I guess in this day and age, anyone reading anything that’s an actual book should be encouraged. After all, between watching hours upon hours of sports tv a day, a cornucopia of porn and tweeting about real housewives of fill in the blank city who has the time for recreational reading. However, when a book is highly praised by the masses and everyone on the bus is reading it, I have to pick it up. The problem with Suzzanne Collins’s trilogy is that she maybe had enough material for 1 book, instead she turned it into a trilogy. Hunger Games is the first book in the broad category young adult dystopian fiction which should provide an actual adult with dyspepsia after reading the first 40 pages. However, I’ve seen many adults enthralled by the novel. The trilogy itself gets exponentially more boring and predictable with every book. To the point where Mockingjay, the third book of the series is nearly impossible to read. I’m lucky that I had access to the audio book versions of Catching Fire and Mockingjay, so I could be productive (read, washing the dishes, vacuuming the floor) while listening to them at 3x the speed of narration.

The book is especially popular with the female  ”young adults”.. or the female adults stunted in development. The appeal is pretty apparent since the main character is a “sweet and innocent” bloodthirsty killer who is essentially a “confused” cocktease on the side that’s stringing along two dudes for the duration of the ride.

Bottom line… if you reading is above 6th grade level, skip the trilogy and read something better and if you talk to an “adult” that is a big fan of the Hunger Games, this should give you a quick shortcut to sizing up their intellectual capacity, or lack of thereof.