Reader’s Notebook, 11/6/25

The Hunger Games, Catching Fire, Mockingjay – Suzanne Collins

One of the great parenting gifts I’ve received recently is L re-discovering her love of reading over the past year. She started reading more in the spring while she was rehabbing. When summer rolled around she kept up with it. After she got a Kindle she really took off. She is connected to my Amazon account, so I could see how quickly she was blowing through books, sometimes one per day. Even after classes began in the fall she continued to pour through books. Her AP English instructor has students read on their own 20 minutes each class. While L spends a lot of free time on her devices, I also find her reading regularly. Her pace is a little slower now, but she’s still getting through a book every 7–10 days. I think she’s trying to catch me for total books read this year, so I need to stay on my current pace.

One of her summer reads was The Hunger Games series. She’s asked several times since if I had ever read it. Shockingly I had not. I say shockingly because at some point we owned all the physical books, I believe they were passed down to the girls from one aunt or another. I’m pretty sure M read them; C is more of an audiobook girl, so if she got into the series it was on that format.[1] I guess I was busy reading all my other books and, eventually, we passed our copies on to someone else.

Despite having a very long list of books I’d like to read, I decided to tackle the series over the past couple weeks. At least the original three books to start. Somehow I had only the vaguest idea of what the stories were about – I haven’t seen the movies, either – so was really entering blind.

For the most part I enjoyed them. They are built on a compelling central concept. Suzanne Collins’ world of Panem has that proper dystopian mix of feeling both futuristic and as if the time had turned backwards. She leaves a lot of details of how Panem came to be and how it matches up with the modern United States vague, which I thought was fine. They do read very much like the Young Adult novels they are, often racing through big moments. That is also fine; sometimes less is more and I wish “traditional” novelists would keep that in mind. The core characters are interesting but have clear flaws so they present as authentic teens rather than archetypes. The love triangle between Katniss, Gale, and Peeta did get a little tiresome, but, again, these are books written primarily for teens and that probably connects with them better than men in their 50s. I certainly understand why the books, and then movies, were so popular.

My biggest complaint is that the ending is kind of a dud. After 1100 pages or so I wanted a little more out of the finish. I will say, though, that part of the story was consistent with other moments where Collins took the reader right up to a big moment then skipped past it to show the results rather than process.

L and I haven’t sat down to talk the series through yet. We have a long car ride together in two weeks and maybe we’ll do a full debrief then. She’s read the two companion books, so perhaps she’s waiting for me to get to them before she really unloads on me.

She’s given me a couple other books she’d like me to read. I’ll get to them, but I need to work on my list for a bit.