A Line-up of the Greats

I read a post on another blog awhile back, and it SO fit ME! It was basically a lineup of authors just like a baseball/softball lineup. So… I decided to put my own lineup together. I’t's completely subjective, and there were no rules. Here it is:

1. Leading off and playing center field, we’ve got my current love affair… Suzanne Collins. Even though there are plenty of authors who have better form and durability, there’s just something about Collins that manages to get on base every time. She always makes contact, and you can’t ask a lot more out of a lead-off hitter. She probably won’t have the steady career a number 5 hitter has, but right now, she’s getting the job done.

2. Batting second, playing second is the master of modern horror… Stephen King. He cranks out work that gets the job done, which is what batting second is all about. His good form and consistency may not make him the flashiest player around, but a manager always knows what to expect from him.

3. George Orwell is catching and batting in the three-spot. With such hard-hitting tales as 1984 and even “Shooting an Elephant”, one can’t but place Orwell in the heart of the lineup. With the flexibility to write both novels and short stories, he makes an ideal battery-mate for any pitcher and the perfect hitter for pressure-packed moments at the plate.

4. Joseph Heller bats clean-up for us and plays left field. He shocked the heck out of us with the home-run that was Catch-22, but he’s definitely not the kind of hitter we’d expect to see consistent singles from. He’s in the line-up for one reason: to occasionally knock it out of the park.

5. Designated Hitter – J.K. Rowling Capable of going yard, but with a poise under pressure and a reliability we might not see from the four-spot, Rowling is the one we expect to come through (and come through big) when no one else can. She’s the one we turn to when the whole team is in a slump, and we can’t bear to face another disappointment from those players everyone keeps raving about… but never quite satisfy. She’s the one who always exceeds our expectations.

6. In right field, batting sixth… Frances Hodgson Burnett. At first look, Burnett may seem better suited to the AAA farm team, but in reality, she’s one of those players who helps everyone around her grow up just a little bit. She encourages her teammates and teaches us to believe that even in the middle of a crappy season, the pennant is just around the corner, and cinderella stories happen more often than we know. We don’t expect shock and awe from Burnett, but we trust that with her on the team, all of the other players will grow into maturity and the atmosphere in the dugout will be brighter for having her around.

7. E.E. Cummings bats seventh for us and plays 3rd base. He might have ridiculous form, but something about him draws success. It’s not pretty, but he gets the job done. He’s also our lone poet, which requires a scrappiness and stubborn nonconfomity you can’t find in the delicate wanderings of a Frost.

8. Playing 1st base and batting eighth, we have Arthur Miller. In every lineup, there needs to be diversity. He may not quite fit in with all of the novelists in our lineup, but every team needs a good playwright, and especially one who can remind us when we’ve gotten off track and are fighting amongst ourselves rather than our true opponents. He also brings us some much-needed publicity with pretty Marilyn sitting in the stands and supporting her hubby.

9. Filling out the bottom of the lineup, we’ve got Nicholas Sparks playing short. He’s certainly not an all-star, but every team needs that guy who is good but not great. With predictable plots and a softness the other guys lost to the steroids, Sparks quietly achieves an average in the .200 – .250 range, with only a few errors at short and quite a few double-plays thanks to his talent for smooth swiftness.

 

Detached.

“Better not to give in to it. It takes ten times as long to put yourself back together as it does to fall apart,” Suzanne Collins’s Mockingjay (156).

Fear and common sense make me think exactly like that.

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When I was in high school, my mom told me that her favorite thing about me is my lack of pretense.

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I pick my nose in the car.

Yep.

And admitting that, in a strange way, connects me to you.

Because you do it too

Don’t lie. We all know you do.

But the hard thing isn’t in fessing up to who and what I am. It’s being that person in front of you and beside you.

I don’t mind you knowing I cry.

I mind you seeing the tears. I mind you touching them to wipe them away.

I don’t mind you knowing I’m broken.

I mind you seeing it.

When I give blood, I totally look away the moment before they stick me. Because it’s one thing to know that they’re taking blood out of my body. It’s quite another thing to see it flowing. It’s more real. And it’s grosser.

Just like it’s one thing for me to tell you I’m a nose-picker and another thing for you to see my boogers.

Like it’s safer for me to just tell you that I’m a sinner than it is for me to sin in front of you.

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A Christian teacher can present “Biblical knowledge” and at the same time be completely detached from the person(s) to whom he is ministering. (disciplers.org)

That’s me.

Detached.

Or, at least it was.

But God has been doing things to me.

And I’ve let people know me so much more than is my natural inclination.

But at the first taste of trouble, I detach myself from the body. It would be so much easier to go to an old folks’ home and read to them

or hang out with refugees

I should love the body. The church.

Because she is the bride of Christ.

Even when it hurts.

Even when it’s excruciating to be myself to her.

Who would’ve thought the suburban church was so much harder on a girl than the plains of Mongolia or mentoring at-risk kids?

Who would’ve thought it’d take so much more of Jesus to serve and love those who know Him than it does to serve and love those who don’t?

It may take ten times longer to put myself back together, if I was whole to start with…

But isn’t the point of the gospel that I’m starting out broken? That I can’t put myself back together.

Every choice should then be made in the light of brokenness and how Christ is the one putting me back together. And it doesn’t take Him ten times as long as anything. And excruciating vulnerability isn’t as much a choice as a constant state of humanity.

 

Book Review: CATCHING FIRE

Awhile back, I reviewed Suzanne Collins’s debut novel HUNGER GAMES. And I loved it. I even told my roommate that if I could be J.K. Rowling or Suzanne Collins, I’d be Collins – not because she’s a better writer than Rowling (she clearly isn’t), but because Collins wrote the story I wished I’d written. She wrote the story that’s full of shocking darkness. Harry may fight Voldemort, but Katniss fights a grayer battle. There isn’t clear-cut good and evil. The characters out to kill her are kids.

SO… Good things about CATCHING FIRE:

1. I REALLY like the back-story we got on Haymitch. He’s a peripheral character, who I found fascinating even before we got his history.

2. There were some really good allusions to the first book. In fact, the only time I cried while reading CATCHING FIRE was a beautiful, tragic scene honoring the memory of a character murdered in the first book.

3. The stakes are higher in this one. In addition to the urgent physical danger that fills the HUNGER GAMES, there is an insidious, creeping danger hidden from sight.

4. Finnick! Finnick is a new character who I have a HUGE crush on. He’s a hottie who wields a trident and swims super fast. Also, he has a heart.

That being said, I didn’t love CATCHING FIRE as much as I loved HUNGER GAMES… or Harry.

Some Negatives:

1. TOO Predictable. I don’t know if Collins just needs practice dropping in details that are secretly hints, but I was able to predict everything about the ending except for whether Finnick would live or die. I figured out all of the other characters’ fates, the exact way they were going to finish up the event in the arena, etc… AND Katniss didn’t figure it out, which bothered me a lot. Brigid Kemmerer posted something on her blog about this awhile back, and it said something to the effect of: No one wants to spend 300 pages with an idiot. I definitely felt like Katniss was a little dense in this one.

2. The stakes were lower for individual characters: In the HUNGER GAMES, I felt like any of the characters could die at any moment, and there were very few I didn’t mourn the loss of. CATCHING FIRE unfortunately gives too many hints as to what’s going on, and I figured out pretty early that most of the characters were safe. So even though the stakes were raised in that the entire dystopian society is in conflict, they were lowered in individual interactions because I never worried my favorites would die. Except Finnick. I couldn’t figure out if he was expendable or not.

3. Stolen Dialogue: One of the characters in CATCHING FIRE tells the other that he loves her. Her response? “I know.” Is it just me or is that Han Solo’s line? I guess most of the target audience were too young to experience the Han/Leia magic, but come on. You can’t steal from STAR WARS!

Overall, I’d give CATCHING FIRE 4/5 stars, which is pretty good. Not quite as good as HUNGER GAMES, but still TOTALLY worth reading

 

I WILL Break Something!

I read for about 6 hours yesterday to get to page 311 of Suzanne Collins’s CATCHING FIRE, and I want you all to know that I WILL break something if Finnick dies to save Peeta!

 

*UPDATE: I didn’t have to break anything.

 

Hunger Games Review

Cover of The Hunger Games

Hunger Games, the New York Times bestseller by Suzanne Collins, is a dystopia like none I’ve ever read. Stephen King called it “A violent, jarring, speed-rap of a novel that generates nearly constant suspense,” – and who am I to disagree with the modern master of horror?

When I first bought Hunger Games, I knew the premise – 24 kids, called tributes, thrown into an arena with one goal: kill each other. I’d heard the sense of awe and love as my students gushed about the book, but I didn’t foresee my own love of it surpassing theirs.

Part 1, titled “The Tributes,” introduces us to Katniss – our sixteen-year-old narrator who spends her days in constant toil against the world she lives in. Her younger sister and widowed mother are incapable of providing food for themselves and rely entirely on Katniss to survive. It is the steadfast,habitual, sacrificial love she’s developed in providing for her family that drives Katniss to volunteer in her sister’s place as the district 12 tribute in this year’s Hunger Games.

In larger-scale, the tone and premise of Hunger Games reminded me of the short story “The Most Dangerous Game” – ever-popular in high school English class curricula. Couple that with the film Gladiator and you’ll have a decent understanding of what you’re in for. Expect disturbing violence and drawn-out suspense. However heart-warming friendship, valor, and romance aren’t completely absent. I shed more than a few tears as characters I loved were murdered, justice breached, and bitter-sweet triumph attained.

Yet, it true dystopian style, the book ends with an eerie sense that whatever small triumphs have occurred, powers like that of the Capitol are not brought down overnight. Surviving the Hunger Games – yep, I just gave away the ending, but since the book is told in 1st-person present tense and this is just the first installment of a trilogy… well, you shouldn’ve guessed that Katniss survives. Surviving the Hunger Games was but a pinch rather than a punch to the gut of injustice. And the hidden activities of the Capitol are more threatening than televised violence ever could be.