Welcome to Hunger Games month at HogwartsProfessor.com! Let’s go shopping!

Yesterday I shared fourteen ‘companion books’ put out as accessories for the Panem faithful to enjoy with the movie. Today I think I can document that The Hunger Games has achieved ‘Shared Text’ status. Not only are evangelists writing The Gospel According To Katniss tracts, they’re putting out tee-shirts, which, in order to be understood as invitations to Christ, require no little familiarity with the Katniss Everdeen Trilogy. Hat tip to Eric for this find!

In case you cannot make out the messages —

Hunger For God... His Spirit Will Fill You! May You Ever Be in God’s Favor!

The Hunger Remains… For Those Without Jesus — Blessed are those who hunger now for you shall be satisfied (Luke)

Go ahead and walk on over to Amazon’s ‘Best Seller’s Page.’ At the time of this writing, the world’s biggest bookseller — with over six million titles available for your purchase if their marketing is to be believed (and why doubt it?) — the top three books are The Hunger Games trilogy. Number Five is the set package of the same books and number fifteen is the hardcover of the first book (I suspect it would be listed higher, even at *1, except for the publication of the trade paperback). The trilogy and set hold the same top five positions in Goliath’s list of Best Sellers of 2012.

There hasn’t been this kind of chart dominance since Harry Potter and Twilight, and, as Harry’s adventures were all published before the world went Kindle mad (hence PotterMore, etc.), The Hunger Games have set records there Harry won’t touch soon. Ms. Collins is officially Kindle’s Best Selling author. Ever. The Kindle editions of the trilogy are also numbers one, two, and three in the Kindle store.

Scholastic and other book sellers are paying attention and they’re doing everything possible to put out ancillary guides to the books for Hunger Games readers wanting more and some schlock for movie viewers to carry around and look out before the film gets out to the Districts Friday. Below the jump I list the first fourteen titles out of the gate in the order of their Amazon rank, from literary guides to cookbooks (two of those). Sadly, only the Scholastic ‘companion pieces’ are listed in the Amazon Hunger Games Store, so this list may be incomplete. Please share any others you have seen or found listed elsewhere! [Read more…]

Watching this interview, no, Miss Lawrence and the world she lives in are a moon shot away from Appalachia’s Seam and the hard-core survivor that is the heroine of The Hunger Games. But the back story of the actress and how she came to play Katniss is a stunner. She actually hails from Kentucky, coal country.

Go to Mockingjay.Net for the second and third parts of this Hollywood Access interview, if you must. I confess my first response to it was thinking up three snarky questions for the actress that no one has asked her, to my knowledge: [Read more…]

The most recent issue of AARP’s magazine, one of the country’s leading journals in terms of subscriptions and reader numbers, features The Hunger Games as a wonderful read — and one that senior readers needn’t be embarrassed by, even though it is officially “teen lit.” From Great Books for Any Age: Why the best new fiction for adults is written for teens (originally ’60 Going on 16′ — hat tip to Deborah!):

Hungry for a deep, dark, addictively absorbing novel? Read The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. The gripping story, a post-apocalyptic tale about a teenage girl who fights to survive lethal games televised for sport, has spent more than three years on The New York Times best-seller list, and the movie adaptation opens March 23.

The catch: It’s teen lit.

[Read more…]

A very good friend from Marine Corps years in Okinawa, Dr. Arthur Remillard, now teaches Religious Studies at St. Francis University. In my regular correspondence with him, I shared my interest in The Hunger Games; he picked up the first novel in the series  as an impulse buy at an airport. He has since shared his thoughts on the lead-off book and I have his permission to share them here as a launchpad to my speculations about the religious faith implicit to the Everdeen Saga:

About the book… I can see why you are jumping on this.  In terms of style, the story moves swiftly and the author has a unique gift in her ability to use words to create vivid scenes, yet keep the story moving at the same time.  And it is thoughtful enough that I didn’t feel stupider (is that a word?) for having read it.  The Christian imagery pretty much hit me in the forehead like a hammer.  Easter and Pentecost symbolism in no short supply, with bread and fire images on every other page.  I wonder if the author is a Methodist, or wrote with Methodist influence.  The flame and the cross matched by the male and female lead… Wesley’s notion of “sanctifying grace” appearing in the slow awareness that winning the game was merely a prelude to a more complicated battle ahead.  Etc.

[Read more…]