What I’m Reading: The Hunger Games

The Hunger Games

I don’t think  I can say enough just how much I love these books. Every time I read them, I get just as caught up as I did the first time. I reread The Hunger Games  Monday night and was up until 2:30 in the morning because I just could not put it down. I tried. I tried multiple times, but I was just too keyed up by the book to sleep. How could I leave Katniss in a tree with all of the careers underneath her plotting her death? It just wasn’t possible. Or how could I leave Peeta on the brink of death? Again, not possible. 

The Hunger Games takes place in a place called Panem in the ruins of what once was North America. Every year, all 12 of the districts of Panem are required to submit two children, one boy and one girl, to take place in the Hunger Games where they will have to fight to the death. Katniss Everdeen is a 16-year-old girl who lives in District 12. When her younger sister, Prim, is chosen as tribute, Katniss immediately volunteers to take her place. She goes to the Capital along with her fellow tribute, Peeta Mellark, to compete in the games. Katniss never really spoke to Peeta, but he gave her bread once when she was on the verge of starvation, and Katniss as always felt herself indebted to him. But Peeta has reasons for what he did that Katniss doesn’t know or understand, and suddenly the games are so much more complicated than they’re supposed to be. Suddenly Katniss has got to get out of the game with Peeta or not at all. 

This book is beautifully written. The writing is so clear and flowing, it’s like watching a movie. (I highly anticipate the movie which I will go see on Thursday night! It looks fantastic) Suzanne Collins shows so much about human nature and how people react to impossible situations. There are so many lessons to be learned about life and the choices we make. I absolutely recommend this book to everyone. It’s one of those books that stays with you long after you’ve finished. I think that’s the sign of a truly wonderful book. I give it a 7 on a scale of 1 to 7. 

My problem with The Hunger Games is not with the book itself. Like I said, I recommend it to everyone. It’s on my list of all time favorite books. My problem is with some of the commercialization that has taken place since it’s release. Before the movie was even being produced, I saw a Hunger Games board game. At first I thought that was really cool. It showed the popularity of one of my favorite books. But then I really thought about it and was kind of horrified. Thankfully, the game doesn’t actually involve the arena, but instead the training that all of the tributes undergo. The goal is to end with the highest possible popularity as you’re about to go into the games.

Then imagine my surprise when I see some of the high schoolers I know having their own Hunger Games “RPG” that involves them actually killing each other off. Apparently it’s a popular thing, but I personally am horrified by it. I think both of these really trivialize the lessons of the book. Human life has been turned into a game, which is one of the things that the characters in the books fight so hard against. How can we as the readers play our own version of the “game” when that’s what the characters were fighting so hard to end.

Maybe I’m taking it a little too seriously, but I don’t think this is okay. The books are fantastic, but I don’t know if I would want my teenager or preteen reading them. From my experience, they just don’t know how to handle them properly, as evidenced by these RPGs and everything. I know that there are exceptions to this. I think I would have been one of them if they’d come out when I was younger. But if I was a parent I would talk to my child about the books and make sure that they really understood the lessons about standing up for what you believe in and the lasting effects of the choices that Katniss and Peeta had to make. I have the same problem with these things that I do with violent video games. Life is not something to be trivialized, even when it’s just pretend. I’m not saying that Suzanne Collins did this. The books definitely show all of the consequences (both good and bad) that Katniss and Peeta experienced.  The books are wonderful, I just think people need to be more aware of what they’re reading.

What I’m Reading: Tatiana and Alexander

The Bronze Horseman series is killing me. It’s literally killing me. And I still have one more book to go. Paullina Simons has given us two perfectly nice characters and then puts them through seven thousand terrible experiences, dangles their happiness in front of us ever so briefly, and then snatches it away again ten pages later. Reading it is an incredibly emotional experience. Have tissues handy. I stayed up last night until almost two in the morning because I just could not leave Tatiana and Shura in the condition Simons had put them in. I needed some sort of closure.

This book is a lot different from The Bronze Horseman. It doesn’t move forward through time quite like the first book in the series. Instead we spend a lot of time in Alexander’s past. We learn a lot more about his history and his life before he met Tatiana at that bus stop in Leningrad, which I definitely liked. But meanwhile he’s in charge of a penal battalion, which is a battalion of prisoners who are always at the front lines. They’re ill-equipped  and undersized, but Alexander is determined that he’s not going to die in the war. He’s going to make it home to Tatiana no matter what.

Meanwhile Tatiana is in New York. She’s living on Ellis Island and taking care of her young son. She’s making friends, and everyone is encouraging her to move on with her life. Then Tatiana finds Alexander’s Hero of the Soviet Union medal in her bag, and suddenly she’s not so sure that her husband is dead after all.

If it’s even possible, this book is even darker than the first book in the series. We’ve left behind frozen, starving, blockaded Leningrad and instead travel back and forth from busy war-time New York to concentration camps in Germany and Poland. The reader gets a front row view of exactly how little the Soviet Union cared about its soldiers during WWII. It was absolutely horrifying. If you surrendered to the Nazis, your family’s rations were taken away so that they would starve to death, and you were probably put to death when the USSR got you back. It was terrible. There was so little regard for human life, and I had absolutely no idea. That was definitely something they never talked about in all of my history classes.

The moral of this trilogy better be the ever used “true love conquers all,” because if Alexander and Tatiana are not together and happy by the end of the third book, I’m going to be furious. That’s going to be days of my life that I won’t be able to get back. It’s going to be like Cold Mountain all over again. (Which I’m fairly certain is my least favorite move of all time. Seriously. Hours of torture and Jude Law and Nicole Kidman still don’t get to be together.) I enjoyed the book, but if these poor people do not get a happy ending, I might throw all three in a lake. I just don’t understand how Paullina Simons can torture her characters like this. It’s probably very true to real life and what actually happened to people from the Soviet Union, but my goodness. I’m giving this book a 5 out of 7, because I don’t think it was quite as good as the first. Simons experiments with some weird shifts in point of view that I don’t think always work and were definitely not in the first book. I’m not sure if saying that I liked it is the appropriate phrase, but I was moved by it. I couldn’t put it down for three days. That has to count for something.

What I’m Reading: The Bronze Horesman

I managed to get lots of readng done over spring break. It was wonderful. I picked this book up at my local Barnes and Noble and couldn’t manage to put it down. I think I got halfway done with it the first night. I even braved Daytona Bike Week traffic to pick up the second book in the trilogy. The Bronze Horseman tells the story of a girl named Tatiana and her family during the siege on Leningrad during World War II. The story begins with the announcement that the Soviet Union has entered the war and Tatiana is sent out by her father to go and buy food for the family. She waits a little too long to go to the stores, and suddenly all of the shelves are empty. She can’t buy any food for her family to stock up for the winter. She sits down on a bus bench and looks up to see a Soviet army officer, Alexander staring at her from across the street. He helps her to get the provisions she needs from the store for Soviet officers and then helps her get everything home. Tatiana has barely met him, but is already well on her way to falling in love with him when she learns that Alexander is the man that her sister, Dasha, has declared just that morning to be in love with.

Tatiana tries to push her own feelings for Alexander aside for the sake of her sister, but the pull between them is just too strong. The best part of her day is when Alexander meets her when she gets off work and takes the bus home with her. As times get more and more desperate, he does everything he can to help Tatiana and her family. Whether it is bringing them food, getting Tatiana and Dasha out of Leningrad to ultimately trying to get Tatiana out of the Soviet Union.

The cover is absolutely beautiful, which is probably what drew me to the book in the first place, but all of the history behind it was what made me buy it. I’ve had a mild to strong obsession with Russia since seeing the movie Anastasia when I was like seven.  What’s really fascinating is that the author Paullina Simons is actually from Leningrad, although significantly after the events of this book. I feel like it gives her a very interesting perspective to write from. It gives a really great picture of what communism was actually like in the USSR and everyday life during the time period. I’d also never really heard much about the siege on Leningrad. It was amazing to read about what those poor people went through and the numbers that starved to death. The story itself is beautiful as well though. I absolutely fell in love with Tatiana and Alexander. I’m so emotionally invested in their story now. The second book, Tatiana and Alexander is officially going everywhere with me until I finish it as well. On a scale of 1 to 7, I give it a 7. It’s an absolute must for anyone who loves historical fiction.

What I’m Reading: My Name is Memory

While I’m still trekking through Les Miserables, I’m also taking the time to read shorter “fun” novels. I recently read My Name is Memory by Anne Brashares and fell in love almost right away. Daniel has chased Sofia for lifetimes. He has the gift of what is called “the memory” and can remember himself from reincarnation to reincarnation. He can also recognize other souls, and in each incarnation all he does is search for her. This time she’s a high school student named Lucy. Lucy is drawn to Daniel. She has been since the first time she saw him. She’s also absolutely convinced he has no interest in her whatsoever until one night he finally reveals who he is. He comes on too strong and runs her off, and they spend the rest of the book trying to find a way to be together.

I don’t believe in reincarnation, but I love the idea of soul mates and having someone who is absolutely perfect for you. It’s absolute fodder for my inner romantic. I personally believe that Anne Brashares completely surpasses her wildly popular Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants books, all of which I have read, with this novel. It’s romantic and poignant and completely compelling. I read it in two days. The story and the writing are absolutely lovely as we see Daniel and Lucy’s past and all of the struggles they have to go through to be together. The flashbacks do get a little long in the middle. I was rather anxious to find out what was happening with the current story, and the glimpses of their past lives made the story drag a little bit at some points, but overall it was fantastic.

The real problem I have with it is that there’s still no news on the long-awaited sequel. The book ends well, but leaves you with so many unanswered questions and so much uncertainty about Daniel and Lucy’s future together. What it really needs is closure. I as the reader need closure. It’s so unfair to get me emotionally invested in these fictional people’s lives and then not tell me what happened to them. The book is still wonderful though. I give it a 6 out of 7.