Sadly, and I know I will regret posting this, I saw the really good trailer photos, with the two blond siblings, and thought "what's with the Flowers in the Attic kids on my fantasy fic?" and had to dive back in.

On the flip side, and perhaps to redeem myself just a little, I just read the house copy of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to HKF, starting with the entirety of the cover. She asked what the six-digit number was in the top left corner. I believe it's the ISBN for a book published in 1976. She also commented that no one had dog eared any pages, in all the book's long yellowing life. I count that as a win.

Remainder Report: Lots of cool titles on the remainder table at Pegasus Books. They had Bolano's 2066 in TPB for only $9. Every time I read the beginning I started to get sucked in so I've been eager to get it.

They had the oversize and elaborate Taschen Circus set (1870-1955) for only $70. I think it originally went for closer to $300. It has huge foldout reproductions of vintage posters and tons of photos.

They also had the complete New Yorker Cartoons book, with the accompanying two CDs of every cartoon ever published in the New Yorker. Only $30, and worth it just for your iPad.

A Dance with Dragons currently #4 on Amazon's Top 100 books thanks to preorders.

(#2 is a pop-up book about Harry Potter.)

Sox, I read the first few and then just stopped. Too long between updates, too much death, too grim overall. Plus the incest. I might watch the show, for the awesome cast.

Good to know, both Connie & Jilli

I just finished the Hunger Games trilogy. I mainlined the whole thing in the course of about 4 days. I found the ending appropriate but depressing. I think I would have felt better about the ending if we had had a scene with Katniss and Peeta coming together again, instead of reading about it in an epilogue. I was really messed up over what was done to Peeta. It is probably wrong to feel this way, but in some ways I feel like that was one of the worst things done in the books.

I would have preferred more closure in some areas and I agree with discussion above that there needed to be a bit more description from Katniss regarding her final dramatic act. I think that her voting for another round of Hunger Games coupled with her assassination of Coin seem like contradictory acts to me. Why vote for it when it wouldn't have made a difference.

How are they going to film this thing? I bet they will change the ending.

le nubian, Katniss voted for it to make Coin think she was on her side. Haymitch realized what she was doing and went along with it. Haymitch knew that Katniss would never TRULY vote for another fucking Hunger Games, having gone through two in a row, so he knew she was up to something. If Katniss had voted against it and made waves, Coin could have dropped her from the Snow execution or, well, had her disposed of some other way. We already knew she considered her a threat. I'll agree that it wasn't entirely clear, though.

How are they going to film this thing?

Seriously.

I bet they will change the ending.

They're going to have to do something to keep the movies PG-13.

P-C,

okay, your explanation makes a lot of sense. Thank you. I have a feeling I was speed reading at that point, so I might not have absorbed everything properly.

No, I felt the same way. I read it over and over to see whether I'd missed something. It's somewhat of a cheat in the first-person POV, but not entirely. Katniss does withhold her motivations from the reader, but she does not lie. You have to read between the lines.

Oh, and I agree that what happened with Peeta was horrible. I never expected that, and I was afraid that there would be no semblance of a happy ending at all.