JZ followed Mark Reads all through the Harry Potter books and it's pretty fun also as he hits the big HSQ moments.

(I wonder how much more I would pick up if I actually read shit slowly instead of being all "MUST KNOW WHAT HAPPENS NOW NOW NOW").

Yeah, I can't even remember where the second book ended. I might re-read it right now.

OK, I guess I have to read it. I bought it back when, and the DH read it and very much didn't like it, so that plus me being kind of ooky on the premise meant I haven't read it yet.

I don't know how to read slowly. The SO's family were all gawking and marveling at me this holiday over how fast I read. I was all shruggy about it. "Do you...enjoy it?" "Yes, I just enjoy it faster than everybody else."

Thanks for the link to Mark Reads! I think I might enjoy reading that almost as much as I enjoyed reading the books!

DH read it and very much didn't like it, so that plus me being kind of ooky on the premise meant I haven't read it yet

I don't think the series as a whole pays off that well, but the first book in particular is written in that OMG CANNOT PUT THIS DOWN kind of way that makes for best-sellers and movie franchises. And if you read it fast enough you won't notice all the world-building problems.

The premise, though, is definitely ooky: it's a dystopia, even more so than Westerfeld's Uglies universe. Which I think is all-around a much better series, but doesn't have quite that insane narrative drive THG does.

I just finished Mockingjay, and I didn't see the ending as being particularly bleak, except in that Panem is still a pretty damn bleak place. Everdeen, however, rejects the role as pawn she was forced into by the revolutionaries. The world can change. The games are over; people know about the other districts and what the Capitol did.

If you want compelling and the absolutely anti-bleak, go with Connie Willis' Blackout/All Clear.

I have a slowly growing list of writers I used to love whose narrative tics are making me no longer love them. Okay, for "list" I mean: Connie Willis and Guy Gavriel Kay.

But Passage was full of those miscommunication-confusion-chaos bits driving the narrative, and it annoyed me, and apparently the new duology is more of the same. Not sure I can deal with it, especially not for 800 pages or whatever it is.

As for Kay, waaay too much ungrounded foreshadowing and playing hide-the-baby with the reader.

Suela, I felt very much as I expect you'd feel about Willis's new duology. (And it's more like 1,000 pages -- maybe more!) Way too much of the plot, and too many of the individual scenes, hang on a missed connection or communication gone awry, and in the second book, I nearly lost it when a character from 2060 has to go back to the 1970s to read archived newspapers. Do internet archives no longer exist in 2060??? There were definitely things I liked about it, but I felt like it was a 400-page book screaming to be freed from the 600 pages of unnecessary interior monologues and narrative trickery surrounding it.

Has anyone read Jennifer Crusie's new book?