The Hunger Games (2008)

The neighbourhood kid who watches me shoot hoops in the back alley and whose parents told her "He's a writer" tells me she's reading The Hunger Games ("again"), and do I know Suzanne? I tell her no, and she asks me if I have read the book. I tell her that in the days of air travel I saw the movie on the backseat of the person sitting in front of me, and she says the movie isn't as good. A couple days later a copy bagged in clear plastic hangs from my gate post.

At the moment I am on Page 115. Katniss, the narrator, has just found out her fellow District 12 tribute Peeta has chosen to train alone. Leading up to that, where Katniss came from (West Virginia?), how her father died in a mine explosion, the rebellion that happened before that (What incited it?), her skill as a hunter and gatherer, and the annual Hunger Games survival competition (broadcast throughout the kingdom? the dictatorship? the feudal oligarchy?).

Katniss is a futuristic subject, yet her temperament is contemporary. She is angry, fatalistic, sarcastic, mistrusting and intolerant. Parents are generally weak or cruel people. The state is fixed and does not have her best interests at heart. In preparation for the Hunger Games she and her fellow tributes are given makeovers ("styled" to attract sponsors), which she seems to enjoy. Same too with how that translates televisually, which, despite her sensitivity to the natural world of hunting and gathering, she seems to know quite a lot about.