I started composing yearly booklists in 2008, mostly to encourage myself to read outside of my usual genres to focus more on reading classics, non-fiction, and New York Times Bestsellers.  But just like the epic list fail of 2009, I’ve once again veered sharply from my booklist, and it’s a struggle to get back on track. The problem isn’t that I’m reading less, the problem is that I’m reading too much of the “wrong” thing, thanks to the lure of the Brooklyn Public Library, book club meetups, and irresistible YA book series.

Case in point: Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games YA book series.  The first book made it on to my booklist after I read a glowing review in Entertainment reading, and the book was so good, I didn’t have the perseverence to hold off until 2011 to read the sequels, Catching Fire and the as-yet-unpublished Mockingjay (August, 2010).

I just finished Catching Fire, and like the first book in the series, I read it in a weekend and was compelled to immediately read it through again from the Reaping to the cliffhanger ending. Collins does right what other young adult authors like Stephenie Meyer and Libba Bray can’t seem to figure out – if you have 300 pages of material, make it a 300 page book rather than dragging it out over decades.  Collins writes concisely and with finesse, providing just enough description, dialogue, and internal monologuing to set the scene and the readers’ senses. Her pacing is phenomenal, and her world-building is effective without bogging readers down with details.  It doesn’t hurt that her very premise is one of the most gripping I’ve ever read in the YA genre.

In The Hunger Games, Collins conceived a dystopian futuristic world where 24 children are forced to fight to the death on national TV every year, and in the sequel, the heroine Katniss Everdeen learns that surviving the bloodbath of the Games has not freed her from the sinister clutches of the Capital and the tyrannical President Snow.  In the months since the events of the first book, seventeen year-old Katniss has become the symbol of a revolution, but like most teenage girls, she is largely preoccupied with her tumultous feelings for two (potential) love interests, and the desperate struggle to stay alive when forced to participate in the Hunger Games AGAIN.

What particularly impressed me about Catching Fire is the insight Collins has for the human condition and in particular her heroine’s psyche.  When Katniss reacts to emotional and sensorial stimuli, be it a stolen kiss, the forced alliance with an enemy, or the loss of a friend, she is completely believable.  She is a fully-formed, flesh-and-blood, three-dimensional character – and those kinds of YA heroines are few and far between.  Katniss is sometimes brash, occasionally naive, and often unlikeable, but I can’t help but care intensely for her and her rag-tag band of allies.

I’ll be reading Mockingjay before the year’s end.  And I’ll be on Team Peeta.