Why I’m Obsessed With The Hunger Games And Why I Can’t Read It

 

I’ll admit that I’ve repeatedly watched the official trailer for The Hunger Games half a dozen times.
The Hunger Games is an incredible book.  It threads inside your mind and wreaks havoc as it cuts through your body from the inside out.  With every line you could feel your breaths hasten.  With every fleeting sentence the words slowly and painfully crawl up your arms toward your neck.  And, I’ve only read past chapter 2.

By now, after watching the trailer so many times, over and over, I’m sure I’ve become obsessed with this book.  I want to follow the characters, glide through their storyline, and live inside a book about a futuristic depression that pins pre teens and teenagers up against each other in a battle to the death.  However, I can’t read it.  I can’t sit myself down and say, I’m going to let The Hunger Games suck me in.

Reading the Hunger Games, to me, has become a full body experience.  It’s a literary orgasm from the first few lines to whenever it’s impossible to keep going without keeping still.  I just can’t handle that.  That’s just too much for me.  The book is that powerful.  The writing in The Hunger Games has this emotional tendency to strike every chord in the body so perfectly that it becomes a heightened experience.  Each sentence is perfectly crafted to paint a sincere heart throbbing pain.  Back in High School, I once read a book called Night by an author named Elie Weisel.  The book was about a man’s experience through the torturous horrors of the Halocaust.  That book nearly comes close to the pain in The Hunger Games; and The Hunger Games is set in the future.

I can’t read The Hunger Games because I can’t handle that type of pain.  I love the book and practically every aspect of it, but it’s just not something I could handle, and not the way I want to influence my writing.  The writing is spectacular.  The plot is spectacular.  It’s gripping, it’s piercing, it’s everything a book should be.  But, right now, I’m a writer.  I want to find the writing that makes me feel a certain way.  The Hunger Games can’t deliver what I want to feel, right now, in this moment.

There are times when I want to read about a post American Civil War future where children are starving and need to kill each other for food.  But, sometimes, well most of the time, I don’t want to start my mornings feeling that way.