Just pointers to two things that I wrote, which are not unrelated.

The first is a piece about the Hunger Games books, the first of which came out from Scholastic last fall. There was a lot of buzz about them, and I picked the first one up … and then put it down again. It was all too grim and earnest and dystopic. And frankly it was a little girly.

Then — because a thousand people shrieked at me about how awesome it was — I picked up The Hunger Games again. And I fell down the rabbit hole. I think it was around about the part where they dumped the heroine into a huge arena with 23 other kids and a heap of weapons and supplies, and they started killing each other.