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Sunday, December 10, 2017

The Annotation Project: The Hunger Games

Well folks, I didn’t get any non-bot comments on two weeks of “Gone Girl” pieces. I’ve always been reluctant to do books due to my fear that nobody actually reads, and that suspicion feels like it’s being confirmed. Let’s do one more book, see if anybody responds, then see where we’re going from there.  UPDATE: As requested, here’s a link to a downloadable Word file.












13 comments:

shusta said...

I bet plenty of people have been reading them, I definitely sure have, but yeah for sure it’s hard to see without getting comments.

I actually did find the commented word file for Harry Potter easier to read through than the screenshots for Gone Girl. Any chance you can upload the word file for Hunger Games?

Matt Bird said...

Okay, I've added a Word download to this one and the last one.

Unknown said...

In a bit of serendipity, you covered about as much of the book as I was able to get through.

Anonymous said...

I for one am eating these up, so I hope you continue. You don't have to do popular books either, I haven't read the last two and the points are still valid for me. You could even do a book that sucks, and we could learn nearly as much from what not to do. Come to think of it, books with a mixture of good and bad would be perfect. Thanks for your efforts.

Mark said...

Indeed - I just never read Gone Girl (mostly on purpose - just not really my thing) so I skipped that one.

Here's one that I read when it first came out, since I was a YA Librarian at the time. I recall being pretty impressed with it ten years ago, but the subsequent novels and movies haven't made me terribly excited, so this is interesting to look at the first pages again for the first time in a long time. Really interesting to see how much of the book(s) - both the good and the bad is all set up in these first few pages.

I love your all your comments about teen/tween wish-fulfillment. Especially interesting in a book that is theoretically depressing.

On the first sentence - I was doing one of those silly online quizzes the other day, this one on "famous first lines" and this sentence came up. Could not for the life of me place it. I thought it must be from some 19th Century domestic novel or something. Might have been better to start right with Prim having bad dreams.

Matt Bird said...

I can't imagine anybody recognizing that first sentence, unless you're obsessed with the book!

James Kennedy said...

It's actually an excellent first sentence because it implies that she lacks a companion to sleep with. Which is the tension of the whole series. Who will end up in bed beside her? Peeta? Gale? Does she even want/need a companion? Is she the kind of person who actually doesn't need to wake up next to anyone?

MCP said...

I am really enjoying your book focused series. I think it is a lot of new territory to cover with the flexibility of books and the fact that the sentence by sentence writing choices make more of an impact than in scripts.

Jonathan Auxier said...

Things are crazy in the holiday season--there's an observable dip in online conversation during Dec. Your annotations are fantastic.

Harvey Jerkwater said...

To expand on what James Kennedy wrote: It's actually an excellent first sentence because it implies that she lacks a companion to sleep with. Which is the tension of the whole series. Who will end up in bed beside her? Peeta? Gale? Does she even want/need a companion? Is she the kind of person who actually doesn't need to wake up next to anyone?

The whole section is about the lack of love. Her bed is cold because her sister isn't in it. The cat, whom she had almost killed years before, hates her. "This is the closest we will ever come to love." Her father was torn apart by an explosion. It's all so goddamned cold and lonely. Even her interaction with Gale is about the rejection of the possibility of love. The only thing she has is her sister, who is talked about more than seen. Prim is more of an idea than a character here: the One Person Katniss Loves. Despite that, the story starts with Prim having left their joint bed to be with their mother. The love is distant.

Then comes the Big Moment, when Katniss, a cold girl in a cold world with a love we see more abstract than real, takes a catastrophic action out of unselfish love.

It's fitting that Peeta is selected after Katniss has emotionally awakened.

Cletus vanWinkle said...

Didn't comment on the Gone Girl stuff, but read everything and enjoyed the analysis!

Joslyn Chase said...

Hi Matt,

I read! And I write. I recently discovered your book and spent the last week or so listening to the audio version. Then started over listening to it again. Thank you so much for putting this information out there. I'm finding it fascinating, inspiring, and helpful.

Anonymous said...

Thank you thank you thank you!!!! I absolutely love the hunger games and am looking to annotate one of my copies, but am scared! This really helps so much!!!