Show The Hunger Games Movie!

Through the month of October, the Hayden Library was involved with our area-wide program called North Idaho Reads, and one of the programs we got to do was show The Hunger Games movie.

North Idaho Reads was a collaboration between Community Library Network, Coeur d' Alene Public Library, East Bonner County Library District and West Bonner Library District to promote one book (Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury), and then offer programs to support people talking about it.

Fahrenheit 451 is a classic dystopian novel, so when our committee considered what kind of programs we could offer, we thought a Dystopian Movie Festival would be really cool. So, we made sure all the libraries had a projector and a DVD player or compatible computer, and showed some movies =D

The Hayden Library chose to show Fahrenheit 451, Children of Men, Serenity, and then finally The Hunger Games. While I don't have any pictures (I'll make sure I do that next time), we decorated the Bookmobile garage with rugs, tables, and Christmas lights, and made it feel like a movie theater.

In addition to watching the movie, we ordered some pizza afterwards and chatted about what we thought about the movie, how it compared to the book, and what other dystopian stories we had heard.

Obviously, The Hunger Games is under copyright protection, so to legally showed it, we purchased a license from Movie Licensing USA, which is also going to let us show The Amazing Spider-Man in December. I'm stoked already!

Fahrenheit 451: Burn Their Ideas Away

Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451: The Authorized Adaptation by Tim Hamilton

Why did I read it?

North Idaho Reads is a series of events coming up this Fall. We'll be having a film festival, banned music, and a futurist all centering around one book: Fahrenheit 451. Originally written in 1953, Fahrenheit 451 was recently adapted into a graphic novel, and I thought I'd check out what this version had to offer.

What happened?

Guy Montag is a fireman, which means he starts fires for a living. Might seem a little bit backwards, but with perfectly fireproof houses, accidental fires don't happen; only intentional ones do. Why would they start fires? To eliminate books.

From our time, society continued to move faster and faster until reading a novel just wasn't desirable anymore. Watching a virtual world on your living room wall was much more interesting and made you much happier. Books became a burden. They confused people and made them sad. So, people decided by themselves that they didn't want books anymore, and firemen changed their jobs from stopping fires to starting them.

Starting fires is all Guy has ever known, but when a peculiar girl talks to him about taking life slow, and an old woman would rather burn than let go of her books, Guy starts to think that their might be something to those countless novels he put to the flame.

What did I like or not like?

Obviously, Dystopian novels are huge right now, and Fahrenheit 451 was one of the very first ones. It tells a thought-provoking tale of what might happen if we just lived for pleasure, and let go of reading and thinking for ourselves. The style of the graphic novel is rough, with a limited but vibrant color palette, and it was very interesting to read and take in.

Once again, I'm not sure if Dystopian novels are meant to be enjoyed per se, as they often portray dark and dangerous futures, but it was very interesting and worth reading.