The Hunger Games

I finally got around to reading it to see what all the fuss was about. I had seen the movie before reading the book, so I had a pretty good feel for what was going to happen.In fact, it seemed like the movie was pretty true to the book with very few changes that I can remember.The largest differences were increasing the size of the roles of some of the supporting and minor characters over the book since the book offers everything pretty much from Katriss's perspective. She does have some rather “impressive” insights into the thinking of some of the others that I think are better portrayed by showing the other characters doing those things instead.Unsurprisingly though, the book was better than the movie, but both were just so-so to me. The book offers much better insight to the thought process and motivation of some of the characters that I just didn't find apparent in the movie.You especially get to know a lot more about Rue, who was relegated to few little screen time in the movie with no real sense of why she and Kat had affection for one another.My biggest issue is that for a book dealing with a battle to the death, the violence level is fairly low. I guess that should be expected since it's considered a YA book though.It also felt pretty derivative of [b:Battle Royale 57891 Battle Royale Koushun Takami http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1331235272s/57891.jpg 2786327]. I'm certainly not the first to say so. It's a book I haven't read, but I've seen the movie a few times. When I first saw the trailer for Hunger Games, I thought it was maybe an American remake of Battle Royale.I'll likely get around to reading the next two books at some point, though I've had a few tell me neither is as good. Since I was only so-so on this one, I'm not in much of a rush so they will fall somewhere behind my fairly long to read list.