Ex Libris Bitsy

To be completely honest I totally forgot I was all set up for this. I found out about it in January. Checked the book out of the library in February. Read it in bits and snatches throughout the move, the book seemed to be set up for it.

Each chapter was a short but engaging and vivid bite and it always ended on a cliff hanger, forcing me to work double fast to get back to it during the next meal time break.

I finished reading the book. Then, in the flurry of moving, I totally forgot about it. I remembered the book discussion (the whole reason I picked it up in the first place) the day after it was over. So, I’m posting my answers here!

What follows is my answers to a series of discussion questions on The Hunger Games posted over at Barney’s Book Blog. This discussion will contain spoilers.

Princess Bookie is hosting a contest to re-design the cover of a YA book coming out in 2010. You can find out all about Princess Bookie’s Recreate a Book Cover Contest and enter yourself if you want. There is a limit of 50 entries or a deadline of March 15th. Whichever comes first.

I decided to recreate the cover for Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins. It’s the final book in the Hunger Games trilogy and is coming out this August. I have read The Hunger Games and am going to reward myself with Catching Fire as soon as I get all caught up on reviews. So, needless to say, I’m excited! I did end up spoilering myself, though, when I read the synopsis of Mockingjay to design the book cover. Still looking forward to Catching Fire in spite of it!

by Chaz Brenchley

[rating:5/5]

Let me start by saying that “The House of Mechanical Pain” really resonated strongly with me. I really empathized with the female character in this one, and I will get into why in just a sec, but if that skewed my review of this story so be it. Actually this story hit so close to home I had a very hard time coming to terms with my reactions and then writing about them on this blog. If it wasn’t for this month’s theme of the Social Justice Challenge I might not have posted this at all. It’s a bit of a tender spot, to say the least.

“The House of Mechanical Pain” is a horrific short story from The Years Best Fantasy and Horror 2008 it is also included in the book Phantoms at the Phil: The Third Proceedings. It is about a woman named Tasha who wants her friend Jonny to come home with her to her family’s mansion where her father is about to sell off several items from the family estate that she holds dear. Part money grubbing move, part power play in this damaged and dysfunctional family, Jonny is supposed to take pictures of everything that is going into the sale, but really he is there as moral support for Tasha.

A while ago I tweeted a link to an NPR article called For Love of Do Good Vampires, and the article got me thinking. Why are vampires currently so popular? Why have they changed so much from vampires in the past? What does this say about us, our generation, and what our vampires are bringing to the table of vampire lore?

I’ve also recently been reading a book called The Chalice and The Blade that covers the history of feminism back to its roots and beyond into what caused the split from egalitarian societies of women and men working side by side to modern day male dominant society. It also covers the multiple attempts to swing back to an egalitarian model and the divisive (but not always complete) swings back to a gender dominant society that result.

These two works have been going around in my head and so here’s my take on Feminism and Vampires.

So, here I am, half way through and seriously I need to stop starting my posts with the word “so”. Anyway, things are calming down a lot here and I am seriously behind on my reading and I’m getting stressed about it, which just seems so wrong. Do I really need stress on top of the stress? Maybe a nice relaxing read-a-thon will help. Too bad the next one that I know about doesn’t start until April. Anyone know of any before then? Like, this weekend perhaps?