[Note: the opinions in this post are my own!]

I wasn't supposed to like The Hunger Games. Dystopian YA? So not my thing. (On the other hand, contemporary YA? So obviously my thing.)

But everyone at my job was talking about the title before it came out in September 2008, and I thought, I'll give it a go. Two years and one sequel later, I count The Hunger Games trilogy as a lesson on how to be a good reader: mute the expectations, calm the naysaying, and give the story a fighting chance.

Today on OOM we announced the title and cover of the third and final book in the HG trilogy, and now it's inescapable: fully 1/3 of my Twitter feed today was probably Mockingjay related, and even places like EW.com are talking about.

It's funny, though; Panem, the country Suzanne Collins created in The Hunger Games, is one of those worlds where I actually ache upon accessing. Like, it physically hurts me to read these books. I read an advance copy of book 2, Catching Fire, so feverishly and so quickly that I barely remember the intricacies of the plot--I just remember the emotions, and that it gripped me so tightly I almost couldn't breathe, and I get the coilings of a knot in my stomach when I think about what's in store for me with Mockingjay. Because I am telling you, a la Jennifer Hudson, that I am not going into a fictional world where Katniss doesn't survive. I fear I physically could not handle it.

I can't think of any other book or series where I flipped from not wanting to read it so assuredly to not being able to imagine living a life in which I hadn't read it, other than The Hunger Games.