"Stay alive!" , "Eat Gelato!" and "Read books!"

That's the advice given in the Hunger Games, to stay alive. I like reading two, three books simultaneously. It can give you a headache though if not carefully picked up but usually all I need to care is to pick one book that is deep in nature, that forces you into questioning, reasoning which you can only read after dinner or during the weekends wrapped in a blanket with a cup of hot tea and another that is shallow but enough to keep you interested, the one you can read in metro, while waiting for your doctor's appointment or just to distract your tired mind.  Absolutely accidentally you can choose these books but yet you will still draw parallels, be amused by coincidences. 

This summer by chance I had two books to read simultaneously - "Eat, Pray, Love" by Elisabeth Gilbert and "How I became stupid" by Martin Page. It was not a planned choice - but surprisingly, the former came to be about "finding yourself" and the latter about "losing yourself". Interesting twist. It is as if you've just put two ingredients together and discovered completely a new taste which would not have happened otherwise. Cooking and reading can also have parallels, you know, if you see them. So, here is an advice. "Eat Gelato!" Gilbert was teaching me how to put your pieces back together after falling apart and get yourself into Italy not for seeking love but finding peace in enjoying food while Page would want me to consider the possibilities of being a sheep in the herd to see why "all sheep are happily ever herded". Elisabeth found peace in meditation and Page lost the peace he believed to be a turmoil deliberately only to be replaced by another one. 

So, "stay alive" Suzanne Collins advises everyone. "Stay alive and strong" I advice you. I have picked the Hunger Games trilogy in a combination with "Hopscotch" by Julio Cortazar. Cortazar makes me jump from chapter 8 to 29 and from 114 to 9. A game of words and battle of thoughts sprinkled with love and carelessness. I try to contemplate over each sentence as it is said to be a very intellectual piece of work but in the end I find myself rushing through lines impatiently seeking an advice to apply in my life. After all, don't we - fiction lovers - lose ourselves in the books to find our selves a newborn, changed, grown up book-loving-creatures? In between the "hopscotch games" I have been reading the "Hunger Games" trilogy everywhere, at work, in metro, at home to distract myself. Expectations. They can be so wrong, so different. I should never expect. Here is another advice - "Never expect". Thus I expected one thing from the Hunger Games but quite a different thing came out. But after all, seeing the colours or smelling the distant scents from Orwell's "1984" and Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451" - that is what tunes me into the Hunger Games. "Stay alive!" - the tune is playing constantly in my mind. "You love me, real or not real?"-"Real" - That is how the trilogy ends. From hunger to revolution, from revolution to love. From love to peace?

Any fiction is a reflection of reality no matter how distorted that reality might seem. Our fantasies feed on life. And then we read books and feed ourselves with the fantasies of the people who came before us. Endless cycle. Chicken and egg. Here is an advice. "Stay alive and read books".