{"id":59007,"date":"2012-04-23T14:44:14","date_gmt":"2012-04-23T18:44:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=59007"},"modified":"2012-04-25T14:20:24","modified_gmt":"2012-04-25T18:20:24","slug":"hungry-for-another-good-book","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2012\/04\/hungry-for-another-good-book\/","title":{"rendered":"Hungry for Another Good Book?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Jeremy<\/a>
Jeremy Teitelbaum, dean of CLAS.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Jeremy Teitelbaum<\/a>, dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences<\/a>, is a guest contributor to UConn Today. His posts appear on Mondays. For his previous posts, click here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

It seems like everyone \u2013 not just young adults, not just the UConn community, but everyone \u2013 is talking about The Hunger Games. <\/em>As an unashamed <\/em>long-time lover of young adult fiction, I was very skeptical.<\/p>\n

I still look back on John Christopher\u2019s dystopian Tripod novels, which I read as a kid, with great pleasure \u2013 though according to this 2012 obituary of Christopher<\/a>, perhaps it\u2019s fortunate that I haven\u2019t re-read them recently. My daughter and I together loved Phillip Pullman\u2019s His Dark Materials<\/em> series, and Garth Nix\u2019s great trilogy Sabriel, Lirael, and Abhorsen<\/em>. And The Giver<\/em> sticks with me, though I fear for its survival now that it is required reading for far too many middle- and high-school classes.<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, I was slow to pick up the Suzanne Collins novel, partly because many of the people who were urging me to read it seemed to see it as startlingly original.<\/p>\n

I take a certain subversive pleasure in my forays into \u201cyoung adult\u201d fiction, the sort of feeling you get from doing something just a bit outside of the social norm. When I tell other adults about these books, I sometimes sense from their reaction a feeling that I\u2019m admitting to having read literature as politically inappropriate as Marx\u2019s Das Kapital<\/em> or as socially inappropriate as \u201cliterary\u201d pornography like the works of de Sade.<\/p>\n

I eventually overcame my cynicism and read The Hunger Games<\/em> along with its two sequels, Catching Fire<\/em> and The Mockingjay<\/em>. It\u2019s a series that raises many questions about our society, about our penchant for violence, about the stresses we place on children and young adults, and about the moral complexity of well-meaning violent intervention to right societal wrongs. Collins handles the dystopian setting and the bread-and-circuses motif well, and the chaste physical relationships among the main characters fit the \u201cyoung adult\u201d classification.<\/p>\n

As so many critics and readers have already observed, it is Katniss Everdeen, the heroine, who drives the series. She\u2019s resourceful, capable, utterly unsentimental, and yet morally engaged. She\u2019s in an entirely different league than Bella of the appalling Twilight<\/em> series \u2013 while Katniss gives young girls a strong, resourceful, and at times cunning role model, Bella merely devotes her life to a condescending undead man. Katniss indeed earns an honorable place with Pullman\u2019s trouble-making Lyra Belacqua and Nix\u2019s clever Sabriel.<\/p>\n

It might be tempting to attribute the success of The Hunger Games<\/em> to its \u201crelevance.\u201d Life in Panem, in which most people eke out a living while a privileged few cavort in pleasure, and the character of Katniss, who needs self-reliance and a (literally) cut-throat competitive edge to stay alive, might seem appropriate to the world that young people experience today.<\/p>\n

But when I think back over 30 years of reading stories supposedly aimed at teenagers, I see kids and teenagers, alone or in small groups, striving to overthrow the established order and make the world a better place. Those are the kinds of books I like to think about our children reading \u2013 those with strong characters, moral dilemmas, and a sense of justice in the world.<\/p>\n

If you haven\u2019t read The Hunger Games <\/em>yet, you should. And if you\u2019re like me \u2013 that is, if you\u2019re a parent \u2013 then as you identify with Katniss and her trials in the book, bear in mind that in reality you\u2019ve crossed the line and you\u2019ll forever more be a member of the Government of Panem.<\/p>\n

Added in Press: I also just finished Paolo Bacigalupi\u2019s fantastic young adult novel Shipbreaker and I highly recommend it, both for its strong characters and for its realistic picture of a world wrecked by climate change.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As UConn Reads wraps up for the year on campus, the dean of CLAS picks up on another book that\u2019s already creating a buzz.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":40,"featured_media":59020,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[66],"class_list":["post-59007","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-09 06:37:32","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59007","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/40"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=59007"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59007\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":59182,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59007\/revisions\/59182"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/59020"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=59007"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=59007"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=59007"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=59007"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=59007"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}