The Hunger Games for Grown Ups

I love The Hunger Games.  Everyone who has read The Hunger Games loves The Hunger Games.  But typically, I don't really love YA fiction.  I don't think of myself as much of a book snob, but while I've read some wonderful YA books (Harry Potter, anyone?), frequently the writing in YA literature is a little juvenile for my taste and I just tend to gravitate more toward books written specifically for adults.  Even as much as I loved The Hunger Games series, there were parts where the writing really grated and I was reminded that as mature and fascinating as the storyline was, in the end I was reading a book that was written and published for readers 15 years younger than me.

So, while I've seen plenty of lists going around of books that are similar to The Hunger Games, so far, each of those lists have been targeted toward YA series, and I'm just not too interested.  So, I thought I would offer up some of my suggestions for books that are similar to the series, and maybe some of you other voracious readers will have some more ideas to add in the comments section.

The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood
Amazon Description: In the world of the near future, who will control women's bodies?

Offred is a Handmaid in the Republic of Gilead. She may leave the home of the Commander and his wife once a day to walk to food markets whose signs are now pictures instead of words because women are no longer allowed to read. She must lie on her back once a month and pray that the Commander makes her pregnant, because in an age of declining births, Offred and the other Handmaids are only valued if their ovaries are viable.

Offred can remember the days before, when she lived and made love with her husband Luke; when she played with and protected her daughter; when she had a job, money of her own, and access to knowledge. But all of that is gone now....

Funny, unexpected, horrifying, and altogether convincing, The Handmaid's Tale is at once scathing satire, dire warning, and tour de force. 

This book was incredibly impactful to me, in particular because as I was reading it, I was going through the process of being diagnosed with infertility.  I think, even as our culture has evolved so much since the beginning of our time on Earth, there is still a huge amount of importance placed on a woman's ability to bear children.  The thought of living in a world where my life literally depended on my fertility was horrifying.  Not to mention, a world where a woman's body is controlled by the government... certainly a timely topic in the upcoming election...

The Road, Cormac McCarthy
Amazon Description:  The searing, postapocalyptic novel destined to become Cormac McCarthy's masterpiece.  A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don't know what, if anything, awaits them there.

They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food-—and each other.  The Road is the profoundly moving story of a journey. It boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which the father and his son, "each the other's world entire," are sustained by love.

Awesome in the totality of its vision, it is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation.

Although you never discover what happened to raze the entire world, although you aren't quite sure exactly who "the bad guys" are, although this book is simply about a father and son struggling to make their way down a road toward what they hope will be safety, it is incredibly touching, and beautiful and horrifying.  Especially with the 2012 "apocalypse" impending, the thought of what might happen should the world end has been at the forefront of pop culture for years now.  But even more frightening is the thought of what should happen if the world ends... but you continue to live.

Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro
Amazon Description: All children should believe they are special. But the students of Hailsham, an elite school in the English countryside, are so special that visitors shun them, and only by rumor and the occasional fleeting remark by a teacher do they discover their unconventional origins and strange destiny. Kazuo Ishiguro's sixth novel, Never Let Me Go, is a masterpiece of indirection. Like the students of Hailsham, readers are "told but not told" what is going on and should be allowed to discover the secrets of Hailsham and the truth about these children on their own.

Offsetting the bizarreness of these revelations is the placid, measured voice of the narrator, Kathy H., a 31-year-old Hailsham alumna who, at the close of the 1990s, is consciously ending one phase of her life and beginning another. She is in a reflective mood, and recounts not only her childhood memories, but her quest in adulthood to find out more about Hailsham and the idealistic women who ran it. Although often poignant, Kathy's matter-of-fact narration blunts the sharper emotional effects you might expect in a novel that deals with illness, self-sacrifice, and the severe restriction of personal freedoms. As in Ishiguro's best-known work, The Remains of the Day, only after closing the book do you absorb the magnitude of what his characters endure.

While this book is set in a world that will make you question your own ethics and survival instincts, what is truly interesting is that it is more about the people who make up that world than the science fiction elements at play.  The characters' plights are moving and their personalities and relationships drawn in such great detail, that you often forget you're reading a book about a world so far removed from our own, until a jarring and disturbing reminder is dropped casually into the narrative.

Now, I should caution you, these books aren't all set in an Arena where teenagers are fighting to the death, and there's not always a love triangle involved, but they are all set in a dystopian universe and give you that deliciously creepstastic feeling of "what if".

Comments

[Molly]

Haven't read the Road yet, but Handmaid's Tale & Bever Let me Go are two of my favorites. What a great way to categorize them! You're so right.

[Terri]

Thanks, Angela! I think I will add some of these to my list.

[margaret]

Never Let You Go is on my shelf of "to be reads." Handmaid's Tale has been recommended before (and seems quite pertinent in this political climate). Thanks for reminding me to read them.

I did love The Hunger Games and Harry Potter, but I haven't gotten totally sucked in by some other >coughcough< YA books that have been cycling around. The story has to be pretty compelling to hook me in--and Hunger Games certainly was that.

[Christie]

Have you read The Night Circus yet? It's a fight to the death kind of story set on the stage of a very unusual circus, but the writing was beautiful (and not like YA fiction at all). I felt like I was floating through a dream the whole time I was reading it. It's strange and mysterious, and I loved it from cover to cover. It makes me sad just thinking that I've finished it and there isn't any more of it to read!

[Kate P]

Interesting list! If you consider Stalinist Russia a bit dystopian and removed from our culture, Between Shades of Gray by Ruta Sepetys is a compelling historical fiction read. (Sorry it's considered YA but it's an older-teen kind for sure.)

I really wanted to like The Night Circus but it was a bit drawn out for me, and then the ending (which felt predictable) left me flat.

[Thoughts Appear]

I have to alternate reading YA books with more adult books.

It really bothered me that I didn't know the cause in The Road.

[Elle Sees]

nver let me go is on my bookshelf right now!!! need to read it.

[Erin @ The Speckled Palate]

Ever since we had a unit in my ninth grade English class on dystopian universes/societies, I've been a big fan of reading this kind of book. I've never read any of these, but I look forward to picking them up, especially since someone else (who, I cannot remember right now) recommended The Road to me, too.

Thanks for the reading recommendations, lady! What else have you been reading recently?

[Elizabeth]

Thanks for this list! I just reread The Handmaid's Tale--oof. I'll have to take a look at the other two soon.