It may surprise you to know that I read. A lot. Not as much as I used to before I wrote full-time, but more than most people I know. I also love to talk books. But I have not blogged on them because the writer’s community is divided about whether being honest about someone else’s book shows good grace or not.

However, it suddenly occurred to me that I can skirt the “good grace” issue if I gossip about the characters in the book, and not the writers themselves.

I’m going to start with Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins. Katniss is someone I would be awed by in real life, even before her life goes from bad to worse. She can break the rules and go out hunting to feed her family. She’ll do anything for her little sister, including take her place in a bizarre, to-the-death battle that is part Survivor and part Gladiator. [NOTE: This is not a spoiler, as it is on the jacket flap. I don't do spoilers...on purpose.]

Ever since I read Shirley Jackson’s short story, “The Lottery,” I’ve wondered how people can let themselves get twisted into harming themselves or others. I always recognized that people did that — I grew up in South Carolina at the tail end of the Civil Rights era, so it would have been difficult to miss that some people thought making a tired woman who had been working all day move to the back of the bus was just fine. However, when I read Jackson’s story (sometime in high school, when I lived just above the Mason-Dixon line in Delaware), she showed me how that kind of empathy-blindness happens. In an elegant, powerful, economical story. If you haven’t read it, you can at the link (there are a few missing words and punctuation, probably from the scan, but they don’t detract).

In The Hunger Games, Collins really explores the idea that there is a ruthless bloodthirsty streak lurking under our “he’s not heavy, he’s my brother” veneer. She does so by putting a capable young woman into the battle, but I couldn’t help wondering what would have happened if Katniss’s sister had not had a sister to save her. She wouldn’t have lasted long in the battle. Much like me. Collins is the kind of writer who doesn’t flinch from that question, though, and several characters in the book represent aspects of her sheltered sister’s gentle, peaceful nature. Aspects that Katniss respects, and wishes to preserve, which I can understand.

The question both Jackson and Collins explore is this: if we are sheltered from having to die or harm others to survive, by those who are not so lucky, are we better? Or worse?

I’ve always thought we were no different, which is why I try to understand why people do harmful things. As a child raised to worship the Catholic martyrs like Joan of Arc and John the Baptist — and all those Christians who faced the lions in the Colliseum — I actually understand the underlying appeal of being a suicide bomber, or a SWAT sniper. How glorious it is (or is supposed to be) to fight the good fight, sanctioned by God or country. However, as the pragmatic type, I am ultimately incapable of putting aside the “walk a mile in someone else’s shoes” precept and always turn the question around to ask myself how I would want to be treated if the situation were reversed.

In Jackson’s story, I’d have gone to the stoning without complaining about it being unfair (having put myself in the place of all the others who I’d thrown stones at in the past — or perhaps not thrown stones at, since I’d probably not have believed the underlying presumption that sacrificing a villager would make the crops plentiful). In Collins’s story, I’d have died protesting the stupidity of the Hunger Games themselves. {NOTE: I’d prefer to believe that I’d have been clever and persuasive enough to get others to see the stupidity of the games and get them banned. But as I’ve rarely been persuasive enough to convince others to “flip the script” and think about what they’d think was fair if they were in someone else’s shoes, I just can’t quite bring myself to do more than hope one day I’ll learn the secret to spreading logic and empathy to all mankind.

I can’t wait to read Catching Fire and see what Katniss must face next. Well, I can, and I’m going to, (because a few little birdies told me the book ends on a cliffhanger and George R.R. Martin has ripped out my heart and stomped on it so that I can’t handle cliffhangers well any longer), but I don’t like it.

Kelly