I just got done rereading World War Zand I just can't get over how well he described a zombie epidemic on the global scale, as well as the personal.

It also has some pretty insightful looks into the psychology of war and "shock and awe".

(It's audio book form is amazing, the voice actors really captured the essence of what was going on.)

Shit dude, I just finished this last week! I agree, his take on a zombie apocalypse is like no other. The implications, the ones we don't necessarily  consider while watching zombie movies (I'm thinking especially of the story about the family that fled to Canada when the attacks started, and the whole camp of others who did the same), are chilling.

As for my own "Just Finished".... Survivor by Chuck Palahniuk. I liked it a lot, just not nearly as much as Invisible Monsters, which I read just before.

Now in the interest of not becoming a depressed, impossible-to-tolerate nihilist, I;ve started The Subtle Knife. I read The Golden Compass some months ago and loved it.

Just finished reading Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys on recommendation from the lot of you who posted about Gaiman here.  I've had issues with Gaiman for a couple years, and all of those issues stemmed from my experience with American Gods.  Don't know what it was about Gaiman exactly, but I'd picked up American Gods as part of that whole read-every-Hugo-winning-novel thing and he just didn't jive with me the first time around.

Anansi Boys, however, won me over I think.  I guess I had 2 original issues with Gaiman.  The first was the whole "gods" paradigm he's created.  I got it with American Gods but I hadn't realized that this is Gaiman's "thing" so to speak.  The foundation of the concept was familiar enough to seem trite and unfamiliary enough to be uncomfortable.  I wasn't able to accept it a few years ago.  But seeing the same idea extrapolated into a different context now with Anansi Boys, recognizing it as a sociological and anthropological perspective, its starting to seem a little brilliant.  I just finished the book, so my feelings about it will grow, right?

Issue number 2 has to do with Gaiman's prose.  I'm never going to love Gaiman's prose.  It's flat.  It's unpoetic.  And I'm a fancy-pants cunt in so many ways.  Nothing I can do there.  But I did some looking into Gaiman.  And my impression as of right now is that he writes like he's adapting a comic book or a movie.  So when reading Gaiman with that in mind, visualizing the story while reading, the imagery and the characters and the plot come out shining like diamonds.  I watched Anansi Boys float by on a screen inside my head and I laughed, and I worried, and I warmed with joy.  Prose really takes a back seat to the plot and the characters, right?  And considering the book as a story and not an elaborate tapestry of inflections and intimations, it becomes clear that Gaiman's a damned fine story teller.

So to make a long story short, I'm going to the library tomorrow with the specific intention of nabbing a few more of his books.  I'm also picking up some more Joe Haldeman cuz I polished off Forever War, Forever Peace, and The Hemmingway Hoax last week and well, Haldeman's something wonderful.  But Gaiman's got something brilliant going on too and I would have completely passed it by in snobbish arrogance if it weren't for the folks here.   So thanks guys.  I'm in your debt.

On a side note: 

I'm going to echo all the sentiments about World War Z.  It was good.  However, the zombie book I really want to get my hands on is the Mondo Zombie collection.  Unfortunately its out of print and used copies are going for between $80 and $300.  Does anyone here have a copy or has anyone read this?  I've heard one or two excellent things about it.  I've also read excerpts from two of the stories, but neither were substantial enough to seed any opinions.   When throwing that kind of cash into a book, extra info's nice.  So if anybody's got any, I'd appreciate the insight.

Enders Game

It's a classic sci-fi novel and I loved every minute of it. Card is an amazing writer

Amen to that. i read it a while back (it was on one of those top x books you have to read, along with catch 22 (genius!) and the illuminatus trilogy (currently reading, fucking hell!)) and it just did not live up to what i'd read and heard about it. there are far better books out there and despite the sad story of its authorship i think its very far from the level of novels like catch 22 and papillon.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy. God, it was depressing. But still very good.

Stories that deal with post-apocalyptic themes fascinate me, probably because I'd like to wake up one day and discover that everybody else choked in their sleep. As time passes by, I'm realizing that I can't stand most novels; an author of fiction writing books stated that novels sugar coat the truth to make their statements easier to digest. The icing rarely does it for me. I prefer to read non-fiction books and tackle the subjects head on. Apart from that, while I find few novels emotionally rewarding, reading how a good thinker works up his premises to derive a good conclusion can give me shivers.

World War Z works both ways. It's a fake non-fiction novel in which a journalists meets with veterans and other survivors of a worldwide plague of zombies. He could have handled it poorly, ending up with a silly book, but the amount of research that went into it boggles the mind. He had into account the medical, sociological, anthropological, geographical aspects of a worldwide infection that ends up nearly extinguishing the human race, apart from dealing with how different armies and urban guerrillas would fight the Zeds. He predicts how different societies would adapt their weapons and tactics to hold them, what kind of psychological changes survivors would have to endure living under constant stress, how they would familiarize with their common enemy and what role meteorology and geography would play.

High points of the book that I remember from the top of my head are how they are unable to contain the infection, due to refugees, organ transplants from black markets and misinformation campaigns to avoid mass panic; Yonkers, where the army makes a stand in the middle of Manhattan to prove that they can win, only to discover that the most advanced weaponry in the world didn't mean shit against Zack and ending up having to flee with their tail between their legs; a hikikomori that only noticed he was in deep shit after his parents didn't appear for days and then has to escape a building overrun with zombies; a blind man that hides in the wilderness to die, finds his divine call and he and another survivor "might be facing fifty million monsters, but those monsters would be facing the gods"; fighting back by making stands in small towns, attracting zombies and killing them one by one for days while the corpses pile up forming walls; thousands of divers having to clear for years beaches, ports and oceans because millions of zombies still roam the trenches; clearing up Paris' underground; etc.

I loved that he implies most zombifications, so the few instances where we "see" them impact more (Yonkers and the female soldier that survived a plane crash and discovers some zombies eating his copilot, for example). Most of the time he deals with the varied psychological states the survivors found themselves in and how they faced the inevitable moral dilemmas.

To pinpoint flaws, it started slow and some characters sound too similar, but creating distinctive voices is one of the hardest issues a writer has to deal with. If I had to give a single reason to read it, I would say that it's one of the few anything I have read in quite a while that had me thinking "fuck yes" in several parts.

I just read Watchmen. God damn. God damn.






(I loved it)

Sperwielder's Tale trilogy(The Woods Out Back,The Dragon's Dagger,Dragonslayer's Return) by R.A. Salvatore.

I've read a lot of Salvatore's fantasy books, most notably the ones about Drzzt the dark elf.

This series is different in that it focuses on a man from "our" world who gets transported into a magical land and has to adapt and fight witches and dragons. There are overt references to J.R.R. Tolkien throughout the novels and a lot of shared themes(Fighting a dragon, a fellowship including a dwarf, elf, leprechaun and human.

The action scenes are well written and there is some decent character development. The endings of each novel, especially the final one, seem rushed and don't give you closure anywhere near the level of Tolkien's works.

It was still an enjoyable read and if you like the Drzzt saga or any of Salvatore's other works you would probably like this.

I finished reading The Road by Cormac McCarthy. It is a great book. The pacing was incredibly well done. The day I started reading it I went 40 pages in and seriously thought I had only read 10. It flowed wonderfully and the story was really great. There was one part in particular that almost brought me to tears. The part where The Man and The Boy watch from afar, a pregnant lady and a couple of guys walk by, and they just hide and watch them disappear in the distance. Man, something about that part just killed me. The book is great. I had a bit of trouble reading it at first because of the odd way its written, but as you can clearly see, it didn't bother me none.