Thoughts on “The Hunger Games” in 410 Words

This is something I should be doing for a long time. See, I’ve read The Hunger Games, and the other two books, last year. Consumed them voraciously in the office when the boss wasn’t looking, or even when he’s looking, and pretended that I was doing some research. Of course, I’m not your model employee-type of shit. But what the hell, I was still able to hit my daily quota, most of the time anyway. But I digress.

I decided to find a copy of the book after reading a raving review about it on Time. Yeah, I read the Time and if you don’t like Time, fuck off! I didn’t buy my own copies, you see. I couldn’t afford them then, I can’t afford them now. But with my research and downloading skillz, I was able to score copies of all three books online, and started reading them, fast.

It was really that, fast. Once you get into the story, you get lost into it. The fast-paced, fiercely beautiful story-telling is purely fortifying, with a sprawling world filled with compelling characters. Then there’s that brutish amusement of survival, the “Hunger Games”, held in an arena engineered to kill off game participants they called ‘tributes’, and one of your favorite characters is one of them, because she has to, and you’re rooting for her to kill them all and win. Next thing you know, you don’t want to stop reading. But you’ve to because rare books like that make you want to finish them slowly, which is a good thing when you’re reading in the office, and you’re a thousand words short of your quota.

Once you’ve finished the book, you can’t wait to take a quick nip on the second book – the Catching Fire – which also ended too fast as the first one, and so on…

The movie version of the first book, which I watched with my girlfriend on the big screen, reminds me to write a long-due blog post about my experience reading the books. Yeah, I know I can’t still afford to buy my own copies, much more shelling out money on two movie tickets, but I’d rather go broke a whole week than not watch it, and see if they’d done justice to the book.

The verdict? Not as good as the book. That’s what you want me to say, ain’t it? And it is. Period. A common complaint, of course. But who cares, right?

Right?