6 – 8. The Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins

Category: 50 Books

I’m not going to get too deep here with these books because they’re still popular and I’d hate to spoil anything.

These books are like The Running Man + Survivor (the TV show, not the ’70s rock group) + The Lord of the Flies + something else (but I forget what I wanted to put here. Was it Star Wars?)

The Hunger Games was really good. Great story, great pacing, compelling page-turner. Read this one and then stop, if you can.

Catching Fire was more of the same, still page-turning but it had a cliff-hanger ending that really did nothing for the book.

Mockingjay was redundant times three, and way too long. The ending to the whole thing was fine. I had no problems with the ending (I didn’t care who she ended up with, to be honest. I just wanted the whole damn thing to end.)

All of these books were DARK. Super dark. I mean, the whole premise is kids having to kill each other for entertainment. I’m not sure we can get much darker.

And now for ten (9) things: WARNING: SPOILERS.

10. These books are filled, FILLED, with the mental and physical torture of children. I felt guilty for reading them, really.

9.  I really liked Katniss. UNTIL I DIDN’T. The author kind of beats her with a dead horse.

8. I really liked Peeta. UNTIL I DIDN’T. See above.

7. There are 6,000 characters in these books.

6. There is no number six. If there were a number six it would be about Katniss’s mother.

5. I liked the superficiality of the Capitol versus the blue-collar Districts thing that went on. It really added some “comedy” to this tragedy.

4. The President Snow thing, was fine. There, of course, needs to be a bad guy. The President Coin thing? Was too much. (I’m not saying that that’s not how it would be in real life. I mean, our own presidential elections are really just pick who you think will be less evil, right?) This added nothing to the book, it made the ending more complicated, and it was rushed. The author could leave Coin as a lesser-of-two-evils, which is realistic, and the ending would have been much tighter.

3. So much torture and murder. I feel gross. The extreme mental torture and damage to these kids is just… ugh. It’s not fun to read.

2. Near the end (oh my gosh Mockingjay had so many near-endings.) when the five or six of them are voting on whether or not to exact justice on the Capitol by making them have a Hunger Games every year, and Katniss votes yes? For Prim? ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME? So then the vote is yea. But then… later on in the ending… it isn’t? What? Then why even have that vote? it’s sloppy and unnecessary and should have been edited.

1. Prim dies anyway. Well, fuck you too.

The Hunger Games gets 2 Cansecos and the other two get 50. Oh wait. I’m doing Roxy heads now. That’s different.

The Hunger Games gets four Roxies:

The other two books still get 50 Cansecos:

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