#65 Read 10 Books by Authors I Have Never Read Before (6 & 7/10)

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins has one of the craziest premises for a book that I have ever read. This is soooo not the kind of book that I am normally interested in but I heard enough good things about it to pique my interest. It is basically about a completely different America with a horrible government and each year the goverment forces each district (think of a state) to sacrifice two children, one boy and one girl, aged 12 to 18 to the Hunger Games, a fight to the death between 24 children to remind everyone that the government is completely in control since an uprising several years ago. You read from the perspective of a 16 year old girl that is chosen to go to the games. It is a total page-turner that keeps you guessing the entire time and it is definitely not a predictable read! This book is the first of a trilogy (of which the third comes out in August) and I will absolutely be reading the other two books. This was the first e-book I read on my Nook and it was so cool. I love the feel of books so I wasn't sure I would love the Nook but it turns out that it is fabulous. The only annoying thing is that even though the second book, Catching Fire, has been out for months, it is not available in the Barnes & Noble e-book store nor is it available in my local library's e-books. Barnes & Noble gets a thumbs down for that and Suzanne Collins gets two thumbs up for writing such a riveting book!

The Help by Kathryn Stockett is about black maids in Jackson, MS just as the civil rights movement was beginning. It was good but not as good as I expected. It was really, really crazy to get an idea of what it was like to be black at that time and it was completely mind blowing to put myself there. It is just unreal that 50 years ago there were so many people who thought that the color of your skin meant something other than just pigment, and that goes for whites and blacks. And especially mind blowing that white people thought that it was an excuse to treat black people as less than. The reason that it wasn't as good as I expected is because I kept on waiting for something really climactic to happen toward the end and it really didn't. And it was one of those endings where I'm thinking, "Okay, am I missing the last page or something?" because it just kind of ended. I felt like there was more to find out. In my opinion, if there is not going to be a sequel (which maybe there will be, for all I know), you should get a synopsis of what happens with everyone. If it is just tying up certain situations from the book or if it finding out how the rest of everyone's lives turn out, I want to know. Anyway, I just found out that it is being made into a movie this summer, so maybe they will do that in the movie and give me more closure. This was Stockett's first book and her writing was definitely not good enough to make me an automatic reader of her future books.