I finally picked this book up after seeing the movie, because i loved the movie and friends told me that i had to read the books. Unfortunately, seeing the movie first pretty much ruined the suspense of the book for me, but i'm still glad i took the plunge. 
 When i first heard of the Hunger Games series, i said i would never read the books because the premise horrified me too much. But i had a lot of time to think about it before seeing the movie, and by now i'm desensitized enough that kids killing each other doesn't really bother me. It's not exactly a first; there's Ender's Game, for example, and all the YA Star Wars novels i read as a teen. The Hunger Games story isn't all that great a departure from the crap that has always surrounded me in books and movies, it's just a tiny bit more realistic. 
 I expected the book to be more graphically violent than the movie because of the way people reacted to it. Not the case. In fact i would say that the movie was a more violent, although the book is more gruesome in terms of how wounds are depcited. I realize now that one of the main things that horrified people about the book was the situation that Katniss ends up in at the end of the book. Take everything that sucked about being sixteen and multiply it by 100, and you'll start to get an idea of what she must be feeling. 
 I was hoping that Hunger Games was written with more skill, considering how much people adore it. The level of writing works as a first-person account by a sixteen-year-old, but i think this is a good enough story that i wish Suzanne Collins had taken more time to draw us into the story. Let us see and smell and feel everything rather than just whisking us through the action. The book has its moments where the pain and fear is almost palpable, but for the most part it just reads like someone telling a long story. 
 All in all, i definitely enjoyed reading the book. I breezed through it in a few days and immediately bought the next one. It remains to be seen whether this is a meaningful story or just a fleeting piece of entertainment, but i suspect Collins has something pretty impactful up her sleeve.