Just finished reading The Hunger Games — most of it in two sittings. Young adult post-apocalypse of the highest order, I was utterly emotionally involved from about 15 pages in. Basically, it’s Battle Royale with a differently slanted theme. Both stories involve groups of young people being forced to hunt and kill each other in a staged arena. Whereas Fukasaku’s film is inspired by the falsehoods perpetrated by WWII, Collins’ novel seemed to me to be about the repulsive gluttony of capitalism’s worst excesses.