Here’s to broadening horizons.

I normally steer clear of young adult fiction – I read Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone in high school and just didn’t see the appeal. Then I read Twilight for work, expecting to dislike it and proving myself right. I put off The Hunger Games for a long while, assuming the same would be true, but with a nagging urge to try it – dystopian, macabre stories are my favorite.

I’ve also been shy of eReaders – I bought a Kindle 1st generation when they came out, even wrote my undergraduate capstone paper on the potential of eReaders, but never adopted the idea into my reading habits. Their screens are hard to concentrate on, the pages turn ever so slooowwwwlyyy, the corners dig into my palms, and I can’t easily see how much progress I’ve made. Whose idea was it to forgo page numbers in favor of ‘locations’, aka. lines, anyway? I never know how many ‘locations’ there are total, and the progress bar is the same length across the bottom of the screen whether I’m reading Heart of Darkness or War and Peace.

So this week, I took a couple leaps of faith – I decided to read The Hunger Games and I bought it for my Kindle (bottom line, I’m cheap and it’s instantly available). I delved electronically into the world of Katniss Everdeen on Wednesday night and was pleasantly surprised.

Some of my suspicions were justified – Collins spells out characters’ emotions and motivations to the point of annoyance at times, her political ideas are transparent from the start, and the eReader is not nearly as comfortable a companion as a book – but I’m hooked! The major plot points of the series had been spoiled for me before I even began reading, but Collins builds suspense so well that I can’t stop. Some authors leave each chapter in a cliff hanger, but Collins manages to leave her paragraphs in suspense, with the result being that I don’t want to talk to anyone, I don’t want to go to work, I don’t even want to write this post… I just want to finish the book! And then maybe start Catching Fire.