I just finished Mockingjay, the last book in the Hunger Games series. While I really enjoyed the whole series, I've got to say the violence in the final book got to be a bit much for me. Lately, my tolerance level for violence in books, movies and TV shows has become really low. I quit watching Hawaii Five-0 several episodes ago after refusing to sit through a lengthy torture scene. Same thing with NCIS: Los Angeles. I just don't have the stomach for it anymore -- if I ever did.But what about books? For me, books are actually more affecting than movies or TV. For some reason, scenes from a book or story can really stick with me. One particularly disturbing scene I read in an Ellery Queen magazine over 40 years ago can still haunt me. I wish I had never read it, and that's the problem. Once you've read something it's there in your mind, like it or not.
My book discussion group buddies are well aware of my squeamishness about graphic violence. But it's not always easy to determine just which books I'll be unable to face. Last year, one of our choices was Little Bee by Chris Cleave. Initially, I loved Little Bee's voice and the story looked promising. But when we got to the beach scene in Africa, I just couldn't go there. I knew it was going to be really bad -- and my friends confirmed that it was. So I skipped the rest of the book. Another book that I found really disturbing, but that the whole world seemed to love, was The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini. I only got part way into the book and realized I couldn't read it. My friend convinced me to skip a little ahead and try again. Unfortunately, that took me to the scene in the stadium -- those of you who have read it will probably recall the scene. Nope, not gonna finish that one.
When friends heard I was reading The Hunger Games, they were surprised. They thought it might be too violent for me. But I actually enjoyed the first two books. In the last book, the body count went up too much, not to mention the cruelty factor. Another book that should have disturbed me greatly but didn't was The Bone People by Keri Hulme, the 1985 Booker Prize winner. The story deals with child abuse, but the book is about so much more than that. I'm not sure, though, why I was able to read this book and not others. I think that the cruelty factor plays a big part. What about you? Do you have a violence tolerance level? Would you like to have violence ratings on books, like we have for movies?
