The Hunger Games by Suzzanne Collins 

aka 

The  Parks and Recreation guy wasn't right.

I finished the first part of the Hunger Games trilogy. I usually start with the book and end with the movie, just like the Park Ranger from Parks and Recreation:

But in case of The Hunger Games I broke the rule and went to the cinema first. I knew about The Hunger Games trilogy earlier, but I am not a fun of post-apocalyptic stories with guns and air thickened with death. But I got dragged to the movies (“two tickets for one” deal on Thursdays did it) and enjoyed it truly. Seeing all those kids running around and killing each other against their own will was like looking at a car crash. You want to turn your head away, you want to pretend it’s not there and stop looking, but you can’t. Just like the main character’s friend ,Gale, who wanted to boycott The Hunger Games, but couldn’t. Just like a boxer's wife, he needed to look at the boxing ring.

There was one thing that the movie left me short of – I didn’t get a full grasp of the love story. Was the main character, Katniss, honest with another competitor, Peeta, or was she just playing games? If she’s into Gale, then what she did was just cheating. On a post-apocalyptic TV! Almost like Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson, just a bit more classy. But I guessed Katniss should be forgiven. But will she be? It was all too unclear to me. Many might think that when there’s guns and arrows flying across the screen every 5 minutes there's no need for a deep and profound explanation of the characters’ love lives. Many, but not me.

Leaving the cinema I thought that the best way to find the answers to all this, let’s face it, quite irrelevant yet so annoyingly unanswered questions, is to check the source itself. And it worked.  I’m not going to say everything here, because I don’t want to spoil the story for you, but right at the beginning we find out that Gale and Katniss have never defined themselves as an item. Oh no! They are just friends. Now, did it change anything for you? For me it did!

I also found out so much more about the whole “bread in the mud” story as well as the cave days of Katniss and Peeta (yes, there were days…).

Nevertheless, all this shortcomings of the movie made me happy. I could go through The Hunger Games adventure twice. Even though I saw the movie and knew the end, I found reading the book truly exciting. So much was missed in the movie that it just lost the ability to spoil the book.

I decided, however silly it might sound, that I will wait with the other books until I see the next movies. I am sure that if I read the books now it will kill the movies for me. And after seeing the first part on screen I know that it will not work the other way around. This is how I’m going to double the fun. And once again the theory that books are always better then movies had been proved right.

And, dear writers, may the odds be ever in your favor!

The Hunger Games by Suzzanne Collins