World War Z

After the Zombie Apocalypse, a series of interviews take place with people from all over the world about what happened. The interviews encapsulate a number of different voices from the doctor who was brought in to treat the first infected patient, American soldiers who fought against the zombies, a blind monk who fought off zombies in the wilds of Asia, and many more hopeful, heartbreaking, and disturbing stories.  Max Brooks brings a sense of reality to an unthinkable event. What was once an urban legend suddenly starts rising from the grave and attacking the human race, bringing humanity to the edge of extinction. What is achieved is a sense of anxiety, reality, morals (or lack thereof), and duty that leave the reader wondering what they would do if World War Z were actually to occur.

Brooks sweeps from continent to continent and subject to subject with ease. The writing is engaging with easy to read language. Fair warning, dear reader, this is not for the faint hearted. Though I did not find it disgusting or the descriptions overly grotesque, if you don’t like violence, this is not for you.

Personally, I did not expect to enjoy this novel. Zombies are not my thing, but I couldn't put this down. It was creepy, but not written as an over the top, slasher book. Brooks explored the nuances and catastrophes of such a devastating event. It was more about the people involved and less about the brain eating ghouls.

Here are a few more books you may enjoy if you like World War Z.

• The Zombie Survival Guide by Max Brooks. For all the know how you’ll need for getting through your own Zombie Apocalypse.

• The Walking Dead by Robert Kirkman. Kirkman prides himself on his look at what happened to people after the zombies invaded.

• Dying to Live (#1) by Kim Paffenroth. A group of survivors of the zombie apocalypse band together to survive and try and make sense of the horrors that are occurring. They’re not the only ones out there though and there are some things worse than zombies…

A Wind in the Door

In second grade, my very bestest friend, also named Kristin (the reason we became besties), had our teacher read A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle aloud to us. Now Kristin is a very smart cookie. She was way ahead of me and a voracious and sophisticated reader ahead of her time. At the age of 7/8, A Wrinkle in Time was a bit ahead of me, but I remember being thoroughly absorbed in it. I reread the book a few years ago and am astonished that it was read to me at 7. It’s kind of intense! Well I decided I really wanted to finish the series because it’s a classic and I love the titles.

A Wind in the Door is the second book in the Time series. Charles Wallace, the youngest of the Murry siblings has just started school and is coming home bloodied and bruised because he doesn’t fit in. Now he is seeing dragons and starting to get very sick. Meg, his older sister, soon discovers the “dragon” as well and is taken on a journey with Calvin O’Keefe and a few new arrivals through the universe and into the mitochondirion of Charles Wallace. This is a journey to save Charles Wallace’s life and help dispose of a force so hateful that it seeks to extinguish all life.

The Time series is most certainly science fiction. The Murry parents are both scientists, and a lot of the extraordinary things that happen to the children revolve around science and different discoveries the parents are currently making. Although I am thrown off by science-y science fiction (chemistry and physics you allude me yet again!), this book was not out of my comprehension. I mean it is for children, so I would hope it wouldn’t be over my head. I kept waiting for the children to go somewhere out of this world and it wasn’t until about half way through the book that they finally left God’s green earth. In this I was frustrated because I was impatiently waiting for more to come. My expectations were not met with a whole new universe until the book was about half done. Then the problem became that events got melodramatic. Maybe I’m too old to be reading this book, but the way Meg interacted with the other characters and the level of drama annoyed me. There was too much explanation on top of panic and confusion. Everything got jumbled together and it felt like we were rushing to get to the end.

Although I still think it’s a well written classic, it was not my favorite. I will finish the series and I do highly recommend Ms. L’Engle for children who love science or science fiction. 

A Different Kind of Alyss

I’m coming to the realization that I love fantasy fiction. I do not like giving myself that title, because I lump fantasy in with sci-fi and I don’t enjoy sci-fi. But I love fairies, magical lands, and fairytale-esque storylines. The little princess in me screams for her dresses and Prince Charming. Cliché? Yes I know. Actually I prefer the magic and adventure over the marrying, but sometimes a little romance is fun too.  

The Looking Glass Wars by Frank Beddor is my latest fantasy read. Based on Lewis’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Beddor takes the idea of Wonderland to a whole new level. Actually this book is a combination of fantasy and sci-fi, but we’ll get to that later.

Alyss Heart’s seventh birthday is quite the celebration in wonderland. The Princess who will one day secede to the throne of Wonderland is beloved by the people and shows a lot of promise as a practitioner of imagination, but her Aunt Redd has other plans. The rival sister to the queen, Redd has been in exile because of her practice of black imagination, but she has built up her forces and on Alyss’s seventh birthday, Redd overthrows her sister and takes control of Wonderland. Alyss witnesses her mother’s death and barely gets out with her own life. The only way for Alyss to survive is to takeher chances in another world with Hatter, her mother’s body guard. But things go terribly wrong and Alyss and Hatter lose each other. Alyss ends up on the streets in Victorian England, while Hatter makes it his mission to find her. In Wonderland, things are going poorly with Redd’s rule, but after many years, Alyss finally makes her way back to Wonderland. She must learn once again how to wield her powers and stop Redd.

Beddor created a Wonderland that is both magical and technical. The card soldiers and more like robots and there are a lot of devices that fall into the sci-fi aspect of fiction. The story is interesting to see the twist from Victorian children’s fiction to what Alyss’s reality was in Wonderland. The characters were a little shallow for me. Motives and desires were easy to see and I didn’t feel there is a lot of depth to their personalities. The story is engaging and adventurous. It is a storyline that has been done hundreds of times before. Bad guy takes over and reeks havoc, so hero must step up to right things.

All in all, this is an easy read and entertaining. It is the first and a triology along with having offshoots of graphic novels devoted to Hatter. I am not itching to read the next two books, but I may pick them up at some point.

Dropping in on Jane Eyre: A Science Fiction book with a literary backbone

Set in an alternate reality during the 1980s, Thursday Next , is part of the government’s Literatec SpecOps team. You see in this version of England, literature is not just admired by a few, but fought over. Hordes of Baconists, those who believe Bacon wrote Shakespeare’s plays, act like Jehovah’s Witnesses knocking on people’s doors to promote their cause. Criminals attempt to reproduce original copies of works or forge never before released poems by Byron and Shelly on a daily basis. Baroque-ists, Reformists, and Renaissance-ians fight against modernists. Thursday is part of the unit protecting literature and keeping counterfeits off the street.

 A mass murderer, thief and most wanted criminal with unknown powers, Acheron Hades, decides not only to steal original manuscripts of revered English literature, but also use a newly invented Prose Portal to travel into the books, steal characters and change the narratives forever. Thursday is recruited by a higher level team to help catch him because she’s the only person who knows what he looks like. Way leads to way, and Thursday ends up chasing Acheron across England and Wales, through time, and into novels.

The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde is a crossover novel; it spans genes, as a lot of novels tend to do. This one is very intriguing to me, however. At my library, it is in the mystery section. The novel is a police procedural with a detective at its heart, but in my humble opinion, the Sci-Fi aspect trumps the mystery aspect. Without the science fiction aspects, this novel would not exist. Time travel, strange powers, and an alternate reality are essential to the life of this novel. You could take out Thursday being a detective, and the novel could still stand on its own two legs.

Being that I’m not much of a Sci-Fi kind of person, I did not stumble upon this title on my own. It was on the top of a Sci-Fi booklist (another one of the lists my coworkers and I competed over, I lost) and it was about Jane Eyre and literature. I was immediately intrigued. Let me tell you right off the bat that this is not for everyone. It’s not a beginner’s novel. One needs some prior knowledge and tastes to appreciate it.  First, you should at least tolerate science fiction. Second, you need to appreciate police procedurals. Lastly, you need to have an understanding of English literature. At the very least know a bit about Shakespeare and Jane Eyre. See?! It’s a bit demanding.

Personally I was a bit confused by some of the time travel aspects. Other than that I followed along and found it enjoyable. Thursday is a fun character. She’s tough, but personable. The master criminal, Hades, is decidedly evil, but very fun to watch in action. There’s action, a love interest, and intrigue outside of the main plot. Everything a good novel needs. I found myself reading this at a leisurely pace. It wasn’t my favorite mostly because of the sci-fi aspects, but I’m also not huge into police procedurals.

This is a novel I would suggest, but the crowd I’d give this to is a rather defined group (see list above). This is the first in The “ThursdayNext” series. 

Classic Science-Fiction

Isaac Asimov is a prevalent name in science-fiction. He was one of the first sci-fi writers who was actually respected and paid well for his craft, and today he is still a force in and outside of his genre. He deserves to be read because his ideas are at play today.

The three laws of robotics say that a robot cannot harm a human or through inaction cause a human harm, they must obey humans, and they must keep themselves out of harms way. "I, Robot" deals with these laws and the history of robotics through an episodic retelling by Susan Calvin to a reporter. Susan is the leading robopsychologist as US Robotics in the mid 21st century, but she is retiring. Through short stories the audience hears tell of robots from early on who could not speak to robots in the mid 21st century who run the economy. Each chapter is a new story of how a problem arouse with a robot and how the three laws can explain any flukes the robots may have. Each story is linked together with familiar characters and the fact that this is all connected back to Susan who is relaying this story. Because each story is about a robot who has gone wrong, or something weird that has happened, they are mini-mysteries or puzzles. Each error needs to be corrected, but first the scientists must figure out why and how the mistake happened. This is not all set in a lab, however, but some are on Earth, others are in space, or on other planets.

The book is not like the movie...at all. I think the movie is actually based off of the first novel in the robot series, "The Caves of Steel". Originally Asimov published each story in sci-fi magazines and then put them all together in the book with the connective tissue being Susan Calvin's memoir. They work as a whole, but you can tell they are meant as individual pieces. As I think is typically the case with a lot of sci-fi, characters come second to plot and ideas. The characters are dimensional, but they are not the focus of the novel. Instead it's really about robotics, and the speculative future.

Personally this book wasn't for me. I'm not a futuristic, technology, space person, and there is some technical language in here that my anti-science brain didn't like. It was not over zealous on tech language and it's nothing the average reader should be afraid of, but it just doesn't appeal to me. On top of that I thought the pace of each story was a bit more leisurely and longer than I would like, especially when I'm already turned off by the setting and plot line. I am not saying this was a bad novel. On the contrary it was good. Asimov is able to write well and he set up a nice world for more books about robot/human interaction and artificial intelligence. I will not be reading them though.

If you like sci-fi, or if you want to diversify yourself and step outside of your boundaries, you should try giving Asimov a read. If not this novel, try The Caves of Steel. It is a mystery and the pace is compelling, but it still holds the sci-fi elements that are important and it is a part of the "I, Robot" universe.