Hunger Games and How a Book Can Save Your Life
Saturday, April 7, 2012
When a movie comes out with a lot of hype, and i hear it's based on a book, I most always try to read the book before watching the movie. Because, as we readers know, the book is always better.
There are a few very rare exceptions. The most immediate that comes to my mind is Delores Claiborne, by Stephen King. A fact even weirder because the movies can never live up to the terrors King can plant in our own heads, but DC the movie, in my opinion, was much better than the book.
The first time I picked up a King book, it was out of total boredom: it was winter finals, I was done with my exams but stuck waiting for my roommate to be done and ready to drive to Ft. Lauderdale for Spring Break. I had time to kill and wanted something mindless, not the Literature that buried me the rest of the school year. My roommate had The Shining lying around, so I picked it up, though I had turned up my nose at King for years. I mean, come on. Rabid dogs, killer cars, buckets of pig blood? Pluh-leese. I was an English major, for Christ's sake.
I probably picked the wrong time and place to read The Shining. Nearly everyone had already left for Spring Break; the long hall of doors in the dorm looked a little like a hotel corridor, and though there was no snow, it was cold outside. It was also eeriely quiet in the dorm: no stereos, no shrieking, no ringing phones. Almost everybody was gone.
I woke up in the middle of the night, went down the deserted hall to the bathroom, and found the doors mysteriously closed. The bathroom doors were never closed. When I finally got up the nerve to go in, I had to check all the stalls and the bathtubs before I could relieve my aching bladder. (Why do we do this when we are scared? Isn't that what the victims in scary movies always do -- go looking for what went bump in the night -- even when we are screaming at them, "Don't go down to the basement!"? We look, because we can't stand not to. We look, not to find the scary monster, but to prove to ourselves it isn't really there. Otherwise we could never stop holding our breath. Unless we look, we will never know we are safe.)
When I got back to my room that night, I checked under the bed, flipped the light switch by the door and ran — literally ran — toward the bed, trying to dive under the covers before something got me. I hadn’t done that since I was eight years old, and was certain that Barnabas Collins slept in the narrow space between my wall and my bed.
It took me years to screw up my courage to finish The Shining. And while I rather liked the movie version (except for Shelly Duvall -- I would have taken an ax to her myself -- it came nowhere near scaring me like the book did.
But the book I started last night was The Hunger Games. I'd never heard of it before the movie, and once the movie came out, people on FB started saying how they loved the books. So, I ordered a copy off Amazon. It came yesterday, and this morning I finished it.
But a good book is a double-edged sword. If a book grabs my attention, it holds me hostage until the last page is turned. I'm like my mother this way: the world stops until the book is done.
I say a good book, because Hunger Games was good -- not great, but good. Certainly a page-turner, in spite of the fact that basically, the plot is one we've seen a million times in some form or other. King wrote it at least twice, in The Long Walk and The Running Man. And he borrowed it from Shirley Jackson's The Lottery. Reality tv is rife with shows where people are pitted against one another, in varying degrees of desperation, for fame and wealth, without the death, of course. But I suspect that's only because the entertainment cannibals haven't gotten brave enough to launch a Snuff Channel. Yet. Could we believe in Katnis and Peeta's willingness to play to the audience, if we hadn't seen years of such manuevering on Survivor?
But except possibly for incredible, toe-curling sex with someone you love, there is nothing on earth that can so completely envelop and enclose you as a good book. Because you read it, rather than see it, it engages your brain in ways that movies and TV cannot, almost like a kind of accidental meditation that happens as you stare at words running across the page. The world receeds, along with all the other crap that eats at the edges of your conciousness almost every waking moment.
Books have changed my life. Gone with the Wind made me want to be a writer. Beloved killed any tiny seeds of racism that might have been lurking in the soil of my soul. The Bell Jar taught me that I was not crazy, not really. Other books have taught me I am not the only person in the world to ever think certain thoughts, and therefore I am not alone.
Books have also saved my life. When I graduated from college, I was miserable, literally trapped in a city I loathed, working twelve to fourteen hours a day in a job I hated, with people I mostly despised. I was lonely and bored and put on fifty pounds, trying to comfort myself in the most pathetic way possible.
I began binging on books, trying to escape from the monotony and depression that threatened to overwhelm me. Books were my shelter from the destructive personalities I lived and worked with, a wall I could hide behind -- figuratively and literally, because with my nose stuck in a book, people would leave me alone, and I could ignore them without having to work so hard at pretending to.
And it was Stephen King who wrote most of the books I read during that period. Having avoided him for years, as prolific a writer as he is, I had a lot of books waiting for me. I found he was a most dependable friend whose stories could, if not completely stop the desperate hamster in my brain, could at least coax the little bastard to run in a different direction for a while. Because that's the worst thing for many of us: getting our brains to stop running along the well-worn ruts of pain, heartache, self doubt, negative thoughts and yes, even just plain boredom.
Boredom is dangerous, because when we are bored, we become numb, lose our curiousity, and start to slide deeper into our own heads. Boredom makes us blind to beauty, makes life nothing but a series of ticks of the clock, counting down to the next meal, the next sleep, the next weekend, the next cigarette, the next chocolate binge, the next drink, the next pill, the next sex.... whatever crutch has a specific siren song for us. So often we spiral down out of sheer boredom. Depression and boredom are part of the same cycle, feeding on each other. When they say depressed people lose interest in things that once gave them pleasure, they are talking about chronic boredom.
Life today is a mine field of boredom. Most of us do jobs that bore us, and we wonder why we bother. Even when we believe we can make a difference, all too often red-tape, bureacracy, stupidity and ignorance conspires against us. We become bored by our own ineffectualness.
Boredom is wasted time standing in line, sitting in traffic, waiting and waiting and waiting through all the things that are required of us, yet don't really mean anything to us. And boredom leads to frustration, because while we wait, we think about the things we'd rather be doing, but can't -- because of time, because of money, because of circumstance.
All the cliches are true: books are escape, books are portals to other worlds, other lives, other realities. Books have always been my best, most dependable friends, who ask nothing of me but time and give me so much. Books are the cheapest vacation, and you don't even have to have money to find solace in them: one of the greatest things about this country is that we have libraries. No matter how poor you are, you can afford a book. Amazing when you think about it. There are buildings full of wonderful books of all kinds, just waiting for you. All you have to do is go get them. And bring them back, eventually.
I have a dear friend who is struggling right now, struggling every day to hang on, to keep breathing, to walk a narrow line between life and failure. And I know she's also lonely and bored, living too much in her own head that's filled with regret and sadness and fear. I have tried to tell her that books can be a lifeline, but she's never been a reader, and I don't think she really understands or believes me. I can't seem to find the words to convince her.
Maybe if you don't develop a taste for reading young, you never do, but I can't bear to believe that.
I'm going to give her my copy of The Hunger Games. Maybe it will be her friend and hold her hand, if only for a little while .... if she'll just let it.
When a movie comes out with a lot of hype, and i hear it's based on a book, I most always try to read the book before watching the movie. Because, as we readers know, the book is always better.
There are a few very rare exceptions. The most immediate that comes to my mind is Delores Claiborne, by Stephen King. A fact even weirder because the movies can never live up to the terrors King can plant in our own heads, but DC the movie, in my opinion, was much better than the book.
The first time I picked up a King book, it was out of total boredom: it was winter finals, I was done with my exams but stuck waiting for my roommate to be done and ready to drive to Ft. Lauderdale for Spring Break. I had time to kill and wanted something mindless, not the Literature that buried me the rest of the school year. My roommate had The Shining lying around, so I picked it up, though I had turned up my nose at King for years. I mean, come on. Rabid dogs, killer cars, buckets of pig blood? Pluh-leese. I was an English major, for Christ's sake.
I probably picked the wrong time and place to read The Shining. Nearly everyone had already left for Spring Break; the long hall of doors in the dorm looked a little like a hotel corridor, and though there was no snow, it was cold outside. It was also eeriely quiet in the dorm: no stereos, no shrieking, no ringing phones. Almost everybody was gone.
I woke up in the middle of the night, went down the deserted hall to the bathroom, and found the doors mysteriously closed. The bathroom doors were never closed. When I finally got up the nerve to go in, I had to check all the stalls and the bathtubs before I could relieve my aching bladder. (Why do we do this when we are scared? Isn't that what the victims in scary movies always do -- go looking for what went bump in the night -- even when we are screaming at them, "Don't go down to the basement!"? We look, because we can't stand not to. We look, not to find the scary monster, but to prove to ourselves it isn't really there. Otherwise we could never stop holding our breath. Unless we look, we will never know we are safe.)
When I got back to my room that night, I checked under the bed, flipped the light switch by the door and ran — literally ran — toward the bed, trying to dive under the covers before something got me. I hadn’t done that since I was eight years old, and was certain that Barnabas Collins slept in the narrow space between my wall and my bed.
It took me years to screw up my courage to finish The Shining. And while I rather liked the movie version (except for Shelly Duvall -- I would have taken an ax to her myself -- it came nowhere near scaring me like the book did.
But the book I started last night was The Hunger Games. I'd never heard of it before the movie, and once the movie came out, people on FB started saying how they loved the books. So, I ordered a copy off Amazon. It came yesterday, and this morning I finished it.
But a good book is a double-edged sword. If a book grabs my attention, it holds me hostage until the last page is turned. I'm like my mother this way: the world stops until the book is done.
I say a good book, because Hunger Games was good -- not great, but good. Certainly a page-turner, in spite of the fact that basically, the plot is one we've seen a million times in some form or other. King wrote it at least twice, in The Long Walk and The Running Man. And he borrowed it from Shirley Jackson's The Lottery. Reality tv is rife with shows where people are pitted against one another, in varying degrees of desperation, for fame and wealth, without the death, of course. But I suspect that's only because the entertainment cannibals haven't gotten brave enough to launch a Snuff Channel. Yet. Could we believe in Katnis and Peeta's willingness to play to the audience, if we hadn't seen years of such manuevering on Survivor?
But except possibly for incredible, toe-curling sex with someone you love, there is nothing on earth that can so completely envelop and enclose you as a good book. Because you read it, rather than see it, it engages your brain in ways that movies and TV cannot, almost like a kind of accidental meditation that happens as you stare at words running across the page. The world receeds, along with all the other crap that eats at the edges of your conciousness almost every waking moment.
Books have changed my life. Gone with the Wind made me want to be a writer. Beloved killed any tiny seeds of racism that might have been lurking in the soil of my soul. The Bell Jar taught me that I was not crazy, not really. Other books have taught me I am not the only person in the world to ever think certain thoughts, and therefore I am not alone.
Books have also saved my life. When I graduated from college, I was miserable, literally trapped in a city I loathed, working twelve to fourteen hours a day in a job I hated, with people I mostly despised. I was lonely and bored and put on fifty pounds, trying to comfort myself in the most pathetic way possible.
I began binging on books, trying to escape from the monotony and depression that threatened to overwhelm me. Books were my shelter from the destructive personalities I lived and worked with, a wall I could hide behind -- figuratively and literally, because with my nose stuck in a book, people would leave me alone, and I could ignore them without having to work so hard at pretending to.
And it was Stephen King who wrote most of the books I read during that period. Having avoided him for years, as prolific a writer as he is, I had a lot of books waiting for me. I found he was a most dependable friend whose stories could, if not completely stop the desperate hamster in my brain, could at least coax the little bastard to run in a different direction for a while. Because that's the worst thing for many of us: getting our brains to stop running along the well-worn ruts of pain, heartache, self doubt, negative thoughts and yes, even just plain boredom.
Boredom is dangerous, because when we are bored, we become numb, lose our curiousity, and start to slide deeper into our own heads. Boredom makes us blind to beauty, makes life nothing but a series of ticks of the clock, counting down to the next meal, the next sleep, the next weekend, the next cigarette, the next chocolate binge, the next drink, the next pill, the next sex.... whatever crutch has a specific siren song for us. So often we spiral down out of sheer boredom. Depression and boredom are part of the same cycle, feeding on each other. When they say depressed people lose interest in things that once gave them pleasure, they are talking about chronic boredom.
Life today is a mine field of boredom. Most of us do jobs that bore us, and we wonder why we bother. Even when we believe we can make a difference, all too often red-tape, bureacracy, stupidity and ignorance conspires against us. We become bored by our own ineffectualness.
Boredom is wasted time standing in line, sitting in traffic, waiting and waiting and waiting through all the things that are required of us, yet don't really mean anything to us. And boredom leads to frustration, because while we wait, we think about the things we'd rather be doing, but can't -- because of time, because of money, because of circumstance.
All the cliches are true: books are escape, books are portals to other worlds, other lives, other realities. Books have always been my best, most dependable friends, who ask nothing of me but time and give me so much. Books are the cheapest vacation, and you don't even have to have money to find solace in them: one of the greatest things about this country is that we have libraries. No matter how poor you are, you can afford a book. Amazing when you think about it. There are buildings full of wonderful books of all kinds, just waiting for you. All you have to do is go get them. And bring them back, eventually.
I have a dear friend who is struggling right now, struggling every day to hang on, to keep breathing, to walk a narrow line between life and failure. And I know she's also lonely and bored, living too much in her own head that's filled with regret and sadness and fear. I have tried to tell her that books can be a lifeline, but she's never been a reader, and I don't think she really understands or believes me. I can't seem to find the words to convince her.
Maybe if you don't develop a taste for reading young, you never do, but I can't bear to believe that.
I'm going to give her my copy of The Hunger Games. Maybe it will be her friend and hold her hand, if only for a little while .... if she'll just let it.
