Uncreated Conscience

Last night Bear and I went to his friends’ apartment for a potluck dinner and an evening of board games. After the standard games of Taboo, Apples to Apples, and Dirty Minds, we decided to try our hand at a weird game called Quelf, which is possibly a game one should play when one is SHITFACED DRUNK or tripping on acid. Or else the creators of the game were possibly on some hallucinogenic drugs. Highlights from this game includes Bear and I have to repeat everything we say twice for the entire fucking game, Chris and his fiancée playing the air piano every time someone rolled a one, and Bear’s roommate Oz performing a bellydance for everyone.

Because I didn’t get around to it on Friday, my promised thoughts on The Disreputable History.

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Not that I didn’t like What I Saw and How I Lied by Judy Bludell but…

..holy hell did The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks by E. Lockhart blow my mind. In my opinion, this book is the more deserving of the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. Not to belittle Ms. Blundell. Just…

Wow.

Will right more coherent thoughts on this book tomorrow.

Am too sleepy for a coherent review at the moment, but I just finished reading The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness and all I can say is:

WHERE IS MY NEXT BOOK??????

This is the worst cliffhanger I’ve ever read since The Subtle Knife. GAAAAAH. Will review this one properly once I’ve returned to New York.

But tonight there is dinner in Koreatown and then karaoke to follow!

A bit late, I admit, but things are a little busy in Chez Jones, what with the Sacramento Joneses down in sunny southern California for a visit.

New Year’s passed in typical Jones family fashion with my mother and grandmother making 떡국 (tteok guk — beef soup with rice cakes except in my case it’s non-meat), viewing the Rose Parade floats the night before on my parents’ street before watching the parade itself on TV, and watching the B-2 Spirit Stealth Bomber fly overhead. I leave for New York again on Sunday and while I’ll be sad to leave the bosom of my family, I will be grateful to be in my own apartment again. And to get started on my resolutions because while I am still at my parents’ house, I feel like I’m on vacation and not entitled to be good.

If you are as obsessive about list-making as I am, then I recommend you check out Listography. I spent most of New Year’s Day crafting a resolution before being carried away with other lists: books to read, books read in 2009, movies watched in 2009, and a dozen ridiculous wishlists broken in technology, art supplies, and style & decor (if you’re ever wondering what you should get me as gifts).

I have now read all my new books (and one old one: Downriver by Will Hobbs) and am out of books to read, which was probably not the wisest decision to make before flying out in a few days. Oh well.

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To this all I can say is “What? WHAT?” Who on earth thinks Phantom of the Opera 2: Love Never Dies is a good idea? I’m horribly offended, really, as a formerly obsessed 12-year-old and as the currently-shamefacedly-disdainful-but-still-kind-of-obsessed 23-year-old I am now. The reason the original musical had its punch (for me, at least) was the tragic ending. There is no creature more made for melodramatic romance than a 12-year-old girl. And my parents are baffled by the Twilight phenomenon. When I was 12 it was Titanic. (Which my mother did not let me go see in the theatre on the account that I was 12 and the movie was rated PG-13. I am still bitter about it.)

One last book from my Christmas haul left to read and then I don’t know what I’m going to do with my time. Last night I finished Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins.

Review of Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

This book has been lauded left and right and it’s certainly the sort of book I would have gobbled up (and still do) in my tomboyish youth: dystopian future, survivalist porn, etc. It’s sort of “The Most Dangerous Game” meets Lord of the Flies meets the legend of the Minotaur (with regards to the tribute). I really did thoroughly enjoy it although I wish I had a slightly larger sense of…danger. It sounds odd because at any given moment the protagonist is in danger of being killed in the 74th Annual Hunger Games but being as she is the first-person protagonist, I wasn’t afraid she was going to snuff it in the middle. Very few books can pull off that trope without alienating the reader and I highly doubt you’d find that particular gimmick in most young adult books.

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