Next on the reading list, Goodnight Moon?

I finished the Hunger Games series last night, reading the entire trilogy in about 3 days. This makes me nervous. Very nervous.

I couldn't put the books down. They were so captivatingly haunting. (I did not like the ending, if anyone’s interested.) I do have a tendency to get very involved in books I'm reading and even particular movies (let's be real, I also think I pretty much am Lorelei Gilmore), and this book pulled me in to the point, even, of making me afraid to go to sleep myself, in danger of slipping into the same nightmares that tortured the main characters. Of course, they were remembering the horrific deaths of their friends and the devastating roles they played in someone else's manipulation. I'm not really sure what types of tragedies I'm afraid of recalling from my own life—earlier in the day, they didn't have brown rice when I went to Chipotle?

I had a similarly enraptured experience in reading the Harry Potter series, I'm embarrassed to admit. It was a begrudging rapture, but enrapt I did become.

It all started when the fifth book came out. I lived with two very intelligent, well read and mature young women when the fifth book in the Harry Potter series was published. They each had pre-ordered their copy as soon as they could and were on pins and needles waiting for the day to come when the books would arrive. When that day finally came, they were beside themselves with giddiness. None of us could leave the apartment in fear that we’d miss the delivery. I was sent down to the lobby of the building several times throughout the day to check to see if the FedEx man had come and had just not buzzed up. In fact, that day FedEx was very busy. I saw three different FedEx men make trips to our building, each with a truckload of the specially marked Harry Potter boxes from Amazon. They told me it was a crazy, crazy day for them.

Now, until this day, I had made fun of all the Potterheads. I mean, seriously, these are children’s books that people were getting wild about! But, it started to gnaw on me, watching two of my best friends and some of the smartest people I know bouncing around our apartment in anticipation and excitement like I’d never seen out of them, that maybe there really was something to the books, so I picked them up and was instantly hooked. I would even ditch out of happy hours early to go home and read Harry Potter. Ditching happy hour! Me!! That’s how you know things have just gotten serious!

So, as you can see, I have a very severe problem on my hands. My enjoyment of these young adult series has been insatiable. I liked reading them more than any adult series besides Philippa Gregory’s historical fiction books about King Henry VIII's court.

This can only be the beginning of a slippery, slippery slope. It’s a matter of time before I'm reading nothing but choose-your-own-adventure books and then dissolving into a reading list devoid of anything but pop-up books!

I need to get my hands on a very intellectual, non-fiction book, post-haste!