Book 11 is now in the bag. I finished World War Z today. I enjoyed the Zombie Survival Guide (also by Max Brooks), but it was a little bit boring and almost too serious. Don’t get me wrong, it was funny because of the serious tone that it took, but that also meant that it was a little dry at times.
Not so with World War Z. That book was great, one of the best I’ve read so far this year…but it wasn’t because I was laughing throughout. Don’t get me wrong, it did have a few comical parts interspersed throughout, but this telling of the Zombie war, which lasted a full decade and nearly destroyed the world was a hodgepodge of first person recollections of events.
It had some really disturbing parts to it, which as much as you want to say go against human nature, show what we might really be like if we were faced with extinction. Its not something to be proud of, but at the same time shows our will to survive. Other parts were incredibly sad…like Old Yeller being taken out back with the shotgun sad…which is really a pretty apt analogy.
I’m not very long out of the book, maybe an hour at this point, and as I think about it more, the book kind of shows how we might have gotten through a nuclear winter (to an extent…not as much ecological damage, but still a considerable amount) or an endemic of bird flu if it ever rose to the levels that we’re always told we are on the brink of. It showed some of the best, and some of the worst sides of humanity, and how it takes a little of both to get through some situations.
Time to find book 12 for the year now. I’ve already lent this book out, but if you’d like to borrow it, let me know and I’ll put you on the list.
11 down, 38 to go.
1 response so far ↓
1 Audrey // Feb 19, 2008 at 6:52 pm
I’m glad you liked World War Z! I read it last year and absolutely loved it, even though zombies aren’t really “my thing.” I liked it for a lot of the same reasons you did. The whole first-person perspective was done very well and made it all very believable.
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