The Hunger Games trilogy: Impossible to put down

January 4, 2012 3 Comments

The Hunger Games Trilogy

Given its ‘young adult’ tag, The Hunger Games trilogy didn’t really appeal to me, but I’d heard a lot of chatter of late, and the preview for the movie piqued my interest, so I decided to give it a try. Let me just say, Suzanne Collins wrote it well enough that they would appeal to any age group. Over the Christmas break I began reading The Hunger Games, and two days later I’d finished the next two in the series, Catching Fire and Mockingjay – the books are that addictive.

The story is told from the point of view of Katniss Everdeen, a 16-year old from District 12, in the country of Panem. It takes place sometime in the future in a post-apocolyptic world where Panem is a large country spreading across North America. It is ruled from the central city called the Capitol which also oversees 11 other districts which produce various goods to feed the main city.

To give a bit of an outline of what you’ll find in the first book, the Hunger Games is an annual tournament where a boy and girl between the ages of 12 and 18 are drawn from a pool in each district and sent to compete in a battle televised for all of Panem, but for the pleasure of those in the Capitol. The games are yearly reminder that the Capitol rules the district and it is meant to quell any thoughts of rebellion that may arise.

The first book’s main focus was the Hunger Games, and as a standalone book it was great. As I moved on to Catching Fire and Mockingjay the overarching story developed into a society on the brink of collapse and eventually a full-on rebellion against the Capitol by the Districts. Expanding the story gave it so much more depth, and made it into one that dealt with the problems in this broken society, and not so much about the games themselves.

When it comes to the characters, Collins’ writing brings the cast to life. Each one, especially Katniss, Peeta and Gale, has a distinct personality and throughout each story you see how those personalities come into play. As with every novel that I love, each of the main District 12 characters have a solid back story so you get a sense of what made them who they are. They’re supported by many other characters from across Panem, and though there are many to keep track of, it rarely gets confusing.

The one thing irked me the most was what that after spending so much time leading to the final showdown in Mockingjay, the conclusion read as if it was point form notes to let everyone know what happened and how the characters fared. It didn’t do the story justice to rush through the end like that and it left a bit of a bitter taste in my mouth.

All that being said, I still enjoyed the story overall and would recommend it to everyone who’s a fan of the dystopian theme a la 1984 or Brave New World. I give The Hunger Games a 5/5, Catching Fire 5/5, and Mockingjay 4.5/5.

What did you think of the trilogy?

Before you go, check out the trailer for the movie, which is coming out in March and starring Jennifer Lawrence:

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My top 5 books of 2011

December 31, 2011 Leave a comment

Last year I attempted to to read 26 books in 52 weeks, but unfortunately life got in the way and could only manage to get through 16. This year I contemplated doing the same challenge, but figured I’d just read as much as I could and not look for a goal, but I managed to read 16 again this year anyway. Oh, these are my favourite books that I’ve read this year, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they were published this year:

5. Between the Assassinations

Between the AssassinationsAravind Adiga’s Between the Assassinations was the second book I reviewed this year and I was really pleased with his second output.

The book features a series of ‘day in the life’ stories from people of (fictional) Kittur, India, shortly after the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in 1984. With that lens it looks at many issues including: caste, sexual disease, drug problems, political corruption, the influx of villagers seeking a better life in the city, and much more.

As with many of the books that really speak to me, this one has very strong characters whose stories stick with you long after you’ve moved on from their tale.

4. Fall of Giants

Fall of GiantsIt seems like I’ve only read the biggest books by Ken Follett; first there was Pillars of the Earth, then World Without End and now Fall of Giants. Each of these were either a bit less or a bit more than 1000 pages, so they weren’t all that fun to read on public transit, but they were all very well written.

Fall of Giants is a fictional story based on history and takes place during the 13 1/2 years leading up to the First World War and it’s end. Each character introduced in the book cross paths at one point or another, whether it be an American diplomat coming to the aide of two Russian slum-raised teenagers, or Ethel the former housewife of Earl Fitzherbert of her village rising up in the political ranks and making an adversary of him in the process.

3. The Given Day

The Given DayWhen I saw The Given Day by Dennis Lehane I immediately picked it up. I’d read two of his other novels, Mysic River and Gone Baby Gone and really enjoyed his writing style. This one was a bit different though – still set in Boston the others, but this time in the 1930s.

The novel follows the two main storylines. The first is that of Danny Coughlin, a Boston police officer; the second follows Luther Lawrence, an African American man who just can’t seem to stay out of trouble. The two become intertwined as we see them separately take on issues of unions and race. Lehane does wonders with mingling the two lives and his writing is full of imagery and the words jump off the page to take you back in time.

2. Steve Jobs: Biography

Steve Jobs I managed to get through Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson rather quickly (for my standards) and just posted my review for it a couple days ago, so have a look:

Review of the Steve Jobs biography

I was thinking it would make a great movie. Do you think any director could do it justice and live up to Jobs’s standards? There was a movie called The Pirates of Silicon Valley in 1999 and it starred Noah Wyle as Jobs. I haven’t seen it but I think this biography would make a bit more of an interesting story since so many of Jobs’s friends and enemies have spoken up about him. I also think Christian Bale would make a great Jobs.

1. The Help

The Help

The Help is set in the 1960s and looks at the issue of race relations in Jackson, Mississippi. The premise is ‘Skeeter’ a white woman is looking to the maids of the city to help her write a story from the point of view of ‘the help’. You just have to do a Google search and you’ll see it’s a book that has gotten as much flack as it has praise.

One interesting news article from September says Stockett stole her identity for the character of Aibileen. Her name is Abilene Cooper and she was the maid to Stockett’s brother for 12 years. Much of the similarities are the same, but the case was thrown out.

I feel at the very least the book is a great starting point for race discussions.

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Review of the Steve Jobs biography

December 29, 2011 2 Comments

Steve Jobs“This bio is sh–!”

That’s all I could imagine Steve Jobs saying if he had read the biography he commissioned Walter Isaacson to write. Since I’m not Steve Jobs, I’d say it was an amazing read, though it could’ve benefited from a bit more editing.

While growing up I remember using Apple products in school, from the Apple II in Grade one, to the Macintosh throughout the rest of elementary school, and once again when I went to college. What I wasn’t really familiar with was the man behind those machines. Sure, I’d helped poke fun of Steve Jobs and Apple, and when I turned 180 degrees on that, I watched every product unveiling from the iPhone onward, but I never looked into the type of man he was, so this biography was quite the read.

Steve Jobs paints a picture of a man who is a quagmire. He was a narcissistic perfectionist who could bend people to his will and still garner deep respect and admiration. He was extremely emotional, often crying in public when happy or hurt, but callous when criticizing others for their work. There are countless stories of Jobs verbally abusing employees when they couldn’t come up with a design that he envisioned. He would catch them in his “reality distortion field” and get them to complete projects in unthinkable ways.

To further add to the quagmire that is Jobs, his personal life is equally odd. He speaks extensively about his personal life, with stories of him experimenting with LSD, strange dieting, traveling to India for months to seek enlightenment, and not stepping up to the plate to father his first child Lisa, among other things. We see a man who is a product of his generation, a bit of a hippie searching for inner peace, but also someone so cold as to not recognize his own daughter as his. The closest we get to an explanation of the reasoning behind why Jobs was the way he was, is through Isaacson’s interviews with others saying that he was trying to cope with abandonment issues at birth. It’s strange because Jobs was raised by loving parents who did nothing but make efforts to see him succeed. For all I know he did, but I’d like to have seen Isaacson press Jobs more about his feelings toward his birth parents.

For someone who is lauded as one of the great technology minds, Jobs was never really an expert at anything. He had this innate sense of how things should be, and worked off the genius of people like Steve Wozniak, designers at Xerox and Apple designer Jony Ive (and many others) to make the great products that Apple is so known for today. Each one of those that worked with him says that yes they did the work, but that wouldn’t have been possible without Jobs pushing them to do the unimaginable.

Throughout the book I couldn’t help but think that I was happy Jobs was never interested in running for public office. Imagine him as President of the United States? I’m pretty sure he’d rival, if not be worse than some other notorious world leaders of the past. Luckily he was focused on changing the world through computers, not politics.

As I mentioned at the top, the book could have been given an extra round of editing. There is a lot of repetition, especially in the latter half that became distracting at times. If it wasn’t for that, I would have given it a perfect score, but instead I give Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson a 4.5/5.

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Jeff Jarvis bares all in Public Parts

December 28, 2011 Leave a comment

Public PartsFor all the negative aspects around online sharing, there are just as many benefits that help make our day to day lives that much better.

Those benefits are all discussed in Jeff Jarvis’ latest book Public Parts: How sharing in the digital age improves the way we work and live, which I picked up when he came to Third Tuesday Toronto to speak about it, in November.

Every so often a disruptive technology comes along that causes people to worry about the effect it has on privacy. It happened with the  printing press, camera, TV, computer and of course, the Internet. People have trouble adapting to new technology, but for the most part, they have made us more connected and aware of our surroundings. Like Jarvis says in this interview on CNN’s Reliable Sources (paraphrased), if people continue to worry about the worst that can happen, you could miss out on the best that could happen.

For businesses, getting to know their customers on is becoming the norm. Examples that the book looks at are Facebook and Amazon, which have grown by targeting their services toward the individual user. Jarvis argues that if you’re getting better services from these companies, wouldn’t it be in your interest to give up some information?

As a consumer I’m down the middle on this issue. I actively tweet, post on Facebook and blog so I’m putting out information all the time, but there’s still a lot that I don’t care to share. I’ll never intentionally click a social ad on Facebook, or sponsored tweet on Twitter even if it’s targeted toward my interests, but if a site like Amazon offers me better suggestions on products based on what I’ve looked at, I don’t mind them tracking my usage because it makes shopping that much easier. Jarvis also brings up a great point – if you’re worried about having your information out there for the public to see or companies to use, no one is twisting your arm to post it. I couldn’t agree more.

The benefits of public vs. private have also played out a lot with the revolutions on this past year in Tunisia and Egypt, as well as the Occupy movements across Europe and North America. Through sharing on blogs and social media sites, people have been able to mobilize mass-movements that have led to the fall of governments and bringing to light the shady practices of many corporations. Specifically in the Arab countries, people were able to share their experiences with the public, and journalists, who weren’t permitted to enter those countries, could work with the citizens to report on the revolutions. Examples like this show the benefits of social media to the journalism industry as well as the effect it has on allowing people to change their livelihood.

Near the end, Jarvis asks “who will protect publicness?” and goes through examples of governments and companies that have proven to be unreliable. He says there needs to be a set of principles that act as a watchdog if governments or companies violating our freedoms, but I don’t see anyone other than governments who could do so. It’s very complicated topic and I feel there needs to be some regulation, but I don’t see how that could happen without it affecting someone’s freedoms.

Public Parts is definitely a worthwhile read, though I found his chat at Third Tuesday a lot more engaging. If you’re into the public vs. private debate then I say give this one a go, and if not you probably haven’t read this far anyway. I give the book a 3.5/5.

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The Peep Diaries: An eye opening look into how much we share online

December 27, 2011 5 Comments

PeepingHave you ever wondered why you bother to share things online? People complain about privacy issues all the time, yet willingly post every facet of their lives on sites that are designed to have that content shared.

The Peep Diaries by Hal Niedzviecki was sitting on my bookshelf for quite a while after I’d won it in a contest run by the CBC show The Passionate Eye. I originally watched the documentary Peep Culture, which is a great example of looking into why we do what we do online. The book, while covering many of the examples in the documentary, delves deeper into the subject.

The Peep DiariesNiedzviecki defines “peep culture” early in the book:

“Peep culture is reality TV, YouTube, Twitter, Flickr, MySpace and Facebook. It’s blogs, chat rooms, amateur porn sites, virally spread digital movies of a fat kid pretending to be to be a Jedi Knight, cell phone photos – posted online – of your drunk friend making out with her ex-boyfriend, and citizen surveillance. Peep is the backbone as Web 2.0 and the engine of corporate and government data mining. It’s like the famous line about pornography: you know it when you see it. And you do see it. Al the time, every day, everywhere.”

As you can tell by the MySpace reference, the book is a tad dated. It can be distracting in some cases where he discusses numbers or tools like MySpace which are no longer popular. Regardless of the tools, the examples he uses still make sense.

Throughout the book Niedzviecki looks at many different ways in which “peep” is invading our lives. From online voyeurs creating a separate identity, to reality TV and how surveillance has evolved from taboo to downtown streets to fodder for YouTube viewers.

He paints an interesting picture to show that through these different outlets we’re looking to build that sense of community that was lost in the age of “me”. When communities were closer knit, privacy didn’t exist nearly as much as it does today, if at all. We always had someone to share with, or protect us from bad seeds, but now that’s all changed.

He brings up a great point in that we’re putting out all this content in the context of connecting with like-minded individuals, but in reality the info we post is used by larger companies to make money. Why must we share everything online? What did you do before blogs, Facebook and Twitter started invading your life? Could you stop today if you had to?

The more I read, the more I thought about why I like to participate in online communities. While I do keep a lot offline, I’m open about who I am and the issues I believe in. I like to share that with others online who are willing to have a conversation about any of those topics. I’m not about having a double identity or someone that posts daily videos of themselves; it’s just simply connecting with others and learning from them, or sharing my own knowledge/experiences.

The Peep Diaries does a great job of starting the conversation about privacy and how much we’re willing to give up for a sense of community. It would seem that society is moving toward that Big Brother scenario, except we’re all watching each other, and more and more people are willing to go along with the ride without questioning it. I give it a 4/5.

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