Hunger Games: Guilty Pleasure

This summer I felt the need to read The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins.  After seeing the commercials for the movie played what I felt like 12 million times, I convinced myself that I would read the first book in the series. I did not want to be left out of this cultural phenomenon.

After downloading the book to my IPad I thought, "I will just read a few chapters, it probably won't be worth my time." Thirteen hours later I had completed the entire book.

Reading the novel I was not impressed with the love triangle or the convenience in with which some events happened, but I was impressed with the dystopian ideas that were present.  It astounded me that this young adult novel had such great examples of a dystopian society.  Everything was orderly, yet only a small percentage of people, those living in The Capital, were "happy." All the other classes in this world were made to comply by strict rules, work hard and be miserable for the benefit of a small percentage of people.  A lot of philosophical questions arose while paging through this book.  I I think that Collins did a great job at targeting the book to a younger audience while also putting some more sophisticated elements into the text that would catch the more mature reader.  This is why The Hunger Games was a win for me. 

I have to admit, this summer I was really into reading dystopian literature.  I started out with 1984, went to Fahrenheit 451 and than was pleasantly surprised when The Hunger Games gave me more to dystopian pleasure. Although some may not want to believe The Hunger Games is actually a good read, I am not ashamed to say that I enjoyed reading mostly every page.