Like every other rabid reader in America who hasn’t been living under a rock for the past two years, I stalked my UPS guy until I had my brand spanking new copy of Mockingjay in my hot little hands.

Mockingjay, for the uninitiated, is the third and final book in the distopian young adult series called The Hunger Games (Scholastic). I’ve hearted this series since the first book, which kept me reading through a very long bus trip. But since the internet is, by now, flooded with book reviews of Mockingjay, I thought I’d do something different and talk about what Mockingjay and other Big Books of the Year mean in publishing.

I can’t speak for anyone but myself (see legal speak in the sidebar) but I for me, there’s nothing more exciting than getting ready for a big book. Even if the big book isn’t your house’s. I liken it to a sport, like baseball. I do what I do for the love of the game, and it’s only smart and right and enjoyable to watch the World Series when it happens. There’s a sense of camaraderie and excitement in the publishing world when our colleagues hits one out of the park. It’s not entirely selfless: it only follows that a big book will make a big splash, which will cause more people to read it, which will get more publicity about the state of reading, which will hopefully cause more people to read regularly. Books aren’t sold in a vacuum; every major book creates these ripples through the market that affect everyone. But basically, we like it when people read. And more good books can’t be a bad thing.

So! Mockingjay. I’ll need an awful lot of Wodehouse to get me out of that depression. I’ll be forming a support group that meets under the Brooklyn Bridge every midnight until we stop whimpering. See you there!

Currently reading: Big Money by PG Wodehouse

Well that was certainly a series of words sometimes accompanied by pictures.

I guess I shouldn’t complain too much. It just wasn’t what I wanted it to be. I was so, so looking forward to this book after revealing in the hilarious silliness of the author’s previous Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. I had been meaning to buy Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter since its book deal was first announced, and when I found myself on a bus ride home with nothing to read, I snapped it up from the train station bookstore.

But unlike P&P&Z, Lincoln: Vampire Hunter doesn’t improve upon a tired old classic that normally wouldn’t be to my tastes. Instead it requires a lot of patience and a lot of eye-rolling as the narrator-historian jumps from prose to “diary entries” and back again, sometimes keeping the different sorts of narration separated with different fonts or text settings and sometimes not. I can take the jarring jumping, but if you can’t keep your text settings straight, I get a little miffed. If a diary entry is supposed to be indented? Italicized? Who knows, because it’s time for another gory fight scene!

And even the gory fight scenes couldn’t let me have fun. I like historical fiction and I like pastiche; I should, by rights, like this silly retelling of Lincoln’s biography. But instead of the absurd improving on the original, it was discomfiting and strange. Like, okay, I’ll buy John Wilkes Booth being a vampire, I guess. But you spend 300+ pages really drilling home how powerful and quick and masterful vampires are, and Booth bumbles over a balcony railing and breaks a leg? Come on, even n00b vamps could do that with a little more grace. If you can’t shoehorn a plot point into a retelling, then leave it out or find a workaround, right?

And also, on a more serious note, I was extremely uncomfortable with the idea that Lincoln’s motivating force behind freeing the slaves was to defeat the vampires. Grahme-Smith’s Abe is a nice dude who does state he wants slavery to end for all the right reasons, but in this alternate history that’s been built, the reader is left to wonder if Lincoln wouldn’t have bothered with emancipation had it not been for vampires. Kind of a creepy thought. Just saying. And maybe that reaction is due to my whitebread America Lincoln-worship, but it just gave me the heebie jeebies.

I still <3 mashups, pastiche, and what someone I know once referred to (kinda snobbishly, I think) as “novelty fiction” but one should have standards even for fun reads.

Presidential history buffs may get a frisson of residual pleasure from reading this book if they can contain their eye-rolls. And thus ends my most dorky book review ever.

Currently (still) reading: The Angel of Darkness by Caleb Carr (it’s like super long guys)

This video was sent to me by a friend. I like the Honda Jazz as a cute little hot hatch, but this ad makes it for me.

It may be ridiculously easy to make fun of hipsters, but at least they read. Even if it’s only to be pretentious.

Philistine confession: I did not enjoy Everything Is Illuminated! I put it in my pile of “white people with not-so-bad problems” stories and sort of forgot about it.

Currently reading: Angel of Darkness by Caleb Carr (it’s LONG) and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

Your opinion matters to me, great internet hordes. So please help me come to an agonizing decision over eReaders. I really want to buy one sometime around my birthday (Christmastime) when I believe the price wars will drop one or all popular models to a very nice gifting price.

FIRST OF ALL, I address the haters: Okay, so you don’t want an eReader. You love the smell of paper, you love the feel of the book in your hands, blah blah blah, whine whine whine. That’s cool. Read paper books all you want. No one is stopping you. I am not a betting gal, but I would bet you a gajillion dollars that within our lifetime, print books will not stop being made. Oh sure, maybe technical books, textbooks, and certain small press books will be completely digital, but it’s incredibly unlikely that print books, which have formed the basis of how we organize our homes, stores, and libraries, will go away anytime soon. And even IF we decided to stop printing books tomorrow, we’d still have oodles and oodles of printed books circulating around for decades to come. But trust me when I say that eBooks are not going to cause the death of your beloved print books. I swear to you that publishers do not slink around the office rubbing their hands together in manic glee, muttering, “Yeeeees, yeeeees, we will kill the book, yeeeeees.” That’s silly. Publishers love books; they have no intention of getting rid of them. So calm yourselves. And let me buy a freakin’ eReader if I wanna, geez! This is America, home of consumer choices and cheese in a can. Deal.

Now onto my consumerial dilemma.

There are several dozen kinds of eReaders available on the market right now, but I’ve narrowed my choices down to four. Here are the pros and cons of each.

The Kindle
The Kindle was the first eReader device backed by a large booky company. Amazon has made it very clear with each new generation of Kindle that they are committed to taking this thing all the way. They’re getting smaller, cuter, and more pimped out every year. At this point Amazon has invested so much time and effort into the Kindle, I get the feeling it will be around for a long time. And that’s a good thing; the last thing I want is to drop $100-$200+ on something that proves to be the Beta tape to someone else’s VHS. (If you don’t understand that reference, zomg, go read a book about history!)

However, I have some qualms about the Kindle. I’m an open-source nerd, and Amazon’s terms of service on the Kindle are notoriously stringent.

Cost: $139 for basic wifi model
eBook pricing: usually $12.99 and under
Pros: most robust bookstore, potentially most longevity
Cons: no share function, no dual screen

The Nook

I like the Nook for a lot of reasons. It’s a more handsome looking device than even the newest Kindle, it’s got dual screens, one color and one e-ink, and it’s got the ability to share Nook books with friends. It’s also built on the Android platform, of which I am something of a fangirl. Some of its additional features, like the ability to read full eBooks while inside a physical B&N store, don’t really appeal to me since I don’t see the point. But I suppose if I were stuck in a store with a few hours to kill and I couldn’t find the physical book I wanted, this feature wouldn’t hurt. My only reservations are that B&N is still quite new to the eReader game and it’s not clear how invested they are in making the Nook a longterm success.

Cost: $149 for basic wifi model
eBook pricing: usually $12.99 and under
Pros: share function, dual screen
Cons: shorter battery life (10 days as opposed to Kindle’s 30), newer product with uncertain future

The Kobo

Borders has a lot of eReaders for sale but the Kobo stands out as their most attractive device. However, the Kobo seems to be looking to fill a niche that doesn’t yet exist: an eReader for people who hate technology. The Kobo ships with a charming if somewhat anachronistic $20 gift card (why not just apply that credit to your Borders account?) and comes preloaded with 100 free public domain titles (dunno about you, but I probably don’t need half of those classic titles clogging up my new eReader).

OK I just included the Kobo out of politeness, I don’t really think it’s a contender.

Cost: $149
eBook pricing: varies
Pros: Uhhhhhh…
Cons: no wifi or 3G, no dual screen, no share function

The iPad

The iPad, strangely enough, is the only one of these devices I’ve actually used. It’s a beautiful little thing, and it displays everything in a lovely way. It clearly is more than just an eReader, which justifies its heftier pricetag. But if we’re talking about the iPad as an eReader, than I gotta say it’s not so great. Unlike the other devices, the iPad doesn’t use e-ink; it has a glass color display which makes enhanced eBooks possible (with additions of embedded videos, animations, etc.) but also makes more a lot of screen glare and eye strain. No more so than reading on a computer screen, but unlike other eReaders, the iPad experience never lets you forget this is a computer in your hands, not a book. The size is also a problem; because it needs to do more tasks than an eReader, the iPad is heavier and larger, uncomfortable for me to hold for hours at a time. However, it is an all-in-one device (excluding flash) that would be handy to have once eBooks grew out of their usual “print book online” mold.

Cost: starts at $499
eBook pricing: varies
Pros: enhanced eBooks, more computing power
Cons: awkward size, eye strain

So, which would you choose?

After years of being told by my geek idol, Stephen Fry, that I should get off my duff and read some Evelyn Waugh, I finally did.

I was dreading it; I know not why. Wait, yes I do: because I’m lazy and I thought this infamous twentieth century satirist would require me to use my stupid brain, and I don’t like reading if it feels like homework. But Waugh isn’t homework. He (not she; like Lindsay and Leslie and Aubrey, I guess Evelyn is a man’s name or at least used to be until women, like they always do with everything worth having, stole it for themselves) is good times.

Waugh is the classic British humorist; dry, biting, and homosexual. There’s just nothing about him and his first novel, Decline and Fall, that I didn’t absolutely love. This book caused quite the scandal in its time, being a thinly veiled treatise on the lives of the idle rich and the people who wished they were rich enough to be idle. Parties are thrown, modern art is commissioned, reputations are ruined, tea is served, butlers raise eyebrows, and in the end everything turns out all right, if absurd.

I thought that Waugh would butt heads with my love of Wodehouse, who is a kinder, gentler British humorist working in much the same topic at much the same era. But it’s a complimentary love, so I’ll allow it. Highly recommended to anyone who wants a proper English guffaw.

Currently reading: Angel of Darkness by Caleb Carr

OK, so I’m reading a manuscript for work. It’s a book that’s being published next year. I can’t tell you what it’s called, or what it’s about, or who it’s by, or anything interesting and useful, actually.

But I can say that getting a chance to read a kickass book, before the rest of the world?

Well. It makes ya feel a little like this.

This entry is pretty much just me bragging, I guess. I’m not sorry.

Currently reading: Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh

Do you love Oscar Wilde? Of course you do. Otherwise I’d hate you. And I don’t hate you; I love you like the fluffy bit of nougat you undoubtedly are.

So why don’t you go ahead and treat your darling self to one or a dozen discounted tickets to see a rollicking performance of An Ideal Husband. I saw it last week and it was fabulous.

The discount code is: BEERWIT and you can use it here.

Basic Info:

Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband
Presented by Big Rodent
Directed by Meghan Formwalt
Running every night at 8pm through July 24
Wings Theatre, 154 Christopher St, The West Village
All details
$2 BEER EVERY NIGHT

Plus! For your reading pleasure I present:

1. I always pass on good advice. It is the only thing to do with it. It is never of any use to oneself.

2. Philanthropy seems to me to have become simply the refuge of people who wish to annoy their fellow-creatures.

3. Geniuses talk so much, don’t they? Such a bad habit! And they are always thinking about themselves, when I want them to be thinking about me.

4. Lord Caversham: No woman, plain or pretty, has any common sense at all, sir. Common sense is the privilege of our sex.
Lord Goring: Quite so. And we men are so self-sacrificing that we never use it.

5. In married life affection comes when people thoroughly dislike each other.

6. In England a man who can’t talk morality twice a week to a large, popular, immoral audience is quite over as a serious politician. There would be nothing left for him as a profession except Botany or the Church.

7. Like all stout women, she looks the very picture of happiness.

8. Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people whom we personally dislike.

9. Nothing is so dangerous as being too modern. One is apt to grow old-fashioned quite suddenly.

10. Women are never disarmed by compliments. Men always are. That is the difference between the two sexes.

11. I love talking about nothing. It is the only thing I know anything about.

12. When one pays a visit it is for the purpose of wasting other people’s time, not one’s own.

13. I don’t at all like knowing what people say of me behind my back. It makes me far too conceited.

Big Rodent’s production of An Ideal Husband runs at Wings Theater, 154 Christopher St, in the West Village, July 21-24 at 8pm. All details here.

Or e-mail Joe at ghostlygerbils@gmail.com for more information.

OK so here’s the deal. I never had to read Harper Lee’s American classic To Kill a Mockingbird in school. So I didn’t.

Them’s just the breaks, guys. I didn’t read a lot of books that most kids had to in school because I was part of a super-secret quasi-European intensive training program designed to keep high school students from ever being invited to parties. We had to read Hamlet, Ethan Fromme, French existentialists, Romeo & Juliet, Scandinavian drama queens, 1984 (twice), Animal Farm (thrice), Fahrenheit 451, Macbeth, Things Fall Apart, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Julius Caesar, John Donne, The Scarlet Letter, and I THINK Frankenstein. After that riveting all-star lineup, can you really blame me for not touching any high school recommended reading I wasn’t going to be tested on?

But then, to my complete and total shame, I saw that it was To Kill a Mockingbird’s 50th anniversary. And I had still not read it. So I dusted off an old second-hand copy I had found years ago and shoved on my shelf. And I got reading. And now I finally get why all my bookish friends can always cry “Mockingbird” when asked what book affected them most as a child.

Having never read the book or even seen the classic film, I was willfully ignorant of what TKAM was about. I knew vaguely that it had something to do with a lawyer and racism but that’s like saying the Empire State Building has something to do with floors and steel girders. It’s true but MAN does it miss the important things. The book manages to be this time capsule for this era I’ve never seen while at the same time feeling like a modern story, with little girl who could have been me when I was growing up (minus the dramatic fire, court case, and violent showdown).

Probably the most ridick part of reading this book was when I was about halfway through and got spoiled by a scene in ABC Family’s Pretty Little Liars. The high school characters are discussing the book in their English class (like normal students) and totally ruined the ending for me! UGH! Like, okay, I know that after 50 years I probably can’t ask for spoiler alerts but still. I wanted to be surprised.

Anyway! I guess my point is it’s never too late to pick up a classic you missed out on when you were young. That’s what makes them classics.

Currently reading: seeeekret manuscript thingy

Once in a blue moon, I will chat about a book I’m working on at HarperCollins. I’ll be sure to be transparent about that when it happens, so here you go: Wings is a HarperTeen book, and I work for HarperTeen, and when I was brought on I was giving a gigantic stack of shiny YA books which I intend to plow through little by little.

So! Wings by Aprilynne Pike is the first in a series of YA books about Laurel, a girl who moves to a new town, starts going to public school for the first time, and discovers she’s a faerie. Except instead of sprouting gossamer butterfly-like wings, her “wings” more resemble a huge-petaled flower. That’s because she’s more plant than animal, as she discovers through her sciencey human friend David and her mystical faerie friend, Tamani. Both these dudes are way hot and want to smooch Laurel tons. Oh! And there’s also some evil trolls trying to find the hidden gate to Avalon, the faerie kingdom.

A quick word on love triangles: they’re a really good way to incorporate conflict into a story, and maybe you’re sick of seeing two guys fight over one gal. But what I liked about this love triangle was that Laurel was a strong enough character to say, “Geez guys, I think we have these huge evil troll things to worry about right now. I dunno, maybe we can worry about who smooches who when we’re out of certain danger?” Fist pump, girlfriend!

Laurel is a gentle character who still manages to make tough decisions about things like her relationships with these boys, her identity, and her place between the human and faerie world. I know last week I said I worried about how young heroines were sometimes portrayed as boy-crazy airheads, but Laurel isn’t that girl. She’s pretty level-headed, and I think that’s really refreshing.

Can I just say I love books about girls who discover they’re WAY different than all the other kids at school? It’s such an indulgent, delightful kind of story. When I was 6, I believed I was a robot from outer space sent to record human behavior. It was the biggest disappointment to hear from the doctor every year that I was normal, normal, normal. Nobody feels normal, ever, and I think that’s why I love stories that turn that universal anxiety into something concrete.

The other thing I didn’t like about this installment was the long buildup to the action at the end, but that could have just been my geeky propensity to skip the origin story and get straight to the adventure, comic book style.

If you want to check out the first few chapters of Wings, click the widget above. And if you want to sneak a peek at the next book in the series, Spells, click here:

Currently reading: To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

Recently I read volumes 1-7 of the graphic novel, The Runaways. My roommate had recommended it to me as something that might appeal to my background as a huge comic book nerd.

Before I start talking about The Runaways, a quick word on criticism:

Thinking about criticism inevitably reminds me of my first and only college theatre course. I think it was literally called Theater 101. Anyway, it was a simple class: we went to plays and then we were supposed to discuss them and write papers on them. The course was led by Fred, a 50-something professor who always wore a sweater tied around his neck and highly shined patent leather shoes. I liked him fine; he had great hair. I didn’t like the class much at first, though.

I had never been very interested in the theatre. Growing up in south Florida, what few plays I had ever seen where local productions put on by friends, and attending these events gave me a distinctly uncomfortable feeling, like being embarrassed by the people I knew who were on stage. Once or twice I was driven down to West Palm to see one of the traveling Broadway shows, but the rare spectacle of a musical with a budget shocked the Floridian audience into appreciative silence. Criticism was the furthest thing from our minds.

Because of this background, I found it very difficult to attend the theatre, let alone be critical of it. For the first class of Theater 101, Fred wanted us to go around the room and say something we thought could be improved in the show we had just seen, Chicago. It was a small class and but by the time it got to me, all the technical quibbles I could have had were already taken (the sound was off, the theatre was too cold, etc.). I had nothing to contribute.

Fred wasn’t having it. “It was not a very good performance,” he said. “There must be something you can be critical of.”

I fidgeted and said, “I’m just sort of happy they all showed up and sang.”

Fred laughed for about ten straight minutes. And then he explained why critics (a class of people I had, until that moment, considered somewhere between nightcrawlers and horseflies in terms of usefulness) mattered: because if we didn’t understand what made a good show, there would be no need for theatre companies to try to put on good shows. I didn’t see the logic in that, since plenty of bad shows make lots of money (Mama Mia, for example, once made a friend of mine physically ill), but Fred said it was the principal of the thing.

OK! So being critical, to bring it all back, is a good thing because it provides a service. So I don’t feel saying that The Runaways failed as a story of rebellion, as a story of youth, and as a story of heroism. The premise is that a ragtag group of teens and tweens discover their parents are evil villains who constitute a secret organization bent on destroying the world. The children rebel against their parents and form their own crime-fighting league whose only tenants are that they don’t trust adults. Most of the kids looked up to classic comic book heroes like Wolverine and Captain America, but in the course of their adventures, are disillusioned by these adults. Oh, and also, they end up getting their parents killed.

There’s the usual teen angst and drama, and that wouldn’t bug me at all if the characters weren’t forced to speak in such a stilted, adult-trying-so-incredibly-hard-to-be-a-witty-youngster way. Kids don’t speak that way; nobody speaks that way. The creators wanted to set The Runaways apart from your Spider-Mans and your Iron Mans, but instead The Runaways becomes an amplified version of those corny old tales filled with snappy, punny dialog and predictable plot twists.

Perhaps to appeal to a generation of young female readers in a bid to get them hooked on comics, the gang includes tons of girls. I give that a thumbs up; chick heroes are good times. But the same tired tropes get applied to this new generation as the old. The girls are almost exclusively tied up in relationship drama, whereas the male characters are more rounded, more concerned with issues of fate, honor, loyalty, and strength. Even the one exciting point in the story, when the female leader is confronted with a version of herself from the distant future who promptly dies, she doesn’t seem as worried about her fate and career as a superhero as she is with her boyfriend. I mean, COME ON. Future!You zooms all the way to the past, dies from wounds sustained in a Very Important Battle, warns you with her dying breath, and your reaction is to smooch some more with the dude who is clearly your intellectual inferior to the point of caricature and who doesn’t ever have any powers fercrissake!

Deep breath, Teej.

Reading The Runaways was not the fun romp I like to get out of a comic book, and it wasn’t as interesting as a story should be, and its characters weren’t as developed as teens or people. It was okay, and the art was pretty rad, but I wouldn’t read any more of it.

And now, some jokes about critics:

Currently reading: Wings by Aprilynne Pike