Hunger Games Hysteria

Laura Beth Payne, One Book co-chair and MTSU English professor, and Jennifer Smith, United Way, dressed as members of Cinna's styling team

With The Hunger Games’ highly-anticipated premiere behind us (with a record-shattering opening weekend to boot) and Read To Succeed’s One Book year coming to a close, hysteria for the young-adult novel might be dying down. For now, anyway.

But residents of Rutherford County have been abuzz about Katniss Everdeen and her bow and arrow for months. Hundreds of fans gathered at Linebaugh Library the night before the film’s midnight premiere decked out as their favorite characters. Local literacy nonprofit Read To Succeed—along with Greenhouse Ministries, United Way and Barnes & Noble—has been promoting The Hunger Games for its One Book Community Read, an annual initiative that encourages the community to read a chosen book.

And it must have paid off: Murfreesboro-fans of The Hunger Games are among the most fervent in the country. Amazon just released a list of the top 20 cities with Hunger Games hysteria, and Murfreesboro landed the number 15 spot, beating out Portland, Ore., and Vancouver, Wash.

In case you’ve missed the madness, The Hunger Games is a young-adult dystopian tale about a totalitarian state called Panem that has risen from the postwar ashes of North America. Each year, a boy and a girl between the ages of 12 to 18 are chosen from each Panem district to compete in the Hunger Games, a gladiatorial competition in which only one teen can survive. This battle is televised and played throughout all of Panem, forcing its residents to watch with a mix of grisly fascination and tyrannical obligation.

It’s a bloody, at times gruesome, tale wrought with messages about our culture’s fascination with reality television, our desensitization to violence and the danger of an all-too-powerful government. And from its intended young-adult audience to their parents and grandparents, we can’t stop reading.

So why are the people of Murfreesboro—who would live within Katniss’s own District 12 in the futuristic Panem—especially enamored with the book? Read To Succeed One Book Co-Chair Kory Wells says she thinks our location might have something to do with it.

Jonathan Parris' Hunger Games-inspired costumes on display at Linebaugh Library.

“The principal characters in The Hunger Games are from District 12, which is the poorest region of the country located in what we now call Appalachia,” Wells says. “As Rutherford County was once the rural South and is situated just west of the Appalachian region, many of our residents have roots in those areas and may have firsthand or ancestral knowledge of the landscape and hardscrabble life described.”

Linebaugh librarian Carol Ghattas says she thinks our community’s fascination with the book is partly thanks to its ability to cross generational boundaries. Parents and grandparents in Murfreesboro and beyond, Ghattas says, are just looking for some common ground with their teenagers.

“Having a book that deals with hard issues gives [parents] something to grasp onto in conversation with their kids,” Ghattas says.

One Book Co-chair and MTSU English Professor Laura Beth Payne attributes some of the book’s local success to its appeal to men and women.

“I get the sense that Murfreesboro readers chose The Hunger Games because it provides substantial ideas to consider as well as a gripping story that readers can care about,” Payne says. “We have had so many adult men thank us for choosing a book that they finally enjoyed reading. Male students in my English classes tell me that they think Katniss is awesome—not a wimpy girl—and they like the action and ideas.”

Murfreesboro’s ranking in amazon.com’s top 20 might be, in part, thanks to Read To Succeed’s One Book.

Ingram Content Group donated 200 copies of the books to Read To Succeed to distribute throughout Rutherford County for One Book. These books were marked with stickers instructing the reader to share it with someone else after they finished. The number of people introduced to Katniss through Read To Succeed’s Book Crossing is hard to estimate, but even these readers weren’t an influence on amazon.com’s list.

“Certainly part of our ranking is coincidence,” says Michelle Palmer, One Book committee member, “because The Hunger Games phenomenon had just reached its peak during our One Book season. However, there’s no denying that per capita, Murfreesboro beat out larger cities. We’ve heard that as many as four generations here have read and discussed the book as a family.”

Consider that mission accomplished.