book review: the hunger games
Feb. 18th, 2010 10:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thelakeThis brilliant book has been the highlight of my day today!
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![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
katayla and aftersix talking about how the romance in this book was something entirely different and how it was executed very well.
I agree, romance was incredibly great because I still have no idea if it was sincere or totally plastic. Katniss was playing for the audience--at least most of the times, although she sincerely cared about Peeta's well being because come on, who wouldn't?!-- but Peeta actually liked her and the resolution at the end, holding hands the last time for the cameras, it left me so unsatisfied but I knew it was the right way to end the book. I'm so unsatisfied that I'm 100% satisfied. It's insane.
My blood turned to ice at some point when I realized what I was reading: they were preparing those kids to die. They were doing Katniss' hair and make up for what? For her death. It was like American Idol, but almost all of them had to die where without exception, ALL of them came face to face with death in some form or another. The feeling is so familiar, it's scary.
And the overall feeling of the book was dizzying for me! At some point I became the audience who kept watching the show with hungry eyes, betting on the kids, but after a second I was Katniss with Rue on the tree, falling asleep in such a comfort, it was painful to see it shattered soon after. Then very unexpectedly I was the guys behind the cameras, planning everything, editing it, feeding the sponsors those love scenes and kisses between Katniss and Peeta to keep the ratings up. It was just a job, those kids weren't much different than ragdolls or puppets on strings.
And after the Games, where Katniss and Peeta watched the "highlights", it confirmed my feelings of being distant from the reality and considering it never actually happened in real life if it's on TV. I think it's a security mechanism in our minds to keep us from going insane from all the evil in the world.
I recommend this with 5 stars and flying colors! Read read read.
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.I agree, romance was incredibly great because I still have no idea if it was sincere or totally plastic. Katniss was playing for the audience--at least most of the times, although she sincerely cared about Peeta's well being because come on, who wouldn't?!-- but Peeta actually liked her and the resolution at the end, holding hands the last time for the cameras, it left me so unsatisfied but I knew it was the right way to end the book. I'm so unsatisfied that I'm 100% satisfied. It's insane.
My blood turned to ice at some point when I realized what I was reading: they were preparing those kids to die. They were doing Katniss' hair and make up for what? For her death. It was like American Idol, but almost all of them had to die where without exception, ALL of them came face to face with death in some form or another. The feeling is so familiar, it's scary.
And the overall feeling of the book was dizzying for me! At some point I became the audience who kept watching the show with hungry eyes, betting on the kids, but after a second I was Katniss with Rue on the tree, falling asleep in such a comfort, it was painful to see it shattered soon after. Then very unexpectedly I was the guys behind the cameras, planning everything, editing it, feeding the sponsors those love scenes and kisses between Katniss and Peeta to keep the ratings up. It was just a job, those kids weren't much different than ragdolls or puppets on strings.
And after the Games, where Katniss and Peeta watched the "highlights", it confirmed my feelings of being distant from the reality and considering it never actually happened in real life if it's on TV. I think it's a security mechanism in our minds to keep us from going insane from all the evil in the world.
I recommend this with 5 stars and flying colors! Read read read.
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no subject
Date: 2010-02-19 05:37 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-19 06:48 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-19 12:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-19 12:52 pm (UTC)I'm not going to consume this one like the first though :)) and I think 3rd book will come out in about 6 months..
no subject
Date: 2010-02-21 07:51 am (UTC)And, yeah, it's so true about distancing ourselves from what we see on tv. Like NBC showed footage of the Olympics luger who died. And they got a lot of crap for it, but there was still the distancing. You can't quite comprehend it.
Finish the second one, so we can talk about it more. :) They just announced the date of the third one. I want to say August, maybe?