Tag: catching fire

Back to the Underland

Last month, I blogged about how much I loved Suzanne Collins‘ Underland Chronicles after I read the first three books right before Mockingjay was released. I must confess the series took me by surprise; way before I discovered the Hunger Games series, I’d been seeing the Underland Chronicles in the bookstores and never really thought of picking them up. Then I managed to forage two books out of the bargain bins, and when I finally decided to read them, I found them utterly engrossing!

I read straight on from books 1-3: Gregor the Overlander, Gregor and the Prophecy of Bane, and Gregor and the Curse of the Warmbloods. I had trouble finding copies of the next books in the series, Gregor and the Marks of Secret and Gregor and the Code of the Claw so I momentarily had to stop reading the series, but some wonderful friends at Scholastic (yay, thanks Ms. Joyce and Ms. Roselle!) gifted me with books 4 and 5, and as soon as the craziness of the past couple of weeks subsided, I happily dug into the remainder of the Underland Chronicles.

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The Mockingjay has landed!


(first published in Manila Bulletin)

The long wait is finally over for fans of Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games trilogy, as “Mockingjay,” the final installment in Scholastic’s hottest property since Harry Potter, was released worldwide this week.

Since “Mockingjay” was announced in December 2009, fans have kept an eye on the countdown clock as they held their breaths on the fate of the series heroine, Katniss Everdeen, and the nation of Panem. Much of the fandom is based online: fan pages, countdown counters and badges, miles of fan fiction, online book clubs and book discussions, and blog tours.

“Mockingjay” has been so highly anticipated that even those in the literary circles were scrabbling about for advance copies, but to no avail. Scholastic kept it under wraps, more closely guarded than “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” that furor ensued all over the internet when Andrew Sims, administrator of Harry Potter fan site mugglenet.com, tweeted that he got ahold of a copy nearly two weeks before the release.

And when a video of Suzanne Collins reading the first few paragraphs of “Mockingjay” was posted on the internet one day before the release, fans all over the world hung on to her every word.

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Suzanne Collins Marathon


Still counting down to Mockingjay!

In an attempt to slake my excitement over Mockingjay, I brought out all the Suzanne Collins books in my possession (and bought one more) and have been reading voraciously for the past five days. I started with Gregor the Overlander, the first book of the Underland Chronicles last Friday, but I didn’t have book 2  yet so I decided to reread Hunger Games and Catching Fire on Saturday. By Sunday, I was already reaching for the copy of Gregor and the Prophecy of Bane that I’d bought the day before. And then I started reading Gregor and the Curse of the Warmbloods yesterday, and now I’m out of the Underland Chronicles, so the marathon’s on hold (at least until I can find myself copies of Gregor and the Marks of Secret and Gregor and the Code of the Claw).

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Outrageous — the Mockingjay Leak!

I just came home from a planning meeting with Scholastic Philippines and NWA for the Mockingjay launch and was distressed by the news that someone has already gotten ahold of a bootleg copy!

Grrr. I just have to vent. HG fans all over the world are in an uproar, and I am itching to do some bodily harm to that evil schmeevil slimeball. Grrrrr. It’s bad enough that he got his paws on it, but he just had to gloat about it on the internet. Despicable! Utterly despicable! Grrrrrrrrrrrrrr. May a thousand trackerjackers attack you, and if you post any spoilers, may the muttations chomp on your flesh and may President Snow breathe heavily on your neck forever.

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Catching Fire (and the HG fever continues!)

mockingjay

I know this is way overdue, as I finished Catching Fire three weeks ago. But the book fair, the two storms (and the great flood) that hit the country, my trip to Singapore (more on that on a future post!), and rearranging the house (ugh, reshelving my books, and still resuscitating those that went under during the flood) have kept me pretty busy and this is the first weekend I’ve had to myself in a long time.

If you’ve just discovered my blog, well, I read Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games (Scholastic Press) about a month back, and to my surprise, it slaked that craving I had for a really good read, and about time too, as I’d spent more than half of the year looking for a book to wow me.

Several days later, I got ahold of the I had newly-released sequel, Catching Fire, and finished it just before I had the thrill of watching the Hunger Games Live Action Role Play (LARP) at the Manila International Book Fair, organized by Scholastic and National Bookstore with the New Worlds Alliance.

(Spoiler free!)

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