Fire Is Catching!

I spent much of this rainy day with my cats, reading The Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins. I'm well into the third book, and it's continuously compelling, inspired, and unpredictable. It is a grand classic of anti-authoritarian literature. Any reader will love it, but there is plenty there that only anarchists will spot. It feels like I'm in the middle of one of Ursula Le Guin's greatest works. It's a tale of survival, resistance, and war, in which rebellion takes the form of mutual aid.

There is love, but no sex. There is a lot of violence and death, but it's never gratuitous. There is not even a mention of religion --hooraaaaay! Mass media is examined very deeply, and the author has a way of making you feel her characters on a challenging landscape. In the second book, in fact, it seems clear to me that she's been to the Burning Man Festival in the desert, as I have.

Here's part of a poem from where I left off reading, which my boy Max found to be very fine and earned his paw print of approval:

Are you, are you
Coming to the tree
Wear a neclace of rope, side by side with me.
Strange things did happen here
No stranger would it be
If we met up at midnight in the hanging tree.

It's too bad this last book will have an ending. Oh, Hell, let's have a song!