I am thinking, yes. Yes it is.
I tend to not read fiction when it debuts. Usually I read it once people I know start saying interesting things about it. I’ve seen several posts about Catching Fire over the last week or so that have convinced me to read these books so that I can join in the conversation about them. Here are my very favorite ones:
Comparative Geeks – GeekHolly responds to an NPR article about Katniss’ relationships, arguing that whomever wrote the piece doesn’t know the source material and bases their argument on flawed assumptions about both Katniss and about the way relationships work:
The not-reading-the-source-material is important, but the basis of the argument is extremely problematic, in my opinion. The groundwork for their argument is that by Katniss only choosing one -either Gale or Peeta – that she is having to give up one side of herself. Apparently with Gale she would have to become more feminine and let him take care of her. Then with Peeta she would be the male and take care of him. Just writing those statements down bugs the hell out of me because when the hell did Katniss ever give up anything?
Part Time Monster – Diana reads Fennick as a hooker-with-a-heart of gold and shows a couple of interesting ways in which this trope is inverted in the story. Eventually, I want to come back to this part and pick at it a little with a post of my own, because I think it deserves further exploration:
Finnick is the most popular of the Capitol’s Victors (we know flat-out that he’s not the only Victor that Snow’s sex-trafficking). So Collins has taken this young man and put him into a situation we rarely hear about-male prostitution and sex-trafficking, and then she’s made him the most popular prostitute, one who can traffic in secrets of high powered officials, in a dystopian city that has parties wilder than any that Gatsby ever planned. It’s no wonder that he makes Katniss uncomfortable.
So now I am fascinated, and will probably read these books in the next month or so.
Sourcerer 
They are really fast reads, particularly if you read academically. They are very refreshing on a Bechdel Level, as well. Thanks for the Pingback!
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Cool, that is good to know. My last not-adult Lit read was Pullman’s His Dark Materials, which wasn’t that fast a read, and really made me unhappy as a reader because I thought the third volume turned the whole series into an author tract.
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Read them, read them! We’ll have to have a different conversation about His Dark Materials; the first is certainly the strongest of those, but I actually enjoyed the third one, though I seem to be one of the few who did.
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Yes, read them! I had a friend loan them to me last year and I had them all read within a weekend. So good!
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I put off reading them because I thought it was just trendy love-triangle rubbish, but I was so wrong. They’re amazing on so many levels, so rewarding to analyze as well as sit back and enjoy.
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Yeah, I thought the same, with a little this-is-such-a-reductive-drawn-in-the-fewest-strokes-possible-dystopia thrown in for good measure. I was wrong, apparently. I am definitely reading them as soon as I can find a way to do it for free 🙂
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Great reads….all three! I only looked into them after my teenager asked that we read them together. So glad I did. In fact, I might read them again to further dig into the nuances your wise commenters noted above.
BTW: Thanks for stopping by my site yesterday 🙂
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