The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

I love reading books before films come out (or before I see the film).   We all know that ten times out of ten, the book is better. It has more description, it gives you better insights into the heroes and heroines, and what's best of all, you get to imagine what they look like before Hollywood swoops in and makes up your mind for you.

I think that's one of the things I love best about reading.  You get to push your imagination to do some hard creative work - it doesn't just sit back and have everything brought to it, as in a film.  (Interestingly enough this meshes well with the concept of the Hunger Games, in which people have to fight for their lives, livelihood, and everything they care about, with nothing handed to them on a platter.)

The Hunger Games (the first book in the trilogy) did not disappoint when it came to readable entertainment.  (The copy I had proclaimed joyfully that Stephen King and Stephanie Meyer couldn't put it down, just in case you weren't sure.)  If you've read any of this blog, you'll know that it's been a while since I picked up a page-turner like this one, an easy read in the sense that I didn't have to stop every few minutes and make sure I understood all the words or could grasp the political or historical implications of what I was reading.  This pushing of myself to read books I don't necessarily 'feel like' reading also had the added benefit of enabling me to put the book down halfway through.  This type of book used to keep me up reading til 3 or 4am, until I finished it, even if I could hardly keep my eyes open. 

When I did finish it, I was disappointed to discover that it left you wishing that you had book two ready at hand.  It feels a little as though the author has, instead of writing a full story and letting you read the whole thing, been persuaded by her publishers to split it into three so that she and they make more money.  Of course this didn't work on me because I beat the system by borrowing a copy from a friend.  (Although interestingly enough, and as a side note, I was startled a bit when I asked one friend who had just finished it if I could borrow her copy, and she said, "Oh, I read it on my Kindle".  It made me realise that one of the many downsides to the digitisation of society is that everything is individual.  I often put little pencil-marks next to quotes or sections I like, and friends of mine love to borrow books from me because it gives them an insight into what I enjoyed. No such thing with Kindles.  And I like being able to read anytime - even when a plane is taking off, or landing, or whether or not I have a charged battery.)

The book was very readable (including a few genuine mouth-drops, which is impressive), but it reads fairly dispassionately.  Despite my interest in the heroine, I felt that Katniss herself wasn't overly zealous about anything - her life, her death, the boy she's supposed to be in love with.  Perhaps, though, that's appropriate considering the society in which she lives, where an ominous Capitol feeds twelve children a year to a "game" that is more brutal than life, a bitter sacrifice year upon year for seventy-four years running, until the world that plays with people as toys, and the players themselves, become as numb as the computer screens on which they watch the games.

And strange to say, it didn't strike me as this horrifying thing that could happen...in many ways I feel it already has.  Big Brother; the emails about Christians being imprisoned or tortured for their faith; starving children who barely get a 'like' on Facebook...sadly I think the appeal of the Hunger Games is not the horror that this might happen, but the deep-down keen interest by most of the world that is already wishing it would.