The Hunger Games Trilogy

Finally finished the trilogy! (and by "finally", I'm referring to the amount of time it took me to buy them... it actually only took me about 7 hours to read all three... and I'm not a particularly fast reader.) While they are in the "young adult" category (which may or may not describe my demographic) and consequently kind of "easy" to read, I thought they were very [very] good. A few things that stood out:

Unless you've been living in a dark and lonely place the last few months (what with the growing popularity of these books and the hype over the release of the first movie coming up), you probably have at least an inkling of the general premise of the book. But for those cave dwellers who may not know, here's a brief and simple synopsis:
The Hunger Games trilogy is set in the future of North America-a place now called Panem. The dictatorship holds power over 12 districts, but at one time there were 13; the 13th rebelled, and it is believed to have been annihilated by the government. In an effort to prevent future rebellion, the government holds an annual Hunger Games competition in which each district provides one female and one male competitor. The Games are held in a man-made arena and are designed to challenge the survival skills of the competitors, whose main goal is to kill off their counterparts and be the sole survivor and therefore the victor.

My first reaction to the concept of this book was complete disgust. No one that I talked to explained that the DICTATORSHIP was trying to SCARE the districts into compliance. A couple of minor details that would have resulted in me reading them much sooner and without so much attitude going in (great job, my friendlies). At any rate, the books-while brutal and relatively violent, at times-are actually really good, and not as disturbing as I was led to believe.

A few things that I loved about this trilogy:

1) The books got progressively better. This is one series in which I actually enjoyed the third book more than the first two... and the first two captured my attention well enough to propel me to full force into the third. Character development was great, and the story really unfolded. At the end of the first book I couldn't imagine what could possibly happen in the next one, as the story seemed to be finished. Turns out that was only just the beginning!

2) The characters were pretty good. I wasn't actually a HUGE huge fan of the protagonist (Katniss Everdeen, who tells the story from the first-person perspective), because she was a little too emotionless and her overbearing sense of independence got kind of obnoxious at times. That being said, it all worked out really well in the end. The way her character developed (and this goes for all of the characters, actually), made sense of everything by the close of the series.

3) The love triangle was convincing. I honestly didn't know how that one was going to end. There was no clear choice between Katniss' two lovers, and the complexity of the issue made the story a lot more interesting.

Other than those things, I think that the book was a very eye opening look into what could happen to a country that falls apart due to issues of war and social unrest; an idea of what political strife and civil war can do. It showed the dirty side of a dictatorship, and any politics in general; how power can change an individual. It painted a picture of what it would be like to live in a world where defending your beliefs will cost you your life, and I hope that the "young adults" reading these books will take those ideas seriously... I hope that this story will help our younger generation realize and appreciate the rights that they have, and defend them as if they'd be lost otherwise.

(I'd add a portion about elements that didn't impress me, but there weren't any... none worth mentioning, anyway.)

So yes---I enjoyed these books and have and will continue to recommend them. Easy read, but a very good story. Looking forward to the movies, now, and desperately hoping that they can do the book justice.... we'll see!

Those 100 books I was supposed to read before college... and still haven't finished.

I like to read, and sometimes I even love it... but it takes a lot more effort to read a book than it does to watch a movie, or listen to music. Besides the occasional textbook and a few choice reads, I didn't accomplish much in this area. I suppose I will [or should] be adding "read much more" to my 2012 list of hopefuls.

15 out of 100... this is shameful. Especially because I don't think I read a single one of these this year. Ouch.

I did read some good books that are not on this list, though; "The 100th Kill" by Charles Sasser, "For Love of the Game" by Michael Shaara, and "The Litigators" by John Grisham were a few of my favorites. I'm also in the middle of a few classics... "The Last Day of a Dying Man" by Victor Hugo, "Lord of the Flies" by William Golding, "Their Eyes Were Watching God"by Zora Neale Hurston (which I would have finished had I not lost the book... ), and Dante's "Inferno".

If nothing else, the pain of seeing the list in this condition should be motivation enough for me to do better in 2012.

--	Beowulf
Achebe, Chinua	Things Fall Apart
Agee, James	A Death in the Family
Austen, Jane	Pride and Prejudice
Baldwin, James	Go Tell It on the Mountain
Beckett, Samuel	Waiting for Godot
Bellow, Saul	The Adventures of Augie March
Brontë, Charlotte	Jane Eyre
Brontë, Emily	Wuthering Heights
Camus, Albert	The Stranger
Cather, Willa	Death Comes for the Archbishop
Chaucer, Geoffrey	The Canterbury Tales
Chekhov, Anton	The Cherry Orchard
Chopin, Kate	The Awakening
Conrad, Joseph	Heart of Darkness
Cooper, James Fenimore	The Last of the Mohicans
Crane, Stephen	The Red Badge of Courage
Dante	Inferno
de Cervantes, Miguel	Don Quixote
Defoe, Daniel	Robinson Crusoe
Dickens, Charles	A Tale of Two Cities
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor	Crime and Punishment
Douglass, Frederick	Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Dreiser, Theodore	An American Tragedy
Dumas, Alexandre	The Three Musketeers
Eliot, George	The Mill on the Floss
Ellison, Ralph	Invisible Man
Emerson, Ralph Waldo	Selected Essays
Faulkner, William	As I Lay Dying
Faulkner, William	The Sound and the Fury
Fielding, Henry	Tom Jones
Fitzgerald, F. Scott	The Great Gatsby
Flaubert, Gustave	Madame Bovary
Ford, Ford Madox	The Good Soldier
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von	Faust
Golding, William	Lord of the Flies
Hardy, Thomas	Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Hawthorne, Nathaniel	The Scarlet Letter
Heller, Joseph	Catch-22
Hemingway, Ernest	A Farewell to Arms
Homer	The Iliad
Homer	The Odyssey
Hugo, Victor	The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Hurston, Zora Neale	Their Eyes Were Watching God
Huxley, Aldous	Brave New World
Ibsen, Henrik	A Doll's House
James, Henry	The Portrait of a Lady
James, Henry	The Turn of the Screw
Joyce, James	A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Kafka, Franz	The Metamorphosis
Kingston, Maxine Hong	The Woman Warrior
Lee, Harper	To Kill a Mockingbird
Lewis, Sinclair	Babbitt
London, Jack	The Call of the Wild
Mann, Thomas	The Magic Mountain
Marquez, Gabriel García	One Hundred Years of Solitude
Melville, Herman	Bartleby the Scrivener
Melville, Herman	Moby Dick
Miller, Arthur	The Crucible
Morrison, Toni	Beloved
O'Connor, Flannery	A Good Man Is Hard to Find
O'Neill, Eugene	Long Day's Journey into Night
Orwell, George	Animal Farm
Pasternak, Boris	Doctor Zhivago
Plath, Sylvia	The Bell Jar
Poe, Edgar Allan	Selected Tales
Proust, Marcel	Swann's Way
Pynchon, Thomas	The Crying of Lot 49
Remarque, Erich Maria	All Quiet on the Western Front
Rostand, Edmond	Cyrano de Bergerac
Roth, Henry	Call It Sleep
Salinger, J.D.	The Catcher in the Rye
Shakespeare, William	Hamlet
Shakespeare, William	Macbeth
Shakespeare, William	A Midsummer Night's Dream
Shakespeare, William	Romeo and Juliet
Shaw, George Bernard	Pygmalion
Shelley, Mary	Frankenstein
Silko, Leslie Marmon	Ceremony
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander	One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Sophocles	Antigone
Sophocles	Oedipus Rex
Steinbeck, John	The Grapes of Wrath
Stevenson, Robert Louis	Treasure Island
Stowe, Harriet Beecher	Uncle Tom's Cabin
Swift, Jonathan	Gulliver's Travels
Thackeray, William	Vanity Fair
Thoreau, Henry David	Walden
Tolstoy, Leo	War and Peace
Turgenev, Ivan	Fathers and Sons
Twain, Mark	The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Voltaire	Candide
Vonnegut, Kurt Jr.	Slaughterhouse-Five
Walker, Alice	The Color Purple
Wharton, Edith	The House of Mirth
Welty, Eudora	Collected Stories
Whitman, Walt	Leaves of Grass
Wilde, Oscar	The Picture of Dorian Gray
Williams, Tennessee	The Glass Menagerie
Woolf, Virginia	To the Lighthouse
Wright, Richard	Native Son