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The Hunger Games – movie!

I read The Hunger Games early this year and was horrified and moved by the first book, underwhelmed by the second and disappointed by the third. Nonetheless, the sheer brilliance of the first book mitigated – just a little bit – the derailment of the story in the sequels. The prospect of a film was extremely exciting, but as any reader of books-being-made-into-films knows, there is a tinge of very real fear that the essence of the story that was so arresting will be lost.

Not so with The Hunger Games. I went to watch the film with deliberately minimal expectations, and was totally and completely rewarded. First, the writing was spot on. The dialogue was very far from being stunted: I thought the sparseness of dialogue in the Arena was particularly apt, considering that in the book, we don’t get too much talk because it’s written in first person and we’re always inside Katniss’s head.

Second, the filming itself. The jerky camera work in the first bit of the film was reminiscent of a documentary, as if you were watching through a handheld camera and following Katniss out into the forest. District 12 was brilliantly realised, from the rundown buildings and the barbed wire right down to the small pile of squirrel bones beside an old man. It formed a sickening contrast to the lushness in the first glance we get of of the Capitol, through the train window. That glance screamed progress and wealth as much as the shots of District 12 couldn’t have communicated poverty and hunger any better. You would never believe the two places were on the same planet, let alone the same country.

Third, the acting. Jennifer Lawrence made me like Katniss on screen even more than Katniss in the book, and that’s saying something because I really liked her in The Hunger Games (she grew a bit too Bella-esque in Catching Fire and Mockingjay, unfortunately). There were tiny little things that worked beautifully: when Katniss is in her room at the Capitol, and she plays with the settings on the window and the glass suddenly shows her in a forest, Lawrence jumps, with an expression on her face that is the perfect balance between frightened and astonished. Her anguish at Rue’s death was again pitch perfect, which I was profoundly grateful for because that’s one of the most heart-wrenching moments in the story, for me.

There were two little niggling things that annoyed me though: one, I didn’t think Prim was very well realised at all. She was reduced into a screaming, crying child, and Prim in the book is a lot tougher than that. All that bathos just made the moment that much less affecting. The other thing was the frequent cuts to Gale watching Katniss kiss Peeta on screen towards the end of the film. It felt way too artificial, and seemed aimed at setting up the romantic conflict that is, irritatingly, so central to the other two books in the series.

I was underwhelmed when I first saw Peeta on screen at The Reaping, but he really grew on me, much to my surprise. By the time Katniss and he were at the cave, he seemed a lot more well-rounded as a character and much more likeable for the grit he showed. I was very pleased that they included the little scene at the Training Centre with him practising his camouflage skills and the mention of decorating cakes at the bakery.

Finally, the gore. The book is essentially about kids being sent into a death trap to kill each other all for the entertainment of a bunch of shallow people, so any attempt at toning down the blood and death would have done a serious disservice to the story. It’s all there though: Glimmer’s horrible death-by-tracker-jacker, the burns, Rue’s heartbreaking death (the scene in which Katniss covers her with flowers was also magnificently done) …the only bit they seemed to have toned down was Cato’s dismembering by the muttations and I’m not complaining about that.

Overall, I was pretty damn pleased with the film. There wasn’t much significance to the mockingjay pin though, so I wonder how they’re going to flesh that out over the next two films. I just really, really hope all of this good work isn’t undone.

York.

I’ve long wanted to write a blogpost about one of my favourite places in the whole world: the city of York in Yorkshire, England. I was lucky enough to have Soumya studying at the University of York the same year I was at Edinburgh, and I spent a considerable sum of money on return train fares to York and visited her at least four times. Everything about York screams ‘OLD’. Okay, that’s a really inelegant way of putting it. What I mean is, I could smell history in the air from the moment I stepped off the train and into the Victorian railway station.

York was the biggest city in the north of England in medieval times. It is a walled city, and one of my favourite things to do when I visited was walk on the city walls, where in ancient times soldiers defended the city from besiegers.

The whole history of the English is visible in York: the Romans were, there, as were the Vikings, the Anglo-Saxons and the Normans. Heck, there are even Indian restaurants run by Bangladeshis now (I’ve been to one). I’ve seen Roman walls, medieval church towers and the ruins of Norman houses. I’ve wandered into churchyards and walked through the Shambles, which is a street whose name is derived from the old word for meat shelf, because it was the location of the meat market. York has seen William the Conqueror’s wrath in the harrying of the North, the Peasants’ Revolt, the Pilgrimage of Grace and suffered the dissolution of the monasteries by good old Henry VIII. It was near York that the Battle of Stamford Bridge was fought by the ill-fated Harold Godwinson. Guy Fawkes was born in York, as was WH Auden.

And of course, there’s the Minster. York Minster towers above everything else, and it’s impossible to take your eyes off it when you’re in the vicinity. It must be one of the most beautiful buildings I’ve ever seen, because every inch of it is so intricately carved, so precisely proportioned that it arrests you and doesn’t let you turn your gaze away. The first time I saw it, Burke’s definition of the sublime sprang to mind effortlessly because that is exactly what it is.

And once inside, I kept running into familiar things: Edward III and Philippa of Hainault were married here; the chapel of the Duke of Wellington’s regiment is here, with the names of cities in every country from Spain to the Indian subcontinent wrought into the grilles; but my favourite thing inside the Minster has to be the screen consisting of statues of the medieval Kings of England. I had endless fun trying to figure out who was who (William Rufus had slightly red cheeks; John looked terribly evil):

Each time I visited York, I came to the same conclusion (which I promptly proceeded to state to Soumya, even though she’d heard it before): I could be blissfully, perennially happy if I lived in York. I’d make trips to Betty’s tea rooms, I’d walk around the Minster and through the Snickelways, I’d do my shopping in the weekly markets and I’d lie on the grass in the Museum Gardens, among the ruins, and read my life away. I’d visit churches – old and new – and wander their graveyards, I’d go to theatre performances and concerts and I would be content.

York always filled me with pure joy.

There are few places in the world I would say that about, but I would never object to adding more to my list :)

my top 10 books of 2011

If this year’s taught me anything, it’s that the way one reads when one is an English student at university is quite different from the way one reads when one is not a student any longer. I don’t mean there’s a difference in terms of how acute one’s critical faculties are – being an English Lit student is, after all, about learning how to read better – but something a lot simpler: there isn’t a reading list you’ve got to get through. Or, to be more precise, the list is yours to shorten, lengthen, or reinvent entirely.

So this year, I went a little wild. I stepped out of 18th and 19th century Britain (well, some of the time at least!) and wandered as far as Fantasia, WWI Europe, the 90s, contemporary New York, a futuristic England, 19th century China and post-Civil War Barcelona. And it was great!

So 2011 has been and gone, and I’m pretty proud of the fact that I managed twice the number of books in 2011 as I did in 2010 and 2009. There were loads of memorable reads, but since the general anatomy of lists only allows for 10 (and because I’m lazy and I don’t really think a top 50 books of 2011 makes much sense if I read only 60 books last year), here’s my list of the ten best books I read last year:

# 1 Passion – Jude Morgan – Jude Morgan is the pen-name of the very ordinarily named Tim Wilson. I approached his work with caution, because so many novelists specialising in historical fiction just use the genre as an outlet for their swords-and-corsets fantasies and don’t really expend much energy on really bringing a historical period to life. Though the distinctly romance-novelistesque pseudonym might set off warning bells in one’s head, Jude Morgan is an astonishingly good writer. I read two novels by him last year, the first being The Taste of Sorrow, which was a novel about the lives and loves of Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë. It was beautifully written, meticulously researched and painted a haunting picture of their lives on the edge of the wild, weather-beaten moors of North Yorkshire. But as satisfying as The Taste of Sorrow was, Passion was even better. Once again, the name and cover utterly belied the brilliance of the novel within: Passion is about the women who knew and loved Shelley, Byron and Keats, that is, Mary Godwin, Augusta Leigh, Lady Caroline Lennox and Fanny Brawne.

The novel once again bore signs of thorough research and a masterful handling of the sheer detail that any novel about the Romantic poets must contend with: many of the words spoken by the three poets came straight out of accounts of incidents in letters or diaries. In fact, this book was such a joy to read that I’m not going to rip it apart into brutal categories. It’s at the top of this list because it was a book that I really, really enjoyed reading. From Mary Wollstonecraft in the waning years of the 17o0s, to Mary Shelley in the middle of the 19th century, it’s a book about breaking barriers, fighting battles against yourself and society, and of course, about the terrible, awesome power love can wield.

# 2 Shelley: The Pursuit – Richard Holmes – I’ve always said Shelley is my favourite Romantic poet, but less as a result of in-depth study of his work than from some vague, lingering notion that he was a kindred spirit. Reading this book vindicated that belief a hundred times over. Percy Bysshe Shelley was a thoroughly remarkable human being whose ideas on free love and the distribution of wealth would still be considered radical today and Richard Holmes’ biography does a brilliant job of putting Shelley in the spotlight without a hint of bias or prejudice. Shelley’s naivete, his insensible cruelty towards those he loved is set alongside his almost selfless kindness; his fiery rage against marriage, monarchy, war and aristocratic society is marvellous to behold because it is so pure.

# 3 A Long Way Down – Nick Hornby – This book reminded me a lot of Waiting for Godot but it was a billion times funnier, nicer and filled with a lot more action. It’s about four people who inadvertently become entangled in each other’s lives because they meet on a terrace that is traditionally only visited by people looking to commit suicide by jumping off it. To say much more would be silly, because the book is just so singularly worthy of being read.

# 4 The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England – Ian Mortimer – This was a hilarious, in-depth and really informative book about the nitty gritty of life in a 14th century English landscape. Filled with gems like ‘May you and your very balls be blessed’ (an authentic medieval greeting). Reading it almost had me convinced that I’d have been happier living in England in the Middle Ages – despite the lack of modern plumbing, medicine and the occasional visits made by the Black Death. Fact you might not know: women were a lot better off in the Middle Ages than in the 18th and 19th centuries. They could own property and engage in business. However, they could still be raped, betrothed at birth, bartered over like property and very often died in childbirth.

# 5 Fables: Volumes 1 – 15 – Bill Willingham – I never read comic books as a kid. I’ve read a couple of Tintin stories, Amar Chitra Katha and Tinkle but that’s it. This series was my first introduction to comic books and my god, I was hooked. It’s about fairytale characters who live in contemporary New York because their own lands have been conquered by the great and terrible Adversary. Much of their time is taken up with bureaucratic red-tape, and keeping their existence secret from all the mundanes walking around. But when you’ve got fairytale characters, figures of myth and legend and nursery rhymes all together in one place, great events and upsets can hardly be prevented from happening.

# 6 The Secret History – Donna Tartt – This would have been higher up on the list if I hadn’t so many other brilliant books this year. It’s a macabre, chilling tale, hypnotically written, and anybody who has ever been at university studying the arts will immediately identify with its themes.

# 7 V for Vendetta – Alan Moore – I was reading it when the London riots were on, and I kept seeing eerie parallels everywhere. ‘Happiness is the most insidious prison of all’ has got to be one of my favourite quotes of all time, along with ‘Ideas are bulletproof’.

# 8 Sea of Poppies – Amitav Ghosh – Again, this would have been much higher up the list if I hadn’t read so many other great books. I’m still incredulous about the temerity of any country that would attempt to make money off the opium addiction of another country’s people, but the novel does a brilliant job of making you feel like you’re right in the thick of it: reading the sailors’ creole, jumbling with different words from languages you may or may not know is quite thrilling to someone who likes linguistic puzzles (like me!).

# 9 Charlotte Gray – Sebastian Faulks – There can never be a book written about World War II that isn’t harrowing. By contrast with some of the other books I’ve read, Charlotte Gray is pretty sparse, in terms of the tone it uses to deal with the horrors of WWII and the Holocaust, but it’s that sparseness that throws characters, emotions and events into sharp relief.

# 10 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon – If you like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, you’ll like this one. It’s magical, shifting, constantly surprising and utterly unpredictable. Also, it features something called ‘The Cemetery of Forgotten Books’ and the plot hinges on a literary mystery of epic proportions. It’s set in Barcelona, and I was reading it when I travelled there, so it was quite perfect.

And because I can’t resist, here are my honourable mentions:

The Neverending Story – Michael Ende

The Siege of Krishnapur – J.G Farrell

High Fidelity – Nick Hornby

Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy

The Taste of Sorrow – Jude Morgan

the city is a sorceress

It’s been a while since I was last here.

I’ve been wandering through colonial mansions, listening to the absurdity of the speeches made justifying colonisation and contemplating the smoky dreamworld of opium; I’m currently embroiled in literary intrigue in post-World War II Barcelona, even as I pack my bags to visit that very city. I’ve been watching with bated breath as 11 men fight against 11 others to keep possession of a ball and gratify the millions whose happiness depends on a well-aimed kick. I’ve been listening to songs about unrequited love and wondering if I’m always going to be stuck in the beautiful twilight of self-pity and adoration that I seem to have made a point of inhabiting over the last few years.

As I grow older, I am merely more convinced of the fact that I don’t really need people; I neither crave their company nor miss it when it isn’t there. Maybe loneliness grows out of the belief that you are cut off because you lack something essential that everyone else seems to feel? An inability to understand community?

Who knows?

I’m happy and sad, full of love and apathetic, content and miserable – and I doubt most people are any less contradictory.