The Hunger Games: Mockingjay

Against all odds, Katniss Everdeen has survived the Hunger Games twice. But now that she's made it out of the bloody arena alive, she's still not safe. The Capitol is angry. The Capitol wants revenge. Who do they think should pay for the unrest? Katniss. And what's worse, President Snow has made it clear that no one else is safe either. Not Katniss's family, not her friends, not the people of District 12.

It’s all done. I have finished the Hunger Games trilogy. I thought it was really pretty good stuff. The plot is stellar with lots of excitement in this tranche of the story and, finally, I actually like Katniss. I know; it was a momentous breakthrough read.

Previously, and sometimes in this book too to be honest, Katniss just came across a little arrogant and always acting the martyr, which I find a little tiring… “Oh how will anyone be able to live if I do not protect them?” This time, though, a mixture of influences let me see that she’s not really that bad. First influence? My sister. She sat me down and explained the complexities of her character, what drives her and pointed out that really there were quite a lot of reasons why Katniss might not have turned out to be the most appealing person – extreme tragedy in her childhood, having to be an adult for her family since she was a tiddler, oh and the whole being forced to leave home and kill loads of people… so I start to sympathise.

Second influence? The writing just isn’t amazing, ok? So her narration was never going to get off to a good start. Don’t get me wrong, and I’ve said this before, amazing writing isn’t the primary concern for a kids book, but it did let Katniss down in this one aspect, I felt.

Third influence? Watching the film because Jennifer Lawrence is just so blooming awesome that there is no way anyone with a heart couldn’t like her. Simples.

Now, to the plot: No Hunger Games this time (for whatever reason you want to assume, people who have not read it) but that is not to the detriment of the action, I promise you. The Gale/Peeta conundrum heats up. President Snow is still an absolute a-hole. It’s all go go go! What I think I liked most about Mockingjay was the increased focus on Panem’s politics.

Overall I felt that although I was perhaps cruel about the writing and unfair on Katniss and her predicament in the first couple of books, the trilogy really is a masterpiece of imagination. Most importantly, it feels like it really could be real. I think that must be the key to the success of the top fantasy franchises – be it Potter, Twilight or Hunger Games – you have to believe these people exist and that the threats are very real. Suzanne Collins, for me, does this entirely.

Really enjoyed this and nothing like taking a break from the world of adult books for a bit. Really shout do it more often… Mockingjay gets 8/10!

Ightham Mote

It is April next week, and it is snowing in London. No, not just a little bit of sleet, actually settled snow. I'm not impressed. Anyway, yesterday, no little bit of snow and minus degrees were going to stop me from driving off into the Kent countryside for a bit of fresh air and, most importantly, a pub lunch.

We went off to see Ightham Mote, a manor house built nearly seven hundred years ago. Over the years it has seen a few changes but retains its original beauty and charm. Wonky beams, dark wooden staircases, Tudor decoration, a beautiful courtyard and huge fire places to welcome you in mean it wasn't exactly a surprise for me to find that the house had inspired a few novels in its time. A Rose for the Crown, an historical novel set in the late 15th century heavily features this stunning moated manor and Anya Seton's Green Darkness centres around the legend of a walled-up female skeleton at Ightham Mote, a rumour that lingers in the Ightham air today.

The Mote part of the house's name doesn't actually refer to the moat, which I think I can be forgived for assuming. It actually just identifies the house as a meeting place, perhaps a welcome retreat from the busy city.

Chinua Achebe, dies aged 82

Chinua Achebe was a Nigerian novelist, poet, professor and critic. He is most famous for his 1958 book, Things Fall Apart, which follows the life and times of Okonkwo, a leader and local wrestling champion in Umuofia, a fictional village in Nigeria inhabited by the Igbo people, and his family. A phenomenal achievement, Things Fall Apart was one of the first African novels to be written in the English language and has since become the best-selling modern African novel in the world. He is widely known as the 'Father of African Literature', quite the legacy.

Achebe's career was one that received high praise and saw him travel all over the world, finally residing in Boston where he worked as a professor. Tragically Achebe was involved in a car accident that left him paralysed from the waist down for the last twenty years of his life - the fundamental reason for his relocating to the USA. His family in their statement paid tribute to "one of the great literary voices of all time. He was also a beloved husband, father, uncle and grandfather, whose wisdom and courage are an inspiration to all who knew him." Nelson Mandela has credited him with "[bringing] Africa to the World".

Chinua Achebe is one of those guys you need to look up just to furnish yourself with some brilliant quotes. Achebe just oozes profundity and is simply one of those people we all wish we were - making a real difference.

Here are a handful of quotes for you to take away:

"One of the truest tests of integrity is its blunt refusal to be compromised."

"The only thing we have learnt from experience is that we learn nothing from experience."

and on Yeats (from whose poem came the title Things Fall Apart): 

"But I liked Yeats! That wild Irishman. I really loved his love of language, his flow. His chaotic ideas seemed to me just the right thing for a poet. Passion! He was always on the right side. He may be wrongheaded, but his heart was always on the right side. He wrote beautiful poetry."

Things Fall Apart has rightly been read and taught in schools worldwide, mine included, but for some reason I remember his poem 'Vultures' much better, so am leaving you with this:

In the greyness

and drizzle of one despondent

dawn unstirred by harbingers

of sunbreak a vulture

perching high on broken

bone of a dead tree

nestled close to his

mate his smooth

bashed-in head, a pebble

on a stem rooted in

a dump of gross

feathers, inclined affectionately

to hers. Yesterday they picked

the eyes of a swollen

corpse in a water-logged

trench and ate the things in its bowel. Full

gorged they chose their roost

keeping the hollowed remnant

in easy range of cold

telescopic eyes ...

Strange

indeed how love in other

ways so particular

will pick a corner

in that charnel-house

tidy it and coil up there, perhaps

even fall asleep - her face

turned to the wall!

...Thus the Commandant at Belsen

Camp going home for

the day with fumes of

human roast clinging

rebelliously to his hairy

nostrils will stop

at the wayside sweet-shop

and pick up a chocolate

for his tender offspring

waiting at home for Daddy's return ...

Praise bounteous

providence if you will

that grants even an ogre

a tiny glow-worm

tenderness encapsulated

in icy caverns of a cruel

heart or else despair

for in every germ

of that kindred love is

lodged the perpetuity

of evil.

Book Club: Poet's Pub

Comprised of an entertaining series of vignettes that occur at the Pelican Pub in Downish, England, Poet's Pub is a humour-filled collection of stories by award winner Eric Linklater—one of the original titles commissioned by Penguin Classics founder Allen Lane—and again available to readers.

When an Oxford poet named Saturday Keith assumes control of the Pelican Pub, what he desires most is the peace and freedom to craft his poems without being disturbed. This is the least of what happens, for the local watering hole soon becomes an out-and-out attraction for various eccentric characters ranging from uncouth rogues to members of academia.

Whoops, been a little longer than I intended between posts... been a busy week, what with book club and my Diva Dance class last night (don't ask). Anyway, back to books.

When it was announced that the next book club read would be Poet's Pub by Eric Linklater, our faces all kind of screwed up with confusion... wha'? who? This is a 'classic'? Never heard of it. I wasn't particularly comforted by the blurb either so I put off reading it for a while, I'm afraid. Even when my mum picked it up off the table and read the first page she grimaced. Moving through it, though, I have to say it picked up.

I don't know about anyone else but I always slightly struggle with humour in books at the best of times. For me somehow humour doesn't always translate in books, which seems odd because I have a fabulous sense of humour (and modesty). I remember when I went to see Hilary Mantel talk at the Southbank Centre and she read out an excerpt from Bring Up the Bodies and suddenly a whole different side, a distinctly funny side, came across that I hadn't previously picked up. So when I saw this was a comic novel, one written in 1929 at that, I sunk slightly into my chair.

So I struggled at the beginning; it seemed more eccentric than it was funny and I didn't have a clue who all these people were running about and writing weird poems about rats and making bizarre cocktails. Moving on, though, the comedy started to come through and I did find myself having a little chuckle. It's wonderfully ridiculous and it was a nice change to read a book, more specifically a classic, that doesn't take itself too seriously and that isn't a million pages long! 

All in all, I enjoyed it. It's not going to go down in history as my favourite read ever. I'm also not sure it would suit everyone but it was fun and a little different. One point that was made at the book club was that it would work brilliantly on stage. I can see there was a 1949 film but no apparent evidence of a play, which is interesting as it has all the silliness and physical comedy of farce such as Michael Frayn's Noises Off and Joe Orton.

Highlight? "The red–haired vixen of a maid, Nelly Bly" of course!

Overall the book was rated 6/10 by the book club and 6/10 by me!

Women's Prize for Fiction - Longlist

   

   

   

   

   

No surprises to see Hilary Mantel is up there fighting for, I think, her fourth major award for Bring Up the Bodies. She has some pretty stiff competition if you ask me, though. Female literary heavy-weights Zadie Smith, Kate Atkinson and Barbara Kingsolver are all up there fighting for the once Orange, now colourless Women's Prize for Fiction. Let's also not underestimate the six newcomers on the longlist either, with the last two years' prizes being awarded to debut novelists Tea Obreht (for The Tiger's Wife in 2011) and Madeline Miller (for The Song of Achilles in 2012 - review here).

Book Break at the Southbank Centre

Do you know what makes me angry? People who exercise at lunch time. To quote Jennifer Lawrence, "I hate saying: 'I like exercising' — I want to punch people who say that." I feel that the slogan, 'There's an app for that" should probably be appropriated and amended soon to read "There's a JLawr quote for that" because there are so many perfect ones for any given situation! Anyway, this isn't unfortunately a post on Jennifer Lawrence or, in fact, on exercising. What I merely wanted to point out was that instead of exercising and making me feel bad, why not go along to Book Break at the Southbank Centre?

Southbank Centre, Coin Street and The Reader Organisation have put together a regular reading group in the Saison Poetry Library. Turn up every Thursday until the end of March, meet some fellow book geeks and talk about books. Seriously, way more fun than exercising. You don't need to prepare or do any homework. Unfortunately, I would say, that you probably need to have a pretty lenient boss as it's a two hour lunch break, running from 12.30 to 2.30.

If your March is looking pretty busy, though, or you just don't think you could persuade your boss that Pret a Manger have released a limited edition sandwich that takes two hours to eat, don't fret! The Southbank Centre Book Club meets regularly at 6.30pm with lots of great books ahead to get stuck into. You can have a look at what is coming up and book some tickets via the Southbank Centre website.

Did I mention that it's all free?

Sissinghurst Castle

Whenever I try to surprise someone for a birthday or some other celebration, I nearly always seem to blow it. The power of knowledge is just too much. I mean, seriously, who can resist hinting that you know something they don't?? Ok so I've exposed a flawed side to my mind... but it's an endearing flaw really, no? Anyway, this weekend I actually did it! For Mothers Day, after months of complaints from my mum that my sister never comes home from university, we managed to organise for her to come home for a weekend of quality family fun without my mum suspecting a thing until she arrived! I'm still feeling pretty proud about it...

Anyway, one of the ways we spent our highly anticipated weekend was by going to Sissinghurst Castle in Kent. Sissinghurst is the ruin of an Elizabethan manor house and in its time has been the site of a prison for French seamen during the Seven Years War, a poor house and a working farm. It was also, however, home to author, poet and avid gardener, Vita Sackville-West and her husband Harold Nicholson during the 1930s after she failed to inherit her family home of Knole as she was a woman. It was Vita and Harold who created the famous garden at Sissinghurst, which is spectacular in its scope and colour.

The original Hogarth Press

Vita Sackville-West had success as a writer and poet, her best known novels being The Edwardians (1930) and All Passion Spent (1931), but she is probably better known for a number of affairs she had with women, most famously Virginia Woolf. You therefore wouldn't be surprised to know that Sackville-West was published a number of times by the Woolfs' Hogarth Press. In fact the original Hogarth Press currently resides at Sissinghurst itself.

If you suffer from house envy, be prepared. Ask any friend of mine what three things I would want for my home if money were no object and they would all say, probably with a yawn: a lake, a library and a spice rack. Now I don't know whether there's a spice rack hanging around (I bet there is!) but they have a herb garden, a large lake... acres of beautiful countryside surrounding their stunning gardens and, naturally, a personal library, which is open visitors. House envy doesn't even cover it. Rows and rows of books extend right from one end of the room to the other, covering an entire wall. *sighs* amazing.

Sissinghurst Castle

Biddenden Road

near Cranbrook

TN17 2AB

International Women's Day

Today is International Women's Day. Stylist magazine already stole my idea for a post by giving us some great quotes from women writers. I could come up with something new and original but I figured I can just steal their idea and give you some quotes anyway... so here are some inspirational quotes from great women writers to get you through those last few hours up to the weekend.

JK Rowling (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows)"Words are, in my not so humble opinion, our most inexhaustible source of magic, capable of both inflicting injury and remedying it."

Toni Morrison"If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it." 

Dorothy ParkerInterviewer: What, then, would you say is the source of most of your work?Dorothy Parker: Need of money, dear.

Virginia Woolf (you didn't think I was going to get through this post without mentioning her did you?)
"A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."

Emily Dickinson"We turn not older with years, but newer every day."

Adrienne Rich"There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors."

and I'll leave you with this one...

Margaret Atwood (A Handmaid's Tale)“Don't let the bastards grind you down.” 

Some great reads from women writers to start this weekend:

How to be a Woman - Caitlin Moran

A Place of Greater Safety - Hilary Mantel

The Song of Achilles - Madeline Miller

The Hunger Games - Suzanne Collins

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal - Jeaneatte Winterson

The Amateur Marriage - Anne Tyler

The Tenderness of Wolves - Stef Penney

The Outcast - Sadie Jones

Cooling and Great Expectations

You might remember that over Christmas I read Charles Dickens' classic, Great Expectations. For some reason I had been led to believe that this was a Christmassy story. This is, quite simply, not true. Admittedly the opening chapter is set on Christmas Eve but that really is as festive as it gets... although this really only occurred to me after I'd finished reading the entire book...

That minor gripe aside, you know I love a good gripe (and that's grIpe not grope as some dirty minded friend suggested...), the reason for this post is that last weekend I quite accidentally found myself in the village that is said to have inspired Pip's home: Cooling, a village and civil parish on the fabulously named Hoo Peninsula.

It's not hard to imagine a young Pip coming across Magwitch amongst the gravestones in the grounds of Cooling's wonderfully dramatic St James' Church. If you take a walk in the graveyard, you will come across what are now called Pip's Graves - those of 13 babies that are referred to by Dickens in his opening chapter as "little stone lozenges each about a foot and a half long, which were arranged in a neat row beside their [parents'] graves".

The main reason for my Saturday morning excursion to Kent was to have a lovely, if not a little brisk, walk on the North Kent Marshes. But you can't have a walk without lunch. That's just... the law. So an hour and a half later, a little more windswept, distinctly muddier and disastrously low on calories, my mum and I stumbled into The Horseshoe & Castle pub in Cooling. This, as it happens, was where I discovered the village's connections with Great Expectations.

Tucking in to rarebit next to a cosy fire, I noticed some writing framed on the wall. With St James's Dickensian associations, 'it is not inconceivable to assume that the public house [The 'Three Jolly Bargemen' from Pip's village in Great Expectations] is one and the same as the 'Horseshoe and Castle' that we know today'. Even less conceivable if it is in fact true that the pub was originally called 'The Three Barges'. Dickens really used his imagination there... Whether or not it is true, the pub certainly remains as 'homely and friendly' as its fictitious brother.

Musician Jools Holland also lives in the village. His house is actually inside the grand-looking Cooling Castle. Does that make Jools Miss Havisham...? I think so.

Other Dickens-related posts:
Great Expectations
Claire Tomalin on Dickens
Introducing...Charles Dickens
Visit The Old Curiosity Shop
The George Inn

Horseshoe & Castle

Main Rd

Cooling

Rochester

ME3 8DJ
01634 221691

Will Emma Watson fit the slipper for Branagh's Cinderella?

Is it just me or do we seem to be swamped by fairy tales at the moment? We've already had Red Riding Hood with Amanda Seyfried and two adaptations of Snow White in 2012 alone (Mirror Mirror with Julia Roberts and Snow White and the Huntsman with Kristen Stewart). This year we have already had Hansel and Gretel and are about to be re-introduced to the world of Oz through Disney's Oz the Great and the Powerful.

Apparently, though, there are yet more retellings on the way and Harry Potter actress Emma Watson is rumoured to be in two of them: Guillermo de Toro's Beauty and the Beast and now she's about to try on Cinderella's glass slipper for Kenneth Branagh. The last part of that sentence sounds a little creepy for some reason... apologies.. Watson's involvement is still a rumour though, when it comes to Cinderella, and other actresses believed to be being considered for the role are Imogen Poots, Gabriella Wilde and Alicia Vikander. Hilariously, I read that back in 2009 Watson's name was attached to Marilyn Manson's rumoured gothic revamp of the fairy tale. Seems that never happened but that must be worth a look if it comes about?

It looks like Emma Watson might not be the only Hogwarts alumni to return to the world of monsters, though, as fans are petitioning for Tom Felton to play Beast opposite Watson's Belle... As amazing as that would be, I'm not keeping my hopes high...

Though it does look like co-star Daniel Radcliffe is very close to being confirmed as Igor in Paul McGuigan's adaptation of Frankenstein. Igor doesn't actually appear in Mary Shelley's original novel but featured in the 1939 film as a hunch-backed assistant to Frankenstein called Fritz, and again in subsequent films in the Frankenstein series as 'Ygor'. Igor has since become a stock character in interpretations of many Gothic films, including Dracula, Van Helsing and The Rocky Horror Picture Show.