jencat | books! feck! drink!

I think my brain has quit buzzing enough now. I think. It's been one of those days and the off switch seems to be stuck. Maybe the glass of (f*cking) Merlot helped, but not so much. Should sleep, really, I guess.

Weekend I stumbled across Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games accidentally - I don't usually keep an eye on the YA new releases, and the cover makes this look very YA - and it was one of those books that your hand automatically strays back to pick up when you should be doing other things. Exceedingly cool, in other words.

What should be a kinda blah, overly familiar setting (post-apocalytic States, televised 'games' to the death) instead kicks you right in the gut because it's happening, believably, to characters that you care about. Ok, so it's backwoods survivalism meets Battle Royale meets Big Brother (the original and the TV show!) but nothing would keep you from turning those pages just to make sure nothing terrible is about to happen. Except, several terrible things happen, and keep happening, and like the characters, you just have to get through it.

Still stuck in my head several days later, and sequels to come, apparently. All good stuff.

Last week's book was Devon Monk's Magic to the Bone, which was also pretty good, and far better than this week's (Jeanne C Stein's The Becoming). I'm curious, at the moment, why the YA books are feeling more... emotionally mature than the adult genre stuff - lacking all the lashings of sex (although Hunger Games certainly doesn't lack gore, or death). Yep, I read too much urban fantasy, but it's time consuming trying to find stuff that doesn't want to tip over into the abyss of 'paranormal romance'. I guess it's easiest to categorise Patricia Brigg's Alpha and Omega as romance, out of all the ones I enjoyed, purely because it felt like a character study, but seriously, not all about the sex'n'death.

Magic to the Bone had a nice harshness to it - in the vein of Ilona Andrews or Kim Harrison - despite the odd use of a reset button, which I think I can forgive, just about. Not sure how sucked in I'm gonna be for the inevitable sequels just yet...

There's a tiresome sense of irresponsibility to the more vamp romance end of the genre that keeps winding me up at the moment - the slightly more downbeat ending of Halfway to the Grave made me want to read the sequel, which immediately cancelled that out. I know everybody and their cat has a Spike fetish in this genre, but it's all getting a bit old now (The Becoming actually manages to pwn its Spike fetish by wondering whether James Marsters was actually a vamp. Revolutionary.) . Halfway to the Grave has a worrying habit of reading like Buffy fanfic every time its love interest appears (the hair! the cod English accent! make it stop!).

I keep thinking I should switch to actual non-genre stuff occasionally before i get too jaded with the current bunch of UF - there is very little I'll read in epic fantasy these days, especially after JV Jones apparently decided to pad Sword from Red Ice to numbingly dull length and make me hate the characters, dammit. All it does is make me write nasty reviews, and nobody likes that. Also weird, because UF didn't really used to exist, and all I've ever really wanted to write were variations on epic fantasy. Standalone epic fantasy, no less. Which nobody writes, and nobody reads (and why I invariably end up having a head/desk moment about halfway through book two of whatever trilogy I'm attempting to read. We have an attention span/padding problem, methinks.). Ok, one of mine probably wants to have a sequel, but the rest.. ack. Oh hell, I don't really even want to write epic, I want to write (and read) epic domestic fantasy. It's not even a genre. I'm screwed.

Give me a couple more books like Chalice or Black Ships this year though, and I'll be a reasonably happy bunny.