Hunger Games Book Covers

Check out the book covers (scroll down) for The Hunger Games designed by Brian Hushagen's art students. 

Campus Read Essay Contest Winner

The winner of this year's Campus Read Essay contest is Jessica Church.  Her essay, "Repetition of History in The Hunger Games," will be published in the Bismarck State College Mystician.  Jessica will also receive a scholarship award of $500.

Congratulations, Jessica, and thanks to everyone who submitted essays.

Looking for a Few Good Books!

What shall we read for the 2013-2014 BSC Campus Read?

Here are the basic guidelines:

1. This year, we are asking for suggestions of books with a 1960s-related theme.
2. The book must be in print and in a price range of no more than $20 per book. Hardcover books will be considered.
3. The book should be reasonably short -- 200-350 pages.
4. The Campus Read selection should be an engaging read that will generate lively discussion.
5. The book should explore any of the universal themes of literature such as coming of age, abuse of power, triumph over adversity, the importance of the individual, conflicts with self, others, and nature, etc. 1960s-related themes are requested this year.

The Campus Read Committee will take suggestions through Wednesday, November 21, 2012.

 

Please send your suggestion(s) to BSC.CampusRead@BismarckState.edu or post to our blog at http://campusread.blogspot.com/

 

The BSC Campus Read Committee

 

Write Now! Campus Read Essay Contest

To All BSC Students:

A reminder ... the deadline for the Campus Read Essay Contest is coming up fast ... Friday, November 30, 2012. 

Why enter? You could win a $500 scholarship from the BSC Foundation for the Spring 2013 semester!  Note: Part-time or dual credit students will be awarded up to three credits of scholarship funds. 

Contest Guidelines

• Submit your best work of 600 words or more. Essays must be typed and must be submitted electronically as an attachment and emailed to BSC.CampusRead@bismarckstate.edu
• The topic for your essay may be anything related to your consideration of The Hunger Games.  It may be a critical response to the book or a narrative essay about your own experiences that relate to the theme of the book. Don't be afraid to be creative with other ideas!
• Quoted, paraphrased, or summarized material must be correctly cited (any recognized format accepted).
• Include a cover page with your name, address, phone number, and email address.
• Essays that do not follow the guidelines will not be considered.

Essays will be judged anonymously by a committee of BSC staff, faculty, and administrators. The winning essay will be published in the Mystician.

We can't wait to read your essays!

 

Thin Man Novellas

Our 2011-12 Campus Read selection was The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett.  If you liked that book and that genre, you may want to read two never-before-published Thin Man novellas by the "legendary master of hard-boiled fiction."

Check out Return of the Thin Man: the Original Screen Stories by Dashiell Hammett and edited by Richard Layman and Julie M. Rivett.  It is currently on the New Book display shelves at the BSC Library.  Editors Layman and Rivett visited our campus in November 2011 as part of our Campus Read activities. Layman is a Hammett scholar and Rivett is Hammett's granddaughter.

The Return of the Thin Man includes two novellas that Hammett wrote as screen stories for the celebrated films, After the Thin Man and Another Thin Man, which were sequels to the adaptation of his 1934 novel, The Thin Man. All told, there were six movies in the Thin Man series starring William Powell as Nick and Myrna Loy as Nora and Skippy as their beloved wire terrier, Asta.

Hunger Games - The Movie - November 7

Be there or be square!

Campus Read Essay Contest - Scholarship Opportunity!

To All BSC Students:

You’re already reading, discussing, and writing about The Hunger Games, this year’s Campus Read selection. Shape up those ideas and submit an essay to the Campus Read essay contest!

Full-time students with the winning essay will be awarded a $500 scholarship from the BSC Foundation for the Spring 2013 semester. Note: Part-time or dual credit students will be awarded up to three credits of scholarship funds.

Guidelines

• Submit your best work of 600 words or more.
• The topic for your essay may be anything related to your consideration of the selection.
• The essay may be a critical response to the book or a narrative essay relating your own experiences that relate to the theme of the book.
•  Don’t be afraid to be creative with other ideas.
• Quoted, paraphrased, or summarized material must be correctly cited (any recognized format accepted).
• The essay must be typed.
• Include a cover page with your name, address, phone number, and email address.
• Essays that do not follow the guidelines will not be considered.
• The submission deadline is Friday, November 30, 2012. 
• Essays must be submitted electronically as an attachment and emailed to BSC.CampusRead@BismarckState.edu. 
• Essays will be judged anonymously by a committee of BSC staff, faculty, and administrators. 
• The winning essay will be published in the Mystician.

We look forward to hearing from you!

The BSC Campus Read Committee

More Literary Dystopias

If you liked The Hunger Games, here are a few more dystopian sagas to check out from the BSC Library:

• Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro 
• The Dispossessed: an Ambiguous Utopia by Ursula K. Le Guin
• The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
• Blindness by Jose Saramago
• A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
• Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell (film version in theatres on October 26)

Two Showings of "The Hunger Games" Movie

Mark your calendar! 

Who?  YOU
What?  The Hunger Games movie
When? Wednesday, November 7, 2012
What Time? 1 p.m. and 4 p.m.
Where? BSC's NECE (National Energy Center of Excellence) - Basin Electric Auditorium, Room 304

Hunger Games LibGuide

To help you explore and find information about The Hunger Games, check out the Hunger Games LibGuide created by the BSC Library. Check it out!

You'll find information about:

• The Hunger Games trilogy
• The inspiration for the story
• Readalikes
• Principal characters
• Panem (including maps)
• The Districts
• The World of the Hunger Games (glossary of terms)
• Profile of Author Suzanne Collins
• Works by and about Suzanne Collins
• Information about the movies
• Web links and selected BSC Library resources
• Information about Campus Read

War-themed 'Hunger Games' Poses a Difficult Choice for Parents

Columbia, MO (July 18, 2012) -- "Brenda Gray is as complimentary as can be when talking about “The Hunger Games,” the book she tried to have removed from her daughter's school. In fact, she's a big fan of it ..."

Read the full article

Unfit to Read?

The Hunger Games was challenged by parents at Jackson (Missouri) Middle School in 2009. "The novel, which contains violent scenes and themes, was ultimately removed from required reading lists at the school, though it remains on the library's shelves."

THE MISSOURIAN
July 20, 2012


"Sunshine requests for public records of book challenges were sent to all 566 Missouri school districts asking for all correspondence regarding book challenges since Jan. 1, 2008. Responses to the requests came in from 495 of the school districts. There were 51 titles challenged in 32 school districts, including one in Columbia. Many of the challenges had less to do with the overall content of a book but more to do with whether it was appropriate for certain age groups. Others argued that the books they were challenging were inconsistent with community values or that they contained language and references to behavior that conflicted with school conduct rules."

View entire article

BSC Library Hunger Games Display

Stop by the BSC Library and check out the hallway display created by Johanna Bjork and Carolyn Twingley.

Book Burning ... A Cautionary Tale

Some burn books because they want to keep others from reading them.  Some, like these fraternity brothers, burn books for another reason altogether.  Regardless of the reasons for it, book burning is serious business.  Check out this article from the June 22, 2012, issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education.

"Fraternity Brothers Not So Joyous After Book-Burning Celebration Torches House"

Some students celebrate their college graduations by lighting the candles on a cake. Others, like one recent group of Louisiana Tech University fraternity brothers, opt for a bigger bash—and learn hard lessons to boot.

The fraternity brothers in question reportedly celebrated the end of the year by lighting their textbooks on fire, and officials with the Ruston Police Department believe the flames sparked a blaze that burned down their house…and the apartment building next door.

John Chestnut, president of the university’s Pi Kappa Alpha chapter, told WAFB his fraternity brothers were “maybe doing an end of year celebration and burning some books or whatever, so we’ll look into that.”

Five students were in the house at the time of the fire, and all escaped unharmed. The firefighters weren’t so lucky: one suffered a broken pelvis jumping to safety, and another injured his knee. Both buildings were destroyed.

Hunger Games Debuts in China

June 22, 2012 - The Hunger Games debuted over the past week in China at number one on the box office chart. The film grossed an estimated 66.1 million yuan (8.2 million euros) over its first week, according to Ent Group.

For more details, read The Hunger Games in China.

Challenged!

Author Suzanne Collins' name has shown up on ALA's Most Frequently Challenged Authors of the 21st Century lists in 2010 and 2011. Evidently, The Hunger Games trilogy, first published in 2008, has struck a nerve.

Why have the books been challenged? 

• In New Hampshire, a parent asked the Goffstown School Board to remove the book from her daughter's class, claiming that it gave her 11-year-old nightmares and could numb other students to the effects of violence.  The parent made the request without having read the book herself.  The challenge was ultimately unsuccessful.  
• In 2011, The Hunger Games trilogy was #3 on the list of Top Ten Challenged Books by Year.  The reasons given were: anti-ethnic; anti-family; insensitivity; offensive language; occult/satanic; and violence.
• In 2010, The Hunger Games was #5 on the list of Top Ten Challenged Books by Year for these reasons: sexually explicit, unsuited to age group, and violence.

What do you think? Will we see more challenges in 2012?

Where In the World Is Panem?

From reading The Hunger Games, we learn that the story is set at some point in the future in Panem, which is basically what we once knew as the United States of America.  Still, we're not entirely sure of the outlines of Panem or the boundaries of its Districts.  What to do?

Problem solved!  Check out the maps of Panem from the My Hunger Games site, or try this one created by fans of The Hunger Games.

More Stories from Sherman Alexie Coming in October

A new collection of short stories by Sherman Alexie, author of the 2008 Campus Read selection The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian, will be released in October 2012.

The prepub alert in Library Journal (May 15, 2012) said, "PEN/Faulkner and National Book Award winner Alexie writes sculpted prose that lands like a good, hard punch; his stories, especially, are knockouts.  So this juicy colection of 15 of his best-known short fiction and 15 new pieces (which range in topic from donkey basketball leagues to dangerous wind turbines) should be a winner." 

The title of Alexie's new collection is Blasphemy: New and Selected Stories. 

The BSC Library has several titles by Sherman Alexie ... check them out!  We'll be ordering his new book, too.

The Hunger Games ... by the Numbers

The Hunger Games by the Numbers (as of March 19, 2012)

by Annie Schutte

The Hunger Games has had quite a journey since it first came out on September 14, 2008. From the humble beginnings of a 200,000-book first run, it has become one of the bestselling books in recent years, with sales growing exponentially over the past year as anticipation for the film has mounted. And early surveys for the movie are showing that the adaptations could be some of the largest grossing of all time, even rivaling the record-breaking Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings movie series. Even with all this buzz, some of the numbers are astounding.

Read on to find out everything you need to know about the books and movie, from how many movies there will be in the series to how much Jennifer Lawrence made for her role as Katniss to how long you’ll have to wait for the second movie to come out.

The Basics
142 minutes: The length of the movie.
4,000+: The number of screens that will show The Hunger Games on March 23rd.
$70-120 million: The amount that the movie is predicted to earn in its first weekend at the box office.
4: Number of movies they’re planning on making in The Hunger Games series; Mockingjay, following in the style of Harry Potter and Twilight, will be split into two movies.

Movie Buzz & Early Reviews
8 million: The number of times The Hunger Games trailer was viewed in the first 24 hours after being released on Nov 14, 2011.
83%: The portion of sales on Fandango.com that came from selling The Hunger Games tickets on February 22–the day they went on sale. This is the largest number of first-day sales in the website’s history.
2.8 million+: Number of fans that the movie has on its official Facebook page.
84%: Portion of moviegoers who say they have heard about this week’s The Hunger Games movie release.
61%: Portion of moviegoers who say they are interested in seeing the movie when it comes out.
8.3: The average critic rating for the movie on Rotten Tomatoes as of March 19.
73: Critic score out of 100 that the movie has on Metacritic as of March 19.

Filming
$78 million: The final budget for the Hunger Games movie after subsidies.
84 days: The approximate amount of time spent filming the movie in and around Asheville, North Carolina between May 23, 2011 and September 10, 2011.
1,200: The number of special-effects shots in the movie.
$500,000: Amount Jennifer Lawrence will make for the first movie before “escalators” if the movie does well.

The Books
200,000: The number of copies in the first print run of The Hunger Games.
4.3 million: The number of The Hunger Games series books sold in the United States in 2010.
9.2 million: The number of Hunger Games series books sold in the United States in 2011—more than double the number sold in 2010.
7.5 million+: The number of books sold in the United States just since the trailer was released on November 14, 2011.
23.5 million+: The total number of copies sold in the United States alone.
160+: The total number of weeks that The Hunger Games books have spent on the New York Times Bestseller list.
1, 2, 3: The spots filled by The Hunger Games, Catching Fire, and Mockingjay respectively on Amazon’s list of top-selling physical books and its list of top-selling Kindle books in the months of January and February (March numbers not yet released).
26: The number of languages that the books have been translated into.
5: The Hunger Games‘ ranking on the American Library Association’s list of most-frequently challenged books in 2010.

What’s Next?
609 days: The amount of time fans will have to wait until the second movie, Catching Fire, is released on November 22, 2013.

-- Reprinted from the YALSA's The Hub blog

Underland Chronicles by Suzanne Collins

If you want to read more books by Suzanne Collins, author of The Hunger Games, try her bestselling fantasy series, the Underland Chronicles.

• Book One - Gregor the Overlander
• Book Two - Gregor and the Prophecy of Bane
• Book Three - Gregor and the Curse of the Warmbloods
• Book Four - Gregor and the Marks of Secret
• Book Five - Gregor and the Code of Claw

All five books are available at the BSC Library. Check them out!

Chicken with Plums by Marjane Satrapi

In 2009-10, the Campus Read selection was The Complete Persepolis by Iranian writer Marjane Satrapi.  That book was made into the film Persepolis, which was also written by Satrapi.

Another book by Satrapi, Chicken with Plums, has been made into a film that will be theatrically released in August.  It was the big winner at last October's Abu Dhabi Film Festival, garnering the Best Narrative Film prize and a monetary award of $100,000.  Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud directed the film.

Check out and read the BSC Library's copy of the book, then watch the film here!

Hungry for More!

You've read the books (The Hunger Games, Catching Fire, Mockingjay) .... and now you're hungry for more!  

You can find all of these at the Bismarck State College Library:

• The Girl Who Was on Fire: Your Favorite Authors on Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games Trilogy / edited by Leah Wilson
• The Hunger Games: the Official Illustrated Movie Companion by Kate Egan
• The Hunger Games: Songs from District 12 and Beyond (CD) by Various Performers
• The Hunger Games Tribute Guide by Emily Seife
• The Unofficial Hunger Games Cookbook: from Lamb Stew to "Groosling" -- More than 150 Recipes Inspired by the Hunger Games Trilogy by Emily Ansara Baines
• The World of the Hunger Games by Kate Egan

If listening is your thing, we also have eAudiobook versions of the trilogy to download:

• The Hunger Games
• Catching Fire
• Mockingjay

You can always find good reading and good listening at the BSC Library.

Hunger Games (Movie) Reviews from Rotten Tomatoes

Rotten Tomatoes is a source for movies, movie reviews, critic scores, showtimes, and movie trailers.  Here's a look at what critics and audience members are saying about The Hunger Games. 

The Little Epic that Couldn't - One Film Reviewers View

Check out this movie review by Brandon Judell on Culture Catch.

Hunger Games (Film) Debut - March 23, 2012

According to a story in the March 26, 2012, issue of USA Today, "The Hunger Games thundered to the third-best debut in history this weekend with $155 million, launching a franchise that could challenge the Twilight series.  The film "exceeded most analysts' highest expectations and marked a huge opening for a movie that is not a sequel. The two films with bigger debuts are Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2 ($169.1 million) and The Dark Knight ($158 million), a sequel to Batman Begins." 

Lionsgate plans to release Part 2, Catching Fire on November 22, 2013.

The Hunger Games - 2012-13 Campus Read Selection

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins has been chosen as the Campus Read book for 2012-13.  Thanks for helping us make that decision by participating in the email and blog polls!

The Hunger Games is the first book in a trilogy about a not-too-distant future that is very bleak.  Every year in what was once North America, tributes from each of the 12 districts are chosen by lottery and summoned to the capitol to participate in the Hunger Games.  It is a fight to the death and there can only be one survivor. 

The other two books in the trilogy are Catching Fire and Mockingjay.  The books are page turners and tell a compelling story.  Once you start, you can hardly put them down!

There is also a movie version of The Hunger Games, which will be released on March 23.  It stars Jennifer Lawrence, Joshua Hutcherson, Liam Hemsworth, Woody Harrelson, Lenny Kravitz, Elizabeth Banks, Stanley Tucci, and Donald Sutherland.  

Film Noir Movie Marathon - Friday, January 27

Join us!  BSC students FREE with current BSC photo ID.

What should we read next year? Vote now!

We've narrowed down the choices for the 2012-13 Campus Read  to three and are looking for your votes!  Take the poll!  

• Downtown Owl by Chuck Klosterman - Chuck Klosterman grew up near Fargo, North Dakota. 
• Downtown Owl - NPR
• The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
• Hunger Games - Review - Time Magazine
• Hunger Games - Movie
• World War Z: an Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks (on order)