antarctica! how cool is that?

My friend and housemate is a glaciology (and, actually, xenobiology) graduate student, and today she left for six weeks in Antarctica. Antarctica! How cool is that?

(As a side note, it's probably pretty typical that my first reaction was, "Cool! Can I pick your brain for a story about a space station?" On the theory that Antarctic research stations are probably as close to a space station as I or any of my friends are likely to get.)

Anyway. If your response is also, "Antarctica! How cool is that?", you may be interested in reading her blog:

Psychroteuthis

(She also writes quite well, so double bonus.)

(You may consider all 'not just cool but also cold!' type puns already made for your convenience. Thank you, drive through.)

Book Challenge #23: The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins

First, a note: yes, I've ready many books between now and the last time I posted. Most of them were non-fiction, because I was on a fit of not reading a lot of fiction. (I do that, sometimes, when I'm brewing a story idea.) I recently got back into reading fiction, with a vengeance -- mostly YA fantasy -- and I realized that if I went back and tried to blog all the nonfiction I've read between June and now, I'll just never do it. So we'll start with this, which I read a week ago and loved, and I may backtrack to blog some particular favorites.

The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins

I heard a lot about this book and how good it was, and, short version: everyone was right. This book is very, very good.

Long version.

Katniss lives with her mother and sister in District Twelve of Panem, a nation that arose out of the ashes of post-apocalyptic North America. Seventy-five-ish years before the story, the Districts tried to rise up against the despotic Capitol -- and failed. To keep the Districts in their place, to reinforce how utterly the Capitol owned them, the Capitol instituted the Hunger Games, in which two teenagers would be drawn by lottery each year to compete. The twenty-four adolescents are set to kill one another, with only one survivor, the "winner."

This year, for District Twelve, the lot for the girl fell... to Katniss's younger sister Prim.

Katniss volunteered to take her place.

My favorite thing about the book was Katniss, hands down. She's strong, clever, resourceful, courageous, and calculating -- all without losing her essential humanity, despite the horrors of the Game. She's hard and tough and yet has her moments of sweetness and even vulnerability. And she's smart, and skilled -- because she lives on the edge of wilderness, she has unusual skills at hunting, foraging, and making shelter, and those skills are both effective and realistically portrayed. She's just, oh. Wonderful. And wonderful without being perfect -- flawed without her flaws being stupid or contrived. The book is worth reading just for Katniss.

The plot is straightforward but breakneck in pacing -- I read this book in two great gulps: one night I stayed up until I actually fell asleep on the book, and then the next morning I finished it before I started work. It really was a very compelling read.

( And now I need to spoiler cut to continue discussing. )

In summary: I really, really loved this, and I have already pre-ordered Catching Fire, the sequel. Highly, highly recommended.

a note on book challenge tagging

This is really only relevant for those of you who are local to me, but --

I've added some new tagging to my booklog posts: the format of the book. This is one of the following four:

format: paper book - a physical book that I own (and that can be borrowed from me)
format: borrowed/library - a physical book, but one that I can't loan out because it's not mine
format: kindle book - a kindle book, and therefore not borrow-able
format: other ebook - a non-kindle ebook that I can probably hook you up with, if you want

Now there's no guarantee that I'll still have a paper book (and if it's a book I hated, I'll probably get rid of it to free up bookshelf space), but if you're local enough to borrow books from me, you can always ask. :)

(As a side note, I've discovered that I read non-fiction very happily on the Kindle... but for some reason I'm happier reading fiction in physical book form. I certainly have read fiction on the Kindle, especially when traveling, but still, the difference is interesting.)