I've heard a lot of good things about the Hunger Games, and it was a quick and interesting read. However, it is also mired down by some of my least favorite writing characteristics - incessant and useless 1st person narrative, climaxes dragged down by realism too bare to leave us feeling anything climatic, and shallow conceptualization - that I am not sure if I'll read the other two books.

I'm not above a 1st person narrative, but it's hard to get in the head of a 16-year-old girl. Granted, this is a young adult book and shouldn't necessarily be judged on the trappings of its genre - but Harry Potter wove a much more compelling story through a 3rd person narrative, even if it mostly kept the focus on Harry. By the end of this quick read I was sick of the main character, and bringing in a few chapters from different points of view would have done wonders in terms of pacing, delivery, and variety.

The whole book is built up to the Hunger Games themselves, and they manage to devolve into trite, boring battles in which the battlers have little say in the outcome, and the game is played by the Games' orchestrators, the environment, and sheer luck. The led me to believe that there is absolutely no reason to follow our main character; I'd have much rather read about a clever girl that outsmarted each obstacle at the perfect moment using her wits, experience, and previous hardship. Instead we get an empty shell of a teenager that fumbles from one lucky outcome to the next, and writing that just glosses over anything that shows the character's real gifts and strengths.

The only reason I'm considering the next two books is my hope that the narrative will get a lot broader. Instead of worrying about the Games, let's hear more about the interesting world that Collins crafted, and how the main character plays her part in a larger rebellion.

This isn't all to say that it's a bad book, just the wrong book for my tastes, and not quite meeting its universal praise. I enjoyed the cynical take on reality television - which doesn't get enough cynicism these days - and I really do like the vague, dystopian setting. no comments

It's not often that we talk about books here at The Easy Mode, but I recently came across a trailer for an upcoming novel on Youtube (I know!) that had me really intrigued.

The novel in question is Untouchable by Scott O'Connor, and is due to be released on Tyrus Books sometime in May 2011. I don't want to talk too much about the details of the book, as I'd probably do it an injustice, but I will direct you to the video that was so effective in captivating me in the first place. Check it out, and feel free to let us know what you think.



As a side note, the music featured in the video is a track by a band called Signal Hill. I haven't been able to find out what the name of the track is, but I can't help but feel that it just fits that video perfectly. no comments

It's a war that's been waged for eons, which started with one simple question - "What are better, books or film adaptations of books?" - and to this day books have won almost every time. Of course, there are some exceptions to this, and by that I mean films like A Clockwork Orange, Fight Club, Jaws, and Trainspotting. That being said, I recently found out that a favorite book of mine, Ishmael by Daniel Quinn, had been adapted into a 1999 film called Instinct that I neglected to see when it first came out for obvious reasons. The obvious reasons, obviously, are a) the film looked like garbage and b) the film is probably garbage.

I decided to watch it, if only because I was curious to see how the film handled Ishmael's philosophical take on our world. It's not every day that a Hollywood film tries to tackle such subjects as mankind's role on this planet, overpopulation issues, and the end of our civilization. Turns out they didn't really know how to tackle it. The film spends about five minutes discussing some of the issues raised in Ishmael - mainly, our move from tribal societies to civilization - but barely skims the full breadth of Daniel Quinn's novel (and two sequels). However, I still found it to be a fairly entertaining film, and my wife really liked it.

Looking back, it's been ten years since I first read Ishmael and its message, while overly Darwinist at times, is something that everyone could stand to read. I won't get into the book's details because it's a discovery you should make on your own (however, there is this thing called "Wikipedia" if you're really curious). I'm glad that somebody at least tried to bring Ishmael to a larger audience; I just wish there was a little bit more of it in the actual film. no comments

As we transition from our old site to this new one, we've decided to bring along some of our favorite posts as well. Enjoy our trip down memory lane.

For a very short time I worked in a white tablecloth restaurant that could be called "fine dining". It was known for its high quality dry-aged beef and took special pride in the wine pairings. For anyone who's not familiar with it, the goal of pairing is to find the right wine for the right steak. E.g.-- Cabernet Sauvignon ages well in oak and often has a sweet, smokey taste. This flavor goes perfectly with red meat but not so much with poultry of fish (which are usually paired with a white wine).

Why is this important? The idea of pairing is that by combining two ingredients the attributes of each will compliment the other and turn a plate of food in to a one of a king meal. Let's see how this applies to video games.

A few months back I read The Road by Cormac McCarthy. At about that same time I also dove back in to the Capital Wastes with the new DLC for Fallout 3. I was halfway through this bleak, depressing book when I loaded up my old save and-- The Pitt never looked so full of despair. It was like I'd been playing the game with blinders on up until that point. As much as I love playing Fallout, my mind can drift when I play it (specially during the long treks to those un-quicktravelable locations). At the same time, whenever I let my mind wander - in traffic, at work - it was always The Road that I thought about.

We've all read a sad story, or a tense chapter and felt affected after we put the book down-- it's the same as playing too much Tetris and seeing falling blocks everywhere. Perfect example; pull an all-nighter with Left 4 Dead, then read some of World War Z and tell me if the next day you don't absent-mindedly examine your workplace for prospective safe houses. A good book will refuse to let you keep your mind off the story after you close the cover, and a good game will refuse to let you take your eyes off the screen while you play it. The Road had put me in the headspace of characters in a post-apocalyptic world. By doing that it gave more of an impact to playing Fallout. I guess I started taking the game a little more seriously.

After that I turned the difficulty up a little to make it feel like there was more risk to my actions. I started playing it smarter, like the Father character in the Road. I checked 360 degrees every few paces conserving as much ammunition as I could and bypassing every enemy that didn't detect me. Instead of seeing Fallout from the perspective of "I can do anything to anyone and just reload the game", I saw it closer to "anything can happen to me, I should be careful".



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As we transition from our old site to this new one, we've decided to bring along some of our favorite posts as well. Enjoy our trip down memory lane.

Since this is a blog by nerds for nerds, I thought I would have our first "My Faves" post concerning books (without pictures) to be about sci-fi books. I'm not a very big sci-fi fan, so my collection falls more under the mainstream, social-commentary sort of novels:

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