Hunger Games

Just finished reading Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. My mother had been trying to convince me to read this one for a while and I finally got around to picked it up. Polished it off in three days (being unemployed helps a little with that).

Anywho, a pretty solid book and worth the read. It takes place in a future where America has long-since collapsed and the landmass is now taken up with a dozen Districts that have all been defeated and unified by one place called the Capitol. Now the people of each District are subservient to the citizens of the Capitol, each one known for its primary industry. Hunger is rampant among the Districts, and the police from the Capitol tend to be heavy-handed.

Every year for the past 74 years there have been the Hunger Games, a barbaric game where each of the dozen districts must send two children between 12 and 18, a boy and a girl, to compete against each other in a huge weeks-long deathmatch. Only one child will live. It's designed to be a constant reminder to the Districts that the Capitol has complete control over their lives.

Hunger Games is the first book in a trilogy and follows the actions of a girl who ends up going to the Hunger Games as a tribute.

It's a quick time, written to be easy to read and not overly long (I think it clocked in under 400 pages). Just finished the first book this morning and am already starting up on the second one.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

While I was on my honeymoon, I ended up finding the time to read a couple of books. When I was returning, I was a little over halfway through The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon.



The book bills itself as something of a mystery novel, but light-hearted. The main character is autistic, narrating the book through his own view of the world. In some places, this turns out to be pretty amusing and in others, depressing. I thought I would really enjoy this novel, but in the end, I found it unsatisfying.

I had expected to gain more insight into autism, but from what I read, I was very disappointed. The character was portrayed as incredibly dense and unsympathetic to other people around him which, from my (albeit limited) research into autism following my finishing this book, that just isn't the case. Generally, from what I was reading, autism has more to do with a communication issue than with an inability to understand other people. An autistic child might not understand what is meant by certain facial expressions, but that doesn't mean he has no feelings of his own, and doesn't mean that he cannot recognize when another person might be feeling things through other cues.

Beyond that, as I said earlier, the book was billed as a mystery. The main character finds his neighbor's dog killed in the middle of the night and decides he's going to become a detective and find out what happened. Except that particular mystery is resolved about halfway through the book and for the rest of it, the main character kinda floats through the third act. Once the mystery was resolved, I didn't feel the urge to finish the book for any reason other than I like to finish what I start. I didn't care about any of the characters by that point of the book, I realized.

I finished it off, closed the book, and found myself more excited about reading something else than I was about what I just read.

Post Apocalyptic

A couple of months ago, I wrote a review of I Am Legend, the book. Over the weekend, Laura and I were able to see the movie with Will Smith.

The movie wasn't all that bad. I really liked the visuals of New York torn apart by the virus. The flashbacks were well-done, showing a lot of what had happened with the world before everything went to pot.

But in the end, I have to say I was a little disappointed. Had I not read the book, certainly I would have liked the movie more, but like many things, the book was better than the movie.

In the book, the vampire/zombie things were a lot more interesting. They weren't just mindless monsters running after their kill. Some of them talked, and they had a plan. They knew where the main character was (though there were reasons they could not reach him), and they taunted him night after night.

Researching the virus felt more real in the book as well. We were able to follow through from one step to another and see how he was able to piece together what he learned about the virus through understandable break-throughs. In the movie, we're introduced to him with a full laboratory and doing blood tests and the like right off. Nothing showing him working at it and what pains he goes through just to learn more.

I think I did like the dog better in the movie than I did in the book, mostly because it was such a small part of the book - a dog that the main character finds and tries to befriend. In the book the dog is more of a springboard to show the desolation and loneliness the main character feels.

I also really liked the scene in the movie where he goes to the video store with all the manikins and the conversations he has with them. A nice touch to show how he's trying to cope with everything.

But I think my biggest criticism of the movie has to be the ending. I don't want to give away the ending of either, so I'll just say that the end of both comes down to the title, "I Am Legend", and each one takes it in a drastically different direction. The book, I think does it far better.

Ah, what the heck, I'll spoil it. If you don't want to know the ending of the book and movie, skip the rest of this post until you see the next picture.

Okay, now that's out of the way. The movie ended with Will Smith finding the cure, giving it to another human he found, and sacrificing his life to make sure they could escape with the cure. The end is a voice-over by the woman who got the cure from Will Smith as she says that the oncoming society that his cure is going to allow to exist is his legacy, and he will become a legend for bringing it about, essentially.

The book's ending is a bit different than that. He does find another person, but it turns out the person is a vampire who has found a way to control her appetite for blood and the like. She escapes from him and heads back to a society that the "enlightened" vampires are building. They end up capturing him and taking him back with them. He is given poison by the woman he had met earlier because, she tells him, the other vampires will never let him go now. They have become civilized and are the new society that is coming out of the old one. They're taking care of all the feral vampires and starting anew. The "I Am Legend" part comes from the main character's last thoughts as he looks out of his cell windows over the new society that's forming. People are looking at him frightened and he realizes that he is a monster to them. They cannot go out during the day, and during the entire book, he would hunt them when they are most vulnerable and kill them when they could not try to stop him. He killed hundreds of them in his time, and realizes that he became their boogie man. As he dies, he realizes that like vampires and the like for us, he will become the legend of their new society.

A bit more depressing, to be sure, but still, I like the book's ending better.



No spoilers in this one. The second post apocalyptic movie that Laura and I saw this weekend was The Road, also based on a book.

If you want to be depressed, see the Road. Or better yet, read it.

This one's a story about a father and his son as they travel through the end of the world. Like "I Am Legend", there are some things shown in flashback, but they don't really have anything to do with why the world is the way it is. They have to do only with the characters.

The entire story is built on these two characters and them trying to not only survive, but maintain the will to survive as they go. It's a f-ed up world. Food is scarce. Most of the animals and plants are dead. There's a scene where the kid and his father find a house where they can take a bath, and when they take their shirts off, they are disgustingly thin. Ribs poking out and everything.

There is a lot of talk in the movie about good guys and bad guys, and the father keeps talking about how they're the good guys. They don't resort to cannibalism, and they don't hunt people. But as the movie goes on, you realize how much humanity the father has lost just trying to keep his son alive. And the sad thing is I think the son realizes it too. It's a sad story, and never really picks up. There is no beginning, really, and the end's not really an end either. It's a small section of their life and showing the struggles to keep alive in the world the way it became.

Overall, I'd recommend the Road, but only for a time when you're ready for the story to depress you. It's a bit slow, but does a great job of drawing you in to the emotion of the world as it is.

Brains: A Zombie Memoir

So this morning I woke up, picked up my new book, Brains: A Zombie Memoir, and started reading while waiting for the insurance adjuster to arrive. The adjuster arrived around page 150 and since the book's only about 180 pages long, I finished it off before heading in to work today.

It won't be winning any literature awards, and it's clearly an attempt to cash in on the zombie craze that's going around, but it was still a pretty clever take on zombies. The basic premise is this: the zombie outbreak has hit, and our main character is pretty quickly turned into a zombie.

Only he realizes he still has the capacity for higher thinking. He's managed, somehow, to keep his intelligence and his ability to write (the book is his memoir). This doesn't prevent him from craving brains - he consumes quite a few people throughout the course of the book - but it does let him think about what it means to be a zombie, and whether there are other 'thinking' zombies like him.

He does, of course, find some. From a zombie who was a nurse in life and has taken to patching up zombie corpses so they'll last longer, to a kid zombie whose motor functions don't seem to be degrading and can still run. Speech seems beyond them, but they put together some hand signals and start working on the zombie revolution. The humans are winning the war against the undead, after all.

The group of zombies, some thinking and some not but kept around for other reasons, start heading to Chicago where they hope to meet the doctor who created the zombie virus. Meet their maker, as it were.

The book is told in a black-humor style and keeps action happening at a good pace. There are a few surprises in it, but by and large it's pretty easy to see where the story is going. The characters are all surprising vivid for zombies, each one with its own personality that follows through to their actions, though all of them have the overpowering urge for brains.

Its this last piece that's talked about the most. The craving for brains, wrestling humanity with canabilism, and the journey that the main character goes through as he's trying to figure out just where zombies fit in God's plan, or in scientific evolution, for that matter.

Overall, if you're not a fan of zombies, this book's not going to turn you into one. It's a popcorn book meant to entertain and it does a good job of that. I'd recommend it to people who want a quick, brainless read (get it!), and to people who already enjoy the zombie genre.

I Am Legend (the book)

When I'm getting ready for a long drive, usually I like to have a book set up on my iPod. Music is fun, but tends to get a little mindless. Books keep me engaged and awake throughout the whole trip. This weekend I was making the short jaunt up to my brother's place, but I thought it would be nice to have a new book. After my post about zombies, I figured I wanted a horror or supernatural book of some kind. My first thought was to try the Dresdon Files series, but when I pulled up the first book of it, it was $20! Not really interested in spending that much. Dejected, I putzed around until I saw the poster for I Am Legend somewhere online. I decided to pick up the book, since I knew it was based on a book. Popped it in, it wasn't too expensive, and I downloaded it.

Written in 1954 by Richard Matheson, it was a pretty quick book, finishing out in about 5 hours. I had never seen the Will Smith movie, nor Omega Man, nor Last Man on Earth, so I didn't really know anything about it other than it was post-apocalyptic and involved vampires (or zombies, depending on who you asked).

The book was really solid, obviously relying heavily on the strength of the main character, Robert Neville, since most of the time he's alone and dealing with his thoughts. It opens talking about his repetitive days - waking up, repairing the damage done to his house by the vampire attacks the previous night, and then, depending on the day, working on other projects. Making wooden stakes, gathering supplies, or heading out into the city to seek out vampires and kill them. In daylight, they go dormant and he finds as many as he can and puts a stake through them. Then, when it gets close to nightfall, he heads home and stays in his house until the next morning.

The vampires know where he is, but he's done a lot to make his house secure. As the book goes on, it explains why the vampires are choosing certain tactics over others, and leaves me satisfied that in the world constructed, he could actually survive.

Eventually after several fits of depression and particularly bad drunk nights, he decides to try to learn about the vampire and how everything happened. There are flashback hints as to what was happening during the time just leading up to the outbreak of vampirism, and throughout the story, clues are scattered that you can put together to come to your own conclusions.

I don't want to tell too much in case anyone wants to read it for themselves, but I have to say I really enjoyed it. I was a little worried early on that dealing with Robert's mind for five hours would become tedious, but the author keeps it fresh and while you can watch him going slowly insane and slowly losing his humanity, Robert's thoughts are always interesting and I kept wanting to know what he'd do next. If you're interested in a quick read that gives a new perspective on the whole vampire/zombie thing, give this one a try.

Undead Delight

Every Halloween my friends and I put together a horror-based roleplaying game just to have a bit of fun. Generally, people die, and much fun is had. A few years back I ran a particular game about a zombie apocalypse. It began with everyone creating each other as characters, and then everyone got to play themselves. I, being the GM, was the first person to be killed and their first introduction to zombies. Appropriately, I think Mary killed me, both hating zombies and in particular being my nemesis. The group had to escape Brian and Mary’s house, find transportation, and then navigate the dangerous route to escape. I had no long-term plans, just put them in a world of zombies and see what happened. They headed for the airport. In a fight near a fueling station at the airport, Dan was killed and came back as a zombie. Things got hectic, the fuel ignited, and I don’t remember how many people survived.

I don’t know what it is about zombies, but I love the concept of them. It might be my fascination with post-apocalyptic stories or survival stories or dealing with a situation that seems so hopelessly beyond your ability to survive and somehow coming out alive. Whatever it is, I can’t seem to get enough of them. I wanted to talk about three treatments of zombies that I consider among the best out there.

First is the movie 28 Days Later. For me, this was the trigger to my really enjoying zombies. Before this they were just lame horror monsters, but this was the first movie I saw where I was really freaked out by the zombies in it. It was pretty much exactly what I look for now in a good zombie adaptation. Focus on a small group of survivors and the terror that they particularly go through. The zombies form a backdrop for the story and help propel the characters forward and through different scenes, but the focus is really on the characters. I still can’t listen to the soundtrack (In the House – In a Heartbeat) without my heart racing. It spawned a few follow ups, but none of them came close to the original.

Second is the comic Walking Dead which started being published in 2003 by Image comics, a year after 28 Days Later came out. I can see the similarities and style. While Walking Dead has more traditional zombies that shamble slowly, again, the focus is entirely on the characters and how they deal with an impossible survival situation. Often times, humans are far more dangerous to each other than the zombies themselves are. People die all the time and sometimes in very unexpected ways, and through it all, the characters keep struggling to survive.

Finally is the book World War Z by Max Brooks. I admit I never read the book myself, I only heard the abridged version on the books on tape. But even with that treatment, it was fantastic. It’s a book that takes the form of a documentary. The author is interviewing people from all over the world who survived the zombie apocalypse that ended just years ago. Each person recounts their own horror stories and how the world responded to such a bizarre situation. Humanity is stripped away and many people cringe still at the things they had to do to just survive. Some of the parts are not for the faint of heart.

If you are a fan of character-driven stories and zombies, all three of these are musts. Enjoy!

Well, It's Official

Check out here. The Game of Thrones story by George R.R. Martin has been picked up by HBO. It's been a rumor for quite some time, but now it seems like the first season, at least, will see air time. After how beautiful shows like Rome, Deadwood and Carnival looked, I have to say I'm quite anxious to see what happens here. I only hope they don't decide it's too expensive to do and stop shooting the series.

A few of my friends have different concerns. Martin is only four books into his eight-book series, and is already over a year delayed in the fifth book. Is working on this show (in whatever capacity he will be working on it) only going to delay the books even more? He has such a rich and interesting world, but it's been a long time coming for the next book to make its appearance.

Regardless, I'm looking forward to seeing how this one goes. Game of Thrones has been a fantastic series so far. I'd be interested in seeing some of the awesome characters come to life on the screen.