I’M READING AS FAST AS I CAN: APRIL 2009 EDITION

[defrog]

Oooooooooo, book reviews!

JUST FINISHED

World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks
Essentially, Brooks takes the premise of George Romero’s films and expands it to its logical outcome. And, like Romero, he uses the living dead as a platform to satirize contemporary society and politics, revealing how inept bureaucracies, greedy drug companies and general unpreparedness would contribute to a worldwide zombie pandemic. Telling the story Studs-Terkel style is a stroke of genius – and probably the only way the story would have worked. Some of the geopolitical outcomes are a bit of a stretch, but otherwise it’s probably one of the best and most believable apocalyptic books I’ve ever read. Recommended. Unless you find zombies to be silly nonsense.

JUST STARTED

Maul by Tricia Sullivan
I picked this up as part of my attempt to try more female writers, which don’t seem to take up much space on my shelves. So far it’s got teenage fashion gangs shooting up a shopping mall and a mad scientist testing terrorbugs on clones. It’s fairly twisted. A good sign. Usually.

RECENT TITLES

The Man Who Was Thursday by GK Chesterton
A cracking and surreal adventure story about a policeman who infiltrates a secret society of anarchists (the equivalent of terrorists in Europe 100 years ago), only to find he’s not the only cop undercover – which is an understatement. It’s great stuff and funny in places, though the ending is a bit wobbly. Overall, though, it’s really good. My only complaint: it totally kills a story idea I had a few years about undercover cops over-infiltrating a terror cell. Who knew Chesterton thought it up a century ago?

Mind of My Mind by Octavia E Butler
Another attempt to read more female writers, as I’d never read Butler before. This is the second of her Patternist novels – about an immortal who is creating a master race of human telepaths, and how one of them rises to challenge his authority – but it works as a standalone piece. I get the allegory, but honestly, I didn’t find it all that compelling. It doesn’t help that just about no one in the book is likable – which is sort of the point, but it doesn’t make for good reading for me. Dreary.

Un Lun Dun by China Mieville
Never read Mieville before, either. This is his Young Adult book about an alternate London where all the broken and discarded things go. It’s imaginatively detailed, and offers some neat twists on the genre conventions (notably the old chestnut about How It Is Written That The Chosen One Shall Appear And Save Us All). But for me, the detail gets tedious after awhile, and the story just goes on too long.

Shooting Star by Robert Bloch
Yet another author I’ve never read before, though I know the name, of course. This is a Hard Crime re-release of one of his late-50s pulp books about a one-eyed Hollywood agent turned private eye who ends up investigating the murder of an actor. Not bad, if a little predictable. I’ll be reading him again, if only because Hard Case issued it as a double novel packaged with a second Bloch novel from the same era.

We by Yevgeny Zamyatin
We’s premise will sound familar to anyone who has read Orwell's 1984, Huxley's Brave New World and Ayn Rand’s Anthem – a passionless uber-logical utopian society where everyone is a number and a collective serving the glory of the State – but this was written before any of those, although Orwell is the only author to cite We as a direct influence. The basic idea and story is okay,  but the writing style is really hard to take – lots of unfinished sentences and philosophical allegories. Frankly, I got much more out of the books it influenced.

By the numbers,

This is dF

Comments

[puffdoggydaddy.livejournal.com]

Cool. I'm so glad you read Z. I read it a few months back and loved it.

Of the others you mention, Un Lun and Thursday may make my read list...after a good looking over and a long walk around a book store...or website while I consider it...as the case may be.

...oh and Maul...I'm definitely going to read Maul. Finished Lethe just a week or so back and really liked it overall.