As we sit over a hardcover copy of Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, Will and I try to articulate what we love about this series and about The Hunger Games. It is difficult to express the emotionally charged relinquishing of reality and the fervor and flush that comes with truly inhabiting a fictional world.  “Just the idea of the book,” he shrugs, stumped. “Just the story.”

With imaginative and driving plots that are both similar and alien to your everyday world, in the really good books, the characters are rich and complicated, but when they are not, it doesn’t really matter.  They are doing, and you are reading as fast as you can.

Of course, one of the reasons you can read this fast is that the language doesn’t always delight your synapses or persuade you to kick off your shoes and stay awhile.  When I’m reading Collins’ writing, I’m not savoring a sentence like I do when I’m reading Michael Chabon.  The plainspoken pulse of The Hunger Games doesn’t beg a reread like the poetry of The God of Small Things, or set you still like a scene of Cormac McCarthy’s.  But I’m not reading Mockingjay for those reasons.

—Carolyn Ross