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Thanks for the comments! Yeah the HAT recipe is so easy and so delicious. Let me know what you think if you decide to give any of them a try!

Thank you for a useful article! :-)

Yeah I find multiplugs are good wherever you go as there are never enough sockets!

Hi Katie, thanks for stopping by :-). Hope your work pays off or will pay off according to the time and energy you're putting in, and that you'll reap more and more passive income from sources like Wizzley!

I love how I'm following you around these books, discussing them with you via comments. I'd so love to be sitting on your deck, chatting about them over a nice glass of pomegranate wine.

I can see the literary device that Collins was going for. We don't know all that's going on in any given situation. That's made obvious here. It does make us also want to see things from different angles, which is always good.

But in terms of story-telling, I thought that device left a lot to be desired.

Ah! I should have worked that out. Thanks!

I totally agree with your assessment here. That's why I loved 'Catching Fire' so much, because of that extra data to assimilate. It's not nearly so clear-cut as in the first novel.

I'm right there with you. The putting aside of Katniss is a great way to put it because there's a lot we miss as her paranoia and variety of other issues kick in and absolutely miss out on the other incredibly rich variety of supporting characters find their way around - made me want to know them more for sure and to have entire major things happen when Katniss is blacked out did sort of piss me off. I wanted to SEE these things happen....but no go. Still a good book, but the first two together made the trilogy work for me.

I'm shuddering at the thought of Elen being in the Reaping. My nephew would be in there too.

Are you like me? Insofar as you're reading it imagining what it would have been like for Mrs Everdeen and the other adults. We would have been expected to just stand there and watch that happen. I don't think I could. I'd have ended up shot or as an avox, because I'd have gone running out to save them.

That, of course, would have saved nothing in the finish.

Suzanne Collins did do a lot of reading about ancient Rome and Greek culture. You can tell that in the gladiator fights and the names of those in the Capitol. But there was also a society which DID have to send two children apiece as tribunes. She nicked that too. Tell Elen that she's really clever to have put all of that together.

I'd have loved for them to have an 'I'm Spartacus' moment in the Hunger Games! LOL

Oh! I wish I was closer too. I'd so have these conversations with you. How much is a plane ticket to your house again?

Ah! Ok! I misjudged the class somewhat. :) I'm not a big one for exams and tests being education. They're not. They are just the bit at the end, which tells people where to pigeon-hole you. But if you were getting the discussions and analyses, then it's all good. It was learning.

Frankenstein is an amazing book! Add it to your reading list now! :o

Cariad, the YA crowd is Young Adult :)
To be frank, this is the book where, to my eyes, Katniss started experiencing a pluthera of mind-fuck after mind-fuck(pardon the French here...sometimes there's really only one way to put it....and here we have it!) As did everyone else, for that matter...so it was fascinating to go through the "WTF!" and "Who can you trust?" and "What NOW?!" - when your world gets shattered, where do you go, who do you turn to? This book asks us all to look deeper - to trust and to turn away sometimes from what we'd instinctually think and do. I liked this book in conjunction with the first but the third not quite as much as the first two. Still flew through it, but....there was more to chew on in these first two.

Elen and I have been reading the books together. She's pretty stunned that if she were in Panem, she'd have her name in the Reaping just like Prim and it's got her in a different mind-set for sure. I talked with her about the Gladiatorial facet - that in ancient Rome, which this all reminds me of VERY much, slaves were made to fight to the death - sometimes one to one, sometimes many with one or none surviving. They had to fight in an arena with hundreds if not thousands watching and those who survived became real celebrities. She's put two and two and figured that Panem is Rome come again. We discuss the deaths, the violence, etc. and she's decided that this reminds her of Sparticus (a story she learned recently because of a Tom Hanks movie of all things...one of the characters kept shouting, "I am Sparticus!" so she had to ask what THAT was all about) and has been asking when they go all Sparticus on the Capital. It'll be VERY interesting discussing this with her as things progress...makes me wish you were closer here so we could all talk about these together!

Aww! Yeah and it was a flip of a coin that I read Jane Eyre over Wuthering Heights, but I still haven't read it yet. (*hides*) And I know I should, and not only because I read your stories, and there are probably no less than a million references in there from that book xP I will......eventually. (I've been saying that for nearly six years now :D)

The class was amazing, it really was a survey of lit class, it had a unit on epics, poetry, classic novels, Shakespeare, drama, short stories, ancient stories, and I read it all, and I loved it. Most were books I'd probably have never thought to pick up. There were discussions and assignments to go along with them, but it was like you could easily pass the quizzes if you just showed up and watched the movies, at the very least.

It is just unfortunate that the teacher had given up on caring, because I could tell from talking to her after class about what I was reading that she loved this class and had high hopes for it when she put it together, and there could have been some really great discussions.

What really happened is that budget cuts left that as the only standing English class for seniors apart from the AP classes, so it ended up the remedial English class. Honestly, I don't think that's what the teacher had in mind when she set up a class for seniors only. For my scheduling, it was actually AP stats that conflicted with the AP lit class, and of course I chose stats over lit. But I needed a fourth year of English for Uni so I took the remedial English class, as opposed to just not taking one at all. But if I had taken AP lit, I'd have read Frankenstein instead of Jane Eyre. Still haven't read Frankenstein either. xD

Ooooph, what a fiery proclamation! I don't necessarily agree with all your sentiments, but I'm glad to see an article expressing an opinion instead of Just Another Sales Piece.
I'm wondering what percentage of your readers actually is American? Just a thought :)

Thanks everyone for your comments, they are appreciated.

Wow! That is quite a story. I can't believe that you could have potentially got an A without either reading the book, nor discussing it. We had to basically tear these novels to shreds with our over-analysis, not to mention reading them!

You can't imagine how my jaw dropped at 'gave up on Wuthering Heights'. That's my favourite classic novel!

But I agree, this movie is a good one. Thanks for your comment. :)