Control

If you already have a video game, why do you have to buy an updated version of it every year? That is the question of the hour, as my husband and my brother sit in front of me pushing buttons, yelling at the TV, and completely ignoring me. Madden 2010. You have overtaken my living room.

So. As my reading obsession continues, I just finished Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. I can't get over it. I can't stop thinking about it. And I should have done this before I started reading it, but this morning I put the sequel to it, Catching Fire, on hold at the library. Hopefully the 24 people ahead of me read quickly...

I don't want to give a single thing away, but the main theme of the book has been overtaking my thoughts this week as I raced through the chapters. What do you think we crave the most? In general? What do you think gives even the most faithless, restless or bored among us a feeling of meaning? What are we most angry about when it's taken from us? I think maybe It's control. You can call it different things or characterize it differently - you can call it money, or power or good looks or whatever, but I'm confident I could always convince you that it comes back to some form of control. Isn't that weird about us?

In that way I keep finding these really interesting threads between all the books I've been reading lately. Hunger Games is about control being stolen. The Secret Life of Bees is about how you get along without it, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is about a people who have too much of it, The Shack is about how the desire for it distances us from God, and Mere Christianity offers an explanation for both why we want it in the first place and why, ironically, we would actually be freer if we didn't have it (and the One who did was God, of course; not other men).

I guess I could explore the topic a little more but I don't know what I'd say. I'm certainly finding, the more I think about it, that the situations in my life that leave me the most anxious are ones where I am wrestling with some translation of a loss of control. I don't know that that's bad, though, unless I am keeping something from God. And maybe I am. I don't know. But it's an interesting way of looking at the world; to imagine us all just scrambling around trying to control everything. It's easier to understand why some people act the way they do, I suppose.

I guess I'll just keep mulling this over. Maybe I'll come to some blog-worthy conclusion soon. For now though, I'm going to take control of the next hour of my life and start the second book in the Stieg Larsson series. Let's see what Salander's up to...