Bookish Thoughts

This book was greatly redeemed by it's thoroughly stunning ending. It came out of nowhere and was not at all how I expected this book to wrap up. But it was so fitting and perfect that I ended this book feeling much better about it than I had been while I was reading it. The truth is that I struggled with this book a bit. Which has a lot to do with my lack of interest in contamination stories in general. It's not that I dislike them, but they aren't my go-to. They have to be really special for me to get excited about them (as opposed to vampires, where I am all in, regardless of the quality of the story-telling). And there were some really great things in this book. But there were some not-great things that served to drag it down. First, the bad. It mostly comes down to the tense. This book is written in the present tense, with flash backs happening in the past tense. Which makes sense when you say it like that. Except that most books are written in the past tense with ...

David Wong's  This Book is Full of Spiders  is technically a sequel to  John Dies at the End . I haven't read the first one, but I really don't think you need to. In fact, the first page of the spider book tells the reader to just ignore everything that happened in the first book. The only confusing bit was that John was in this book, alive and kicking and drinking way too much. So he probably didn't actually die, which makes that first title rather misleading. The second title, though, is not in any way misleading. This book is all about spiders. Many-legged, alien parasites that zombify their victims while they breed and search for new victims. The book plays out like a typical zombie narrative in three acts. The first act counts down to the outbreak, the second to a massacre, and the third to a last-ditch effort to contain the threat by bombing an entire town off the map. Like you do. Our heroes, David, John, David's girlfriend Amy, and her dog Molly try thei...

I ended up liking Blackout , the third and final book in Mira Grant's Newsflesh  trilogy, much better than Deadline . But still not as much as Feed . I think this is going to end up being one of those trilogies where I just ignore the existence of the second and third books. Like His Dark Materials . I am so glad George was back for this book. I actually considered skipping all of Shaun's chapters and just reading George's. But I decided I'd probably miss too much of the story that way. George is ultimately what kept me going through this trilogy. The science is unbelievable to a point that I ended up writing it off as magic so I could accept the story on its own merits. I mean, clones of dead people being nearly exact matches of the people they're cloned from? Memories and everything? Also sexually transmitted immunities? (That is what Grant was getting at with Shaun, right?) Anyway, Grant did a decent job expanding the conspiracy beyond the first ...

Deadline , the second book in Mira Grant's  Newsflesh  trilogy and sequel to  Feed , was a really difficult book to get through. I actually walked away from it for a couple of weeks because I had so many issues with the main character. But the plot eventually pulled me back and I actually read the last half of the book pretty quickly (and only partly because I have so much time on my hands right now). Shaun takes over the narration of this book after his sister dies at the end of  Feed . While I liked him fine in the first book, being inside his head destroyed most of my goodwill. It's quickly revealed that George's death has driven Shaun insane. He has vivid hallucinations that she's talking to him and he has violent tendencies, striking out at his employees and friends seemingly at random. I don't think these traits would bother me so much except that Shaun recognizes them both as negative things that are driving away his friends and proceeds to do absolutely ...

I remember Max Brooks' World War Z  being immensely popular at one point in college. Since one of the big battles in the book takes place at the college I went to (or rather, the college across the street), I just chalked it up to that. And since I wasn't much interested in zombies at that point in my life, I made no real effort to read the book myself. But then my book club chose it for the month of January, so I gave it a try. World War Z  isn't at all what I was expecting. The scope is massive, actually covering the entire world. There's a section devoted to the front in the United States, but there's also sections about how the plague started in China and the civil war it sparked there, Russia's attempts to maintain control of the military, Israel's decision to lock their borders, a nuclear war between Iran and Pakistan, the emergence of Cuba as a new economic superpower, the complete disappearance of North Korea, and the evacuation of Ja...

Mira Grant's Countdown is a novella rather than a proper novel. It's really short. Short enough that I had no problem reading it on my phone. Grant wrote it as a prequel to Feed , and released it in the month leading up to Feed 's sequel, Deadline . Countdown is a prequel, detailing the events that led to the zombie apocalypse and setting the stage for Feed. Countdown relies pretty heavily on dramatic irony. If you've read Feed , you know exactly how and when the zombie rising happens. You're passingly familiar with many of these characters and already know their fates. I think Grant does a good job of using that to ramp up the tension in this book. If you enjoyed Feed (which you should definitely read), give Countdown a try. My only complaint is that it's only available as an e-book (hence my reading it on my phone). I can't put it on my shelf with the rest of the series.

Feed is the first book of the Newsflesh trilogy written by Seanan McGuire under the pen name Mira Grant. The title is a clever double-play on the word. It refers to both the desire of zombies to feast on human flesh and the RSS feeds that many people get their news from, both today and in the near-future of the novel. This book takes place 26 years after the zombie apocalypse. Both sides have survived the initial uprising of the zombies and have managed to find a sort of equilibrium in which they can both continue to live. The main character, George, and her brother, Shaun, are bloggers who report on the zombie situation near their northern California home. But then they get their big break, following the presidential campaign of Senator Ryman, and take off on the road with their friend Buffy. Grant creates a world that is staggering in it's detail. She's thought through security protocol (zombie tests at every door), diet changes (many people have chos...