How Did I Miss that One?

On September 1st, I turned 25. Yep. I am now a quarter of a century old. As everyone has pointed out, that means I'm officially old. But the main point isn't that I'm old (of which I already know), but that one of the gifts I received was Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins. Mockingjay is the last of the Hunger Games books, a series that is hugely popular with the young population. I know this, because, as I have said before, I'm a teacher (even subs/guest teachers are teachers, so there), and I'd see probably twenty to a hundred copies of each of the first two books every day during the previous school year.

I read the first one because of this. As a teacher, I try to at least stay current with what the kids are listening to/watching/reading/whatever, even if I don't know a ton about it. This is how I ended up reading Twilight, which, I do appreciate the fact that it gets kids to read, an ever increasingly difficult feat to accompish, but that was just utter garbage. I mean, I know I'm no prize-winning author, but I like to think that I'm at least more to the point than Stephanie Meyer. Anywho, I digress. I was a bit apprehensive about reading anything the students are because of the whole Twilight fiasco, but I picked it up from the library, and wow, that book was everything Twilight was not. It was fast-paced, the characters were believable (under the circumstances) and even the forced romance was more palatible than the one between Bella and Edward. As an added bonus, at no point in reading HG did I ever feel unclean, no matter how hard I tried to wash myself.

Anyway, the point is, I had been keeping close track of the series and was blindsided by the fact that, in the craziness that was my summer, the release of the third and final book in the series had snuck up on me. However, I got it, and all is good in the world. It continues with the time jumping (not actual time travel, just skipping forward hours, days, months to get to the meat of the story) and picks up about a month where Catching Fire left off. Some of the reveals are both sad and shocking, but I can't wait to see how it ends (I've had the book for about sixteen hours, so I'm a little ashamed that I'm not further along that I am).

In other literary news, I picked up the first volume of Young Avengers at the convention. It sucked because I settled for the paperback edition (I have the hardcover of the second, because I found that at Half-Priced Books months ago and figured that it'd stand up to student reading a bit better). No sooner had I picked up the paperback edition did we find a stand that had an entire row of sealed copies of the hardcover edition...at a stand we had already picked through, but had given up because Kelly had been looking for Walking Dead and not any comics from Marvel.

I also picked up the first four volumes of Brubaker's Captain America as well as the first volume of Runaways, New Avengers, and volume two of Atomic Robo. So, overall, it was a good year for trade buying. My brother, who had a table in Artist's Alley, said that, despite the screwups by Wizard, this was probably his most successful convention yet. I will detail why at another time, as it is late, and I am tired.