Finishing up 2012 reading

[cahn]

Rot and Ruin (Maberry) - 3+/5 - Well, the best zombie book I've ever read, for sure; and its worldbuilding is head and shoulders above the vast majority of the dystopian YA I am fed. It got a bit preachy at times, and a couple of the plot twists were telegraphed pretty heavily, and Benny is a bit much on the obnoxiousness. But I liked it! And it gets major points for sidestepping a lot of irritating things in the (small number of) other zombie books I've read.

A Severed Wasp (L'Engle, reread) - 4/5 - Another yuletide-reread. The best adult book L'Engle ever wrote, where she works out her thoughts on love and marriage and work, but always in the service of the story. I really, really like this one.

Little Brother (Doctorow) - 3+/5 - Doctorow is rather like Ayn Rand to me, in that I am not entirely sure he had a lot more to say in this book than he had in the last Doctorow I read (which I quite liked, don't get me wrong). The government is evil; don't give up your privacy rights. There, now you don't have to read it. Also I was highly entertained by Doctorow taking great pains (and here he is unlike Rand, who lived in a white world) to include Two Non-White Sidekicks. Who give Moving Speeches About Their POC-ness and then... disappear from the narrative. Clearly I have been hanging around social justice wank for too long...

Elementals (John Antony) - 3/5 - Antony's a quite good writer, and I was tickled to see that this YA dystopia is set in North Carolina, which never happens. I think though that this book was trying to do too much (dystopia AND magic powers! AND young boy who must discover his destiny AND threatening danger! AND love triangle AND family drama!), and as a result I spent most of it a little off-balance.

Comments

[ollipop]

So, saying the "best zombie book I've ever read for sure" turns out to be less than the sweeping recommendation it would be at my house. I'm living with someone who has unfortunately gotten swept up in the zombie trope; even kiddo is now aware that "Daddy likes zombie stories but Mommy doesn't."

So if you wanted some recommendations, I know someone who could cough them up. But I think you're smart to stop with that one.

(The real point of my comment: I appreciated the L'Engle review! She's one of those authors I would love to get back to as an adult but I'm not sure where to start.)

[cahn]

Ahahahaha! Yeah. I might read Feed as joyce recced below (has your household read that?) but yeah, I'm not a zombie fan. At all.

Ah, L'Engle! I just adore L'Engle. I started writing up a response to where to start and it started getting long, so I will probably just make it into its own post once I get caught up on booklogging :)

[joycec]

Let me recommend the zombie books for people who don't do zombie books: the Newsflesh trilogy (plus some novellas), by Mira Grant: http://www.miragrant.com/. They're really political thrillers, as much as zombie books.

[cahn]

Ah, right! I've heard very good things about that. And of course your recent YT posts have reminded me that I need to read McGuire as well :)

I'm ashamed to realize that part of my reluctance was not so much antipathy to zombies as that I read this book Feed by M.T. Anderson, which I really didn't like for various reasons, and I was conflating the two :)

[seekingferret]

Heh, part of my reluctance to read Newsflesh is because I loved MT Anderson's Feed.

I don't read too many zombie novels, but I can at least issue an ambivalent though mostly positive recommendation for Colson Whitehead's Zone One. Possibly the most languorous, placid, meditative zombie novel I've ever read.

[cahn]

Hee. Good data point to have, and actually that doesn't surprise me overmuch (I can see the appeal, and I very much respect the taste of the friend who recced it, it just didn't appeal to me).

Huh, placid zombie book sounds... well, different, anyway!

[seekingferret]

I didn't like Little Brother for what it said so much as for how much I wished I'd been able to read it when I was a thirteen year old boy. I instead had to make do with Nat Hentoff and Bob Heinlein and Richard Stallman and yes, Ayn Rand (Though at thirteen, only Anthem, probably her least problematic work).

Because like those other books, Little Brother says three things to a thirteen year old kid, not just the two you state. 1. The government is evil. 2. Don't give up your privacy rights. 3. You have it in your power to do something to fight back.

Doctorow bottles that potent mixture of optimistic individualists who were so important to my intellectual awakening and distributes it in an easily digestible package that comes with an instruction manual.

[cahn]

Ah, right! The third point was also present in For the Win, which is the only other Doctorow I've read. (If I remember correctly, the other two points were slightly different, something more along the lines of 1. Corporations are evil, and 2. Unionize!)