It's the End of the World as we Know it!

World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks

What an intriguing pick for Book Club this was. When Lydia announced her book choice, many members moaned, while I rejoiced. I had not heard of this book before, but it sparked my interest. With all of the women of book club being so different, it’s fun to jump into new genres and read books that I would have not known about without one of my fellow book-clubbers pointing it out. After all of that rejoicing I did at book club some months ago, I guess I should just throw it out there and confess that I didn’t enjoy this book as much as I thought I would.

As an oral history of the Zombie war, the entire book was reports of survivors from around the world. These personal stories made up how the audience learned what happened during the war. The issue I had with the way the book was written was that the author/interviewer did not return to the reports from earlier sections. Each section had new people and we did not learn about how stories ended until the last couple of pages. These goodbyes were from some of the survivors that were interviewed in preceding sections and were not enough to appease me.

There were times when the book was a little slow. It did not take me a long time to finish the book, but when I put it down, it was difficult to pick it back up. It was such a depressing subject matter, who wants to read about the end of the world as we know it? I mean the whole earth is decimated by this horde of our loved ones and friends. These monsters aren’t faceless creatures (well unless his face was eaten off by his attacker); these are the neighbors of the victims of this war. Even though the stories do not go into details of people being attacked by someone they knew before they were infected, I can only imagine that it happened, and often.

Overall it was an interesting plot and was executed well. That being said, I had to wonder if the zombies were really some political propaganda instead of the living dead. Like some ploy to get the reader to recycle more or some other world issue that is heavy on the author’s heart. Maybe not, maybe it is actually about the walking dead or Zack. On a completely different note, I will probably not go watch this movie, December 21, 2012; I will probably not be at the movie theater waiting in line for the midnight show to watch Brad Pitt take on the undead. I can use my imagination and picture how this movie will probably be very scary. Even though what I’m about to say is very contradictory to the usual, I could leave my imagination at bay while reading this horror book because this book was about people surviving and not really about zombies. I would usually say that the opposite is true that reading is more alive than screen, but I think actually watching the zombies on the big screen would be too much for me to handle. We’ll see…

I think I’m going to take my friend Josh’s advice and read something happy now. This book was a little depressing. Anyone else read this book? If so, what did you think?