Hunger Games

It’s been a very long time since I read “young adult”; so long that I was a young adult the last time I did, and I’d rather not count the years since then.

I picked up a nice hardcover collection of Suzanne Collins’s work for ten Canadian dollars via a Facebook Marketplace sale. I read the first few sentences of Hunger Games and was struck by how easy and brisk they went down. As someone who’s been immersed in dense literature (Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo to name two) and religious texts for most of 2024, I’d forgotten that books could be easy to digest.

I wouldn’t pick Hunger Games back up until midway through December. I’d been toiling away at the Qur’an after putting a pin in the Holy Bible but I felt the need for a palette cleanser. Turning back to Collins’s book, I managed to devour it in a handful of sessions over the space of a few days.

I didn’t expect to get as emotional as I did. There’s something about straightforward, almost naive storytelling that gives it the ability to cut right to the chase and hit the reader where it counts. In the years since publishing my own books I’ve worked hard on the ability to condense my thoughts down to their barest essenses. It’s no easy task.

Hunger Games is a masterwork. As I consider opening up the second volume for another voracious feast, I wonder why no one’s made a video game adaptation. Some claim it’s due to Collins desire to retain creative control, but in an era where extraction shooters (Escape from Tarkov) and battle royales (Fortnite) draw millions of players it seems logical to me to capitalize.

Someone get on that.

2024.12.26 – 2024.12.30


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