I don't blog every single book I read here, especially if it's something tons of people are already reading and writing about. Believe it or not, I'm not quite egotistical enough to think I have something new and exciting to add to every conversation. So, I'm plugging away at the Stieg Larsson books and recently completed both of Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games trilogy. I'm finding them darkly entertaining, but like I said, don't have anything special to say.
However, Salon's Laura Miller had some very interesting things to say over at the New Yorker about the Hunger Games, as well as other YA dystopia novels and series. Some excerpts:
"'The Hunger Games' is not an argument. It operates like a fable or a myth, a story in which outlandish and extravagant figures and events serve as conduits for universal experiences. Dystopian fiction may be the only genre written for children that's routinely less didactic than its adult counterpart. It's not about persuading the reader to stop something terrible from happening--it's about what's happening, right this minute, in the stormy psyche of the adolescent reader."
Maybe that's why I like them? I don't like being preached at, and although what happens in these books is often terrible, it's as Miller describes above--part of the story, not a story striving to hide its moral.
Miller also talks about books I haven't read, but maybe would like to, like "The Knife of Never Letting Go" by Patrick Ness, which she describes:
"...the Internet appears metaphorically, in the form of a virus that causes people's thoughts to be broadcast into the minds of all those around them...
"Todd, the novel's narrator, is a post-apocalyptic Huck Finn, the youngest resident of an all-male frontier town...where he's bombarded by mental 'Noise," a cacophony of impressions and ideas, rendered at one point as a web of overlapping scrawls. Todd prefers to hang out in the nearby swamp, which is also Noisy, because the virus broadcasts animals' thoughts too, but less intrusively so."
Intriguing. She also posits the idea that part of the rise in popularity of these books is the over-scrutinized, helicoptered-parented children of our generation. What do you think?
