie, September 30, 2011 2:57 pm

In recent years, I have been fascinated by some of the research being published social economics. I like the idea that some economists are interested in more than just capitalism and “the bottom line” (caveat – I have never taken an economics class, and I might be somewhat ignorant as to what most general economists write about), so when I heard about this book, I was excited to read it. The authors, Paula Szuchman and Jenny Anderson, are journalists rather that economists, so I figured the economics portions of the book would be just technical enough to teach me something without losing me.

There is some risk in thinking you can learn a great deal about marriage by reading a book – just as our children socialize us to be parents, our spouses socialize us to be marital partners (for better or worse). That said, it is always valuable to hear different perspectives, and this book is full of information and examples from other married couples. I actually finished the book over a month ago, and I still find myself referring back to specific concepts that can hopefully help us achieve (maintain?) marital bliss.

To research this book the authors conducted a huge survey, where they surveyed and then interviewed hundreds of people all over the United States, asking them detailed and personal questions about their marriages. Throughout the book, we are presented with case studies taken from these interviews; sometimes informative, and other times uncomfortably voyeuristic, these vignettes certainly keep the book lively despite its grounding in economics.

Particularly for those who think that marriage is a one-time deal, and that making someone part of your family means that you are intimately attached to them for life or longer, it might be challenging to think about marriage as an economic partnership. We might think of our marriages as “too big to fail” much the way some gigantic corporations do (some think this even as they are about to crash horribly, taking employees and shareholders down with them – some do not recover from these often avoidable catastrophes). Even if we think there is a zero percent chance that our marriages will end badly, it is definitely worth it to do what we can to make our spouse’s lives (and, by extension, our own) as happy as we possibly can.

I actually finished reading this book over a month ago, and I can say that it has made me rethink some of my habits and decisions. Housework still gets away from me at times, and I’m pretty sure GB would be happier if I spent more time on the treadmill and less time shopping (the book talks about both of these issues). And I want for him to be happy, and proud to have me for a wife (please don’t take that in a sexist way – in an ideal world we should all be proud of our spouses, no?). As I write this, I rededicate myself to doing my part to make my home a happy place to be.

GB generously agreed to read this book with me and blog about it from his perspective. He did a great job on the one post he wrote, which was a big deal, considering he is not too keen on sharing his life in this way with the entire world (even though it’s a pretty small world mostly consisting of our parents and friends). Now that I’m finished with the book, I will hand it back to him to use as he sees fit. This might mean you will read more about it here, or not. I told him not to feel obligated – putting oneself “out there” in a blog, even one with a very small readership, can be an uncomfortable experience for many of us (and is hardly the way to make my husband happier if he is only doing it because I asked him to).

Most of my criticisms about the book are not worth mentioning, with two notable exceptions. The first one is about sex. It’s unsurprising that a book about marriage would include mention of this topic, but these authors managed to overdo it. Not only did they devote an entire chapter to sex (the title was “Supply and Demand” – haha), they found as many opportunities as possible to turn the discussion in this direction. Most of the time it seemed as though they were trying to be funny – they did not succeed. Some of their quips actually made me feel embarrassed for them.

My other major annoyance is that the authors made it plainly obvious (and I’m sure this was unintentional) that the book was written for middle- to upper-middle class people. They did not really cover marriages of people who are so stressed out with trying to put food on the table that they probably do not have the luxury to complain about their less-than-perfect spouse. They also managed to include an unfunny joke about gentrification and several examples of “free spirits” (read “freeloaders”), all of which I found to be appalling.

Despite these missteps, I am not one to throw the baby out with the bathwater, so I recommend this book to anyone who wants to improve their relationship with their spouse or significant other. You might learn a few things about economics which may help you better understand some of the shenanigans major corporations engage in these days (given my lack of education in economics, I cannot vouch for their accuracy in this area, but you can probably learn enough economic theory to get you through a dinner party, at least). The book will also give you plenty to think about that can help improve your marriage or relationship, or keep it humming smoothly if you are already (or still) in a state of happy marital bliss (and you will learn about how these things can be cyclical – not unlike housing bubbles, so you don’t freak out when it’s not all roses and sunshine as time goes on).

Scroll down for other posts about Spousonomics:

Review
Part 1: Spousonomics, by Paula Szuchman and Jenny Anderson
Part 2: Yoga and Over-Cooked Chicken
Part 3: Unpacking my Suitcases
Part 4: Don’t Lecture Me
Part 5: Games and Bubbles
GB Part 1: Post-privacy and Marriage