Puzzlers Welcome!

Stop by the BSC Library and add a piece to The Hunger Games jigsaw puzzle!

Hunger Games Book Covers

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

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!

 

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)

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

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.

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

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.  

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)