color me strange

The Hunger Games

Finished Mockingjay today. My thoughts on the trilogy.

This damn series. I haven’t been able to stop hearing about it everywhere I turn. It aggravated me to my very core. The plot did not interest me. The names sounded stupid. Yet people flailed and flapped over it. One night I thought to myself, “If everyone is talking about it so damn much, I need to read it for myself.” When I got the first book, my local Barnes & Noble did not have the other two in stock, it appeared. I had to wait to get the next two for weeks, and when I finally did, I got them at Target (reading Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children in between… what a fantastic book). Of course, The Hunger Games was in paperback, and Catching Fire and Mockingjay were in hardback. This made the OCD in me whack out, but oh well.

So.

(No spoilers.)

1. The Hunger Games

Let me start out by saying that I, at best, liked it. It was pretty good. I had to read pretty much every paragraph over twice for it to transfer into my brain for some reason (that was a strange time of my life), and it was like I read it twice, so I remember it well.

The pros:

- The characters were great and well developed. Dimensional? Of this I am not sure, but I did love and care about quite a great deal of the characters. Even though I view Katniss as selfish, she does start out as a strong character, and I can see why people like her. She’s the polar opposite of Bella Swan.

- It definitely makes you appreciate the life you have.

- Ends almost every chapter on a cliff-hanger, so you simply must keep turning the pages forward.

- It was smart in its tendencies and well thought-out… BUT

The cons:

- The plot wasn’t intricate. Yes, it was well thought-out, but it didn’t require me to think at all.

- The plot is a bit unoriginal. Yet original. But not quite. I’ve felt like I’ve read/seen the same thing about a million times before.

- The writing is… not that good. It could have been written much better, compared to what I’ve been reading lately. I was not really all that mesmerized. I would have liked it a lot more it had been more verbally alluring, you know? This could have made up for its unoriginality, in my opinion, but it didn’t.

2. Catching Fire

My thoughts on the first book are a little echoed here. It has great character development; makes you love Peeta. It seems a little anticlimactic until the last act. The last act was wonderful, in my opinion. I can see why people would love this one. I do prefer the first one just a little bit more because it’s more action-heavy, but this one is definitely easier to sit through.

3. Mockingjay

I could write a damn essay on this book.

I wasn’t sure where this book was going to go when I started it. It seemed as if the author pigeon-holed herself with the plot. The more it went on, the more I questioned the plot she was heading with. It seemed a little weak. The writing was weak. The structure of it was weak. Character development? Yeah, let’s crap all over that. Let’s add all these new minor characters I don’t really care about only to kill them all off later. But it was somewhat bearable compared to the climax. The climax made me realize that the rest of it was actually somewhat okay. Until this point, I was actually thinking, “Okay, this book isn’t as bad as everyone said it was.”

Yeah, I take that back, obviously.

Let’s just say, when I finished, I was yelling, “What on God’s blessed earth was THAT?”

WHAT WAS THE AUTHOR THINKING?

I never thought I’d get this angry over a book. If I ever did, not a chance in hell did I ever think it was going to be a Hunger Games book.

First of all, somewhere along the line, it threw in all these confusing, random-ass technicalities and I had no idea what I was reading. I started to really struggle following the plot. And then, everything just gets screwed up. At one point I felt like I was reading the dawn of the dead.

How sloppily written. How rushed. And, before that, I thought the book was rushed; no, until you’ve read the climax of this book, you will not know the meaning of the word “rushed.” Was it because she was told by her publishers to trim it down? Or did she actually originally intend for it to be that way? I noticed that all the books have pretty much the same length, so I figured this.

Random deaths, one by one. And it’s as if the main character doesn’t even care.

I could go on FOREVER.

Just… WHAT?

The last few pages are good, in my opinion, and the epilogue is all right but it gives me no answers other than one or two specific details about how everything has changed.

So, overall?
Good, but overhyped.

Until the last book, of course.

My favorite characters were Peeta, Cinna, Rue, Finnick, and Beetee. I hated Gale.

Stress.

Stress of life. Stress. I’m seventeen going on eighteen, and my parents did nothing to prepare me for life. I don’t know what to do.

January is already gone. Vamos. Adios.

I feel like I’m going to fail before I even get the chance to succeed.

I’ve got so much on my plate. So much that I am thinking and stressing about. I just want it all to be over and done with. I am so unbelievably scared. I can’t be happy. It’s like I’m not allowed to be. Any time that I manage to achieve any level of happiness, the stress is there, in the back of my mind, on the bottom of my stomach, haunting me. I can’t remember the last time I actually felt completely happy, peaceful, free.

Obsessions

• Pentatonix
• Christmas
• Harry Potter
• Hugo
• Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children
• Ghost Whisperer
• Friends
• Boy Meets World

I’m lame.

Life, what a jolly trail.

Life… is like a BOX OF CHOCOLATES

Or maybe, an expired box of chocolates.

I can range into being optimistic… mostly for other people. But not me. I’m usually just realistic bordering on pessimistic. It keeps my expectations low.

I’m so scared about where life will take me; can faith cure the involuntary disease of fear for me?