My Lost Week

Photo cred

I hate being sick. Unfortunately, I have a gross cough that I can't shake off.  I took a few sick days, but I had to go back to work today still coughing up a storm. I read a little bit this week. I finished The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern but I haven't been able to write a review yet.  Hopefully, I'll get that to you next week. 

Until then, enjoy these random bookish links!

20 heroic librarians who save the world from io9.  It's an awesome list!

Supercut: Libraries on TV and in the movies (Funny Library Montage) from BuzzFeed.

SNL, Daniel Radcliffe do Harry Potter ten years later from The Huffington Post. LOL! How did I miss this?

Should Authors and Agents Weigh In on Citizen Reviews?  from Publishers Weekly.

ALA Midwinter Meeting 2012 Coverage from American Libraries.
-- I wish I were in Dallas this weekend. So many great programs and speakers (John Green)...sigh!  I really want to go to ALA Annual this summer in Anaheim, CA.  Hey, a girl can dream! 

Bookish News: The Occupy Movement & YA Dystopians

Photo credit: AP from Salon article

Yesterday Salon.com posted an interesting article entitled "What Occupy can learn from the Hunger Games".  Mike Doherty wrote about the how the Occupy movement can learn a few lessons from dystopian novels.  He specifically cites an example of how the London Occupy movement uses slogans and visuals from the graphic novel V for Vendetta.  Doherty discusses the parallels between Occupy and popular young adult dystopian novels:

It’s fitting that the Occupy movement should have drawn inspiration from dystopian fiction, an increasingly popular genre for teenagers and young adults in particular. If, as Time magazine suggests, the person of the year was the Protester, the publishing phenomenon was the Dystopia — the story of the dissenter in a repressive society who becomes a revolutionary. The new wave was led by two trilogies, both published from 2008-10: Suzanne Collins’ “Hunger Games” (whose big-budget Hollywood adaptation kicks off in March) and Patrick Ness’ “Chaos Walking” (now being adapted by Lionsgate).

The article discusses examples from The Hunger Games, Matched, Divergent and Chaos Walking in depth.  There are SPOILERS in the article for these books, so be prepared for them if you haven't read these stories yet.  Doherty concludes with intriguing insights:

The new YA dystopian novels are thoughtful books, but they don’t offer solutions or blueprints – they merely suggest ways of combating stifling political ideologies. They’re full of different voices, or what literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, writing in – and against – Soviet Russia, called “polyphony”: the opposite of propaganda, and the enemy of ideology. Where they resonate with the Occupy movement, it’s in the protagonists’ determination to recalibrate the world around us in creative ways: seeing a bank as an educational institution, a tent as a library, a movement as a gathering of people asking questions, and encouraging ways of thinking by which solutions could be found. 

Check out the full article. It's worth the time. While I'm reading my next dystopian, I'll think about how the storyline could parallel current events.

HG: Our First Look At Katniss And More!

In March, I ranted a little bit when Jennifer Lawrence was casted as Katniss in The Hunger Games movie. Too blonde, too old, yada yada yada.

Now I'm breathing a big sigh of relief.  Jennifer Lawrence is on this week's Entertainment Weekly cover...and she looks pretty awesome!  The hair and makeup does wonders.  She almost looks like the Katniss image in my head.  I can't wait to see more pictures. Hopefully we'll get a glimpse of Gale and Peeta soon.

Other reasons to anxiously await and celebrate the movie's release in March 2012:
- Woody Harrelson as Haymitch: I'm doing back flips! Absolutely loved Harrelson as Tallahassee in Zombieland. Perfect casting job there.
- Stanley Tucci as Caesar Flickerman: Incredible actor!
-  We can splurge and buy some amazing HG merchandise from Cafe Press, Etsy, Amazon, NECA, and more other sites.
- The Girl Who Was on Fire: Your Favorite Authors on Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games Trilogy: This collection of essays released last month (I haven't read it yet...I know, it's blasphemous) is a must read to add on your TBR list before the movie. Hmm, perhaps there will be books in the future on HG film criticism and interpretation.

So excited to see the movie. Gary Ross, please do it justice!

Check out these HG links:
EW's Hunger Games Central for news and updates.
My Hunger Games
Mockingjay.net
JabberJays

Bookish News: 30 Days until Mockingjay!

I'm so excited for the release of Suzanne Collins' final installment of The Hunger Games series, Mockingjay.  I marked August 24 on my calendar months ago.  Only 30 more days to wait!

I haven't decided if I'm going to preorder it on Amazon (so it will be waiting for me when I get home from work) or if I want to pick it up at Borders or Chester County Book Company and take a vacation day to read it (is that crazy?!?). Some Borders are hosting special Mockingjay Fan Fests that following weekend, but I'm disappointed that it's not a midnight release party so not sure if I will attend yet.

Author Suzanne Collins will be promoting the book on a 12 city tour this fall, including a stop in Pennsylvania on Sept. 21 at 6:00pm at the Barnes & Noble in Fairless Hills. I will definitely be there! Let me know if you're local and plan to go.

Hunger Games tshirts are now available at Hot Topic. I haven't shopped there in a while, but I'll definitely stop by to take a look at what they have in stock. Several designs are already sold out online. These shirt designs are available on Hot Topic's website:

Also, you can shop for some amazing Hunger Games inspired jewelry at Etsy, including charm bracelets, necklaces, pins, earrings, rings and much more. I love this Girl on Fire necklace! Go Katniss!

As you could probably tell by now, The Hunger Games is currently my favorite YA series.  I gushed about it in my first ever Waiting on Wednesday post.

If you haven't read the series yet, don't wait another day. WARNING: Do NOT read the summaries/synopsis/reviews of the second or third books because they will spoil the endings of the previous books. You've only got 30 days to devour the first two books (The Hunger Games and Catching Fire)...I did it in 4 days!

Check out The Hunger Games Examiner for other news stories about the series.

You can download this Mockingjay countdown widget and other fun stuff from Scholastic.

Bookish News: Daniel Radcliffe in Woman in Black

Daniel Radcliffe will star in the film adaptation of Susan Hill's The Woman in Black.  I'm a huge Harry Potter fan and I thought he was great as Rudyard Kipling's son in My Boy Jack.  In The Woman in Black, Radcliffe is a young lawyer who travels to an old house in a remote UK village to review the papers of a deceased client. Check out the descripton of the book below for more details. I've added the book to my TBR list...how 'bout you?

Published in 1983, The Woman in Black was Susan Hill's first ghost story. Read about her process of writing the book on her website.  Susan's latest book The Small Hand, published by Profile Books, will release this September.

  

Some cover love for The Woman in Black

The Woman in Black book description from Amazon:

What real reader does not yearn, somewhere in the recesses of his or her heart, for a really literate, first-class thriller - one that chills the body with foreboding of dark deeds to come, but warms the soul with perceptions and language at once astute and vivid? In other words, a ghost story by Jane Austen.

Austen we cannot, alas, give you, but Susan Hill's remarkable Woman In Black comes as close as the late twentieth century is likely to provide. Set on the obligatory English moor, on an isolated causeway, the story has as its hero one Arthur Kipps, an up-and-coming young solicitor who has come north to attend the funeral and settle the estate of Mrs. Alice Drablow of Eel Marsh House. The routine formalities he anticipates give way to a tumble of events and secrets more sinister and terrifying than any nightmare: the rocking chair in the nursery of the deserted Eel Marsh House, the eerie sound of pony and trap, a child's scream in the fog, and, most dreadfully, and for Kipps most tragically, the woman in black.

The Woman In Black is both a brilliant exercise in atmosphere and controlled horror and a delicious spine-tingler - proof positive that that neglected genre, the ghost story, isn't dead after all.

P.S. Radcliffe is also starring in the film remake of Erich Maria Remarque's novel All Quiet on the Western Front, due out in Spring 2012.