Wednesday, May 13, 2009

Cannonball Read - Book 35

Oh. My. God. What was I waiting for? My zombie-loving husband read World War Z by Max Brooks at least two years ago, and I've pooh-poohed reading it, even though he said it was OFF THE HOOK. But really, I was just saving it for this big read-a-thon. Ahem.
Well, it was so worth the wait. This book is incredible. Brooks has written a collection of first-person accounts of people who survived the decade-long war against zombies. And before you start laughing, saying, "That's preposterous!," let me tell you that this shit is real. No, I don't mean a zombie attack. I mean the telling of this story. This book makes you feel like it actually happened. There's a super-creepy section about feral children, kids who survived the attack but whose PTSD is so severe, they have to live in institutions - and by contrast, there's a section about the K-9 soldiers who went into battle on behalf of humans. Since I brought my own little pichu home, I've become quite tender-hearted toward dogs, and this section broke my heart a little. But it was followed by images of cracked skulls and frozen zombies re-animating after a long winter. Truly terrifying.

I could heap a bunch of words on it (awesome! amazing! unbelievable! not-to-be surpassed!) and it still couldn't do this book justice. By page THIRTY, I was saying "This book is really good." And ZLH only said "I told you so" once.

World War Z - A+

2 comments:

Chargenda said...

See, I read it and didn't love it. I actually didn't finish it. I was really excited about it, but I wanted less military government mumbo jumbo and way more personal stories. Great concept, but I got a little bored of it.

amanda said...

See, I thought the military mumbo-jumbo was perfectly balanced with the personal stories.

So there.