Some thoughts on The Hunger Games

I've had The Hunger Games series on my mental to-read list for a while now, but I never actually got around to them until the movie came out. I could feel myself getting sucked into the movie hype, and if I'm going to read a book I generally like to do so before I see the movie, so the other night I sat down and read The Hunger Games.

I don't mean that I started the series the other night, I read it the other night. These are not thick, meaty books that take time to devour. I read one reviewer compare them to cotton candy, and that analogy seems very apt to me - enjoyable (overall), hard to put down (in places), but ultimately not very fulfilling. The books are written from the first-person perspective of a 16-year-old, targeted for an audience a few years younger than that. Writer Suzanne Collins either accomplished this with expert precision or just isn't a very good writer, because the writing style of these books reminded me very strongly of stories written by classmates in junior high school.

Let me get straight to my biggest problem with the series: I'm big on endings. A large part of my enjoyment of a story hinges on how good the ending is. A bad ending means that an otherwise enjoyable story was a huge waste of time. A great ending can save an otherwise mediocre story, in fact if the story is structured so that it builds to a great ending, then accomplishing that ending means that the story building to it isn't mediocre at all. An unfortunately, the ending is where The Hunger Games series completely fails. The first book is very good, a gripping plot and engaging characters, and by about the middle of the book I no longer found the writing style distracting. The second book, Catching Fire, I also enjoyed, though the weaknesses that would come to full bloom in the third book, Mockingjay, are present to a smaller degree in Catching Fire. This is when large parts of the story become focused on Katniss vacillating over things rather than making decisions and taking action. This is when Katniss laying in bed recovering from things becomes a recurring story trope. This is when the first-person narrative structure, which helps the reader identity so strongly with Katniss in the first book, starts to become a bit of an impediment. First-person storytelling isn't very satisfying when the narrator starts to become less and less involved in the story, as major plot developments start happening off-screen and Katniss/the reader only hears about them as third-hand rumors long after the fact. The second book also suffers a bit from repetition, as the major driver of action in the second half of the book is a re-hash of the first book. But all of these issues were extremely minor in Catching Fire - had Mockingjay been as good as the first book, I would have been a big fan of this series.

Unfortunately, Mockingjay was a huge letdown for me. Part of this is the issues that began in Catching Fire - Huge swaths of Mockingjay are taken up by Katniss recuperating from various injuries and breakdowns, which is a realistic depiction of how a sixteen-year-old thrust into the middle of a war might react but is not very entertaining to read. As she is further sidelined and marginalized from the front lines of the main conflict, so is the reader. Once she finally goes back into action, that action is meaningless - first on purpose as it's simply another propaganda shoot, but even when she goes on her "secret mission" she accomplishes nothing but getting her squad killed and has no effect on the war.

In the end Mockingjay takes the story that started in The Hunger Games - about someone used and manipulated by a tyrannical government who manages to overcome and survive through her own skill and determination - and turns it into something very bleak, about someone used and manipulated by everyone, even the good guys, even her closest allies, whose spirit is broken and gives up trying to fight it. There's a perfectly valid, if bleak, story that Collins is telling in Mockingjay: that one power-hungry child-killing dictator will simply be replaced by another; that one regime of propagandist liars will simply be replaced by another; that the public at large will never, ever know the truth about anything and even a revolution will never change that; that ultimately nobody can really change the nature of things; that even the strongest of people eventually give up trying to fight these things, give up even trying to tell people the truth about them. But to begin a series with The Hunger Games, to fan the flames of populist revolt in Catching Fire, and then to end Mockingjay on that note was a huge letdown to me. Call me simple-minded, but I like more satisfying endings in my escapist fantasy. At least not having our viewpoint character beaten down and defeated in every way. She could have at least kept fighting, at least try to tell people the truth about Cain, instead of simply give up. Even the one thing she set out to do at the start of The Hunger Games is taken from her by the end of Mockingjay.

The reason the ending bothers me so much is because there really is a lot to like about the series - Katniss is a great character. I've seen people say she's not sympathetic, that she's too cold, and I couldn't disagree more. She's been shaped by her experiences, but she clearly has a good heart, otherwise she wouldn't even be in the Games. And why is a character cold and unsympathetic just because she's learned to survive in her world? The action sequences are well told, and Katniss's strategy in the Games is interesting to read. The development of the Katniss-Peeta relationship in the first two books I also really liked, though here again the second book retreads some ground already covered by the first. The plucky underdog leading a rebellion against a tyrannical dictator is a classic story, and the buildup to it in the first two books is good even if the payoff isn't there in the third.

In the end, The Hunger Games is the worst kind of story to me - a great buildup with a bad payoff. This is the worst kind of story for me as a reader, because it means for the next few weeks when my mind is on the story, and really from now on whenever I think about it, I'm going to keep rewriting the ending in my head, trying to bring the story to a more satisfactory conclusion.

I can't say for sure that Suzanne Collins wrote a bad story with The Hunger Games series. But ultimately she didn't write one I wanted to read.

Final grades:
The Hunger Games: A
Catching Fire: A-
Mockingjay: D
Overall series: C-

2Scott2Review: The Evolution of Everything by Mark Sumner

The Evolution of Everything is not what I expected it to be, but for what it is it's very good.

The book grew out of a series of essays originally published on Daily Kos, which were a mixture of bits on the history of the theory of evolution and examinations of various other subjects using evolution and selection as a lens through which to analyze them. When I learned that this concept would be expanded into a book, and especially when I read the promo blurb for the book, I was expecting a lot more of the latter part of that mixture, with perhaps enough of the former to tie it all together. In the finished form, the book is in fact the reverse: an expanded examination of the development of various aspects of evolutionary theory, with relatively little of the broader examination that I was expecting. Perhaps The Evolution of Evolution would have been a better title.

Throughout the book, the focus is squarely on evolutionary theory, including but not limited to Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection. Sumner dispels the misconception that evolution was an idea that originated with Darwin, and places Darwin's ideas in the larger context of general scientific thought at the time, explaining why the first theories about evolution came about when they did. He covers earlier ideas such as Lamarckian evolution, and traces the development of later misunderstandings of Darwin's ideas, such as eugenics, social Darwinism, and the modern anti-science Creationist fervor. There is comparatively little of the broader application of selection and "survival of the fittest" (a phrase nearly as misused and misunderstood as the word "theory" BTW), and what there is mostly comes out of the original Daily Kos essays. That disappointed me.

Sumner does a very good job of explaining the science so a lay person can easily understand it, without dumbing down the subject matter. The comparison I make in my head is to Michio Kaku's book Hyperspace. Kaku's introduction to string theory is far more technical than The Evolution of Everything, and as a much longer book is able to provide a more in-depth exploration of its subject, but both books find the right balance of making their ideas easily understandable without making the explanation simplistic. This isn't Evolution for Dummies, this is Evolution for the Un- (or Mis-) Informed. I like to think of myself as a scientifically literate person, but I learned a lot from this book, particularly about how various theories related to each other and how other discoveries set the table for evolution and natural selection.

Now I'm going to make every author cringe: This is a rather short book. (CRINGE!) I know authors hate it when readers complain about books being "too short," because writing a book is an equally trying process whether the finished product is 200 pages or 400 pages, and because authors are trying to produce quality not quantity, and it's a bit gutting to expend that much effort trying to make a book engaging and interesting and entertaining and informative, and then for someone to slam it based on page count. All I can say is, try to see it as a compliment: if the book wasn't engaging and interesting and entertaining and informative, I wouldn't give a shit about there not being enough of it. Part of it is also based on my expectations: After the background on natural selection is finished, just when I'm thinking that the book is finally going to get to the Everything part, it ends. So don't blame me for complaining about the page count, blame the marketing people who made up covers for The Evolution of Everything and then used them to bind The Evolution of Evolution. 

Final Grade: I'm really conflicted about what to put for a grade. I'll put it this way: As an introduction/explanation of evolution and natural selection, this book is a solid A-; better as an introduction I think, a bit thin on detail for someone already familiar with the subject. And I'm eagerly awaiting the sequel, The Evolution of Everything Else.