book review: percy jackson and the olympians book 1

I felt like reading it because;

1. It's a kids book so I could read it much quicker.
2. It sounded fun.
3. Greek gods.
4. I am extremely bored at work.

( Percy Jackson and the Olympians - The Lightning Thief )

I may continue reading other books when I'm bored at work, but now I'll start reading Hunger Games. I also began to read The Mortal Instruments series, but couldn't get myself to care about it that much, I can always go back pick it up again of course. I have way too much time in my hands.

book review: the hunger games

This brilliant book has been the highlight of my day today!

The Hunger Games (2008) is a young-adult science fiction novel written by Suzanne Collins. It is the first book of the Hunger Games trilogy. It introduces sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen, who lives in a post-apocalyptic world where a powerful government called the Capitol has risen up after several devastating disasters. In the book, the Hunger Games are an annual televised event where the ruthless and evil Capitol randomly selects one boy and one girl from each of the twelve districts, who are then pitted against each other in a game of survival and forced to kill until only one remains.

As for non-spoilery things to say; it was 100% great. I recommend it to everyone I know, just read it and see it for yourselves. It's usually really hard to make the reader care about the characters very early in a book, but Suzanne Collins manages to nail that one. Even after a couple of pages I was in Katniss' head, living & seeing everything through her eyes. I couldn't put it down (not exactly the right words to say about an e-book but you know what I mean) I even considered taking my laptop to the bathroom with me (and I might have done it, or not, who knows...).

It's been such a long time since I read something this full of action and excitement. It was extremely refreshing after reading so many fluffy love stories. This book was dark, painfully familiar and cold in terms of "big brother-ish tv shows". Overall it made me realize how it is highly possible to actually have a show like this in our televisions, right now, with a totally different title and similiar premise (hell, we have Survivor!). It shows how evil all the things we have in the name of communication: television, media, careful editing of reality shows, playing with people's emotions, but also distancing the whole world from what is real, brutal and painful with such a small tool: silver screens of out televisions. It hit me hard towards the end of the book. Watching news everyday, seeing people dying in the street corners, corpses in war fields, starving children living in mud, diseases erasing half of the population in a country... Those are real, but as long as you are not personally experiencing them, they're not real, they are images on TV, they are channels to switch off, skip so you can find something happier. It's so crazy and honestly, SCARY how humans have the ability to survive after anything and everything.

The reason I picked up this book today was because I've seen katayla and aftersix talking about how the romance in this book was something entirely different and how it was executed very well.

( And onto spoiler arena... )

I recommend this with 5 stars and flying colors! Read read read.