The Hunger Games Trilogy

Panem keeps twelve districts in line by making each of them send two children a year to a televised fight to the death, and Katniss Everdeen volunteers in her sister’s place. The trilogy is less interested in the arena than in what follows it — the second and third volumes are mostly about how a rebellion manufactures a symbol and what that costs the person being used as one.

It is the one contemporary young-adult title in this stretch of the list, and the lowest Lexile in it at 810.

Context: Suzanne Collins (born 1962) wrote for children’s television before the Underland Chronicles and The Hunger Games. The trilogy sold in the tens of millions and was adapted into four films.

Connections

• Suzanne Collins — the author.
• Dystopia — the genre it revived for a generation of readers.
• Propaganda — the actual subject of the second and third volumes.
• Literature