The Dead and The Gone made Inny wibble
Took the earlier Belgian bus of 9 o'clock, seeing as we ate really early because Pol had to be somewhere for a work-outing. I may keep this up, at least until it gets warmer again. (Yes chill_morte, you were right all along. Shush.)
I just finished reading The Dead and The Gone by Susan Pfeffer in two trips and about an hour at home. It was a companion piece to Life as we knew it. It is a brilliant series, and it's stuck with me more than I thought it would. Somehow, it seems less cold at the busstop when the characters in your book are fighting starvation, stealing shoes off corpses to trade for some string beans and trying to decide who will go out to shovel snow because they're least likely to get a heartattack from all the work.
The idea of the book is based off the idea that a meteor hit the moon, which knocked it out of orbit and closer to the earth. Because of this, there's floods, tsunamis, the tides go crazy. Later in the book there are earthquakes and lots of volcanos, even supposedly dormant ones, errupt, making the skies gray and killing crops. The winter sets in way sooner and harsher than ever before.
Life as we knew it dealt with the countryside, through the diary of a young girl named Miranda. The Dead and The Gone centres around Alex, a Puerto Rican New Yorker whose parents never return home after the accident.
I didn't think The Dead and The Gone would be able to live up to Life as we knew it, especially because it wasn't written in the first person, but it did. The style was different, but you still felt for the characters. It was interesting to see the differences between what was happening in New York and what was happening in the small towns in the countryside. New York's schools seemed to stay open much longer, but they suffered more from dead bodies and rats and flooding. There were also paralels. Both families had a head start, because they managed to get a lot of food stored up before it was all gone. Both families suffered from the flu sweeping the country.
Another thing that really struck me was how even with all the death, the endings are still... happy. Well, they feel happy. Hopeful. The characters could die right after the book ends and you're left with a lot of questions, but still, it's hopeful.
... and now there's no more in the series, and I'm running out of books. I still have The Zombie Survival Guide, though that's not really train-reading and Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age. The rest of my books are still in England. I'm thinking of ordering Richard Matheson's What Dream May Come, because I liked reading I Am Legend and... well, the movie with Robin Williams was brilliant and heartbreaking.
Anyone have any book recommendations?
I just finished reading The Dead and The Gone by Susan Pfeffer in two trips and about an hour at home. It was a companion piece to Life as we knew it. It is a brilliant series, and it's stuck with me more than I thought it would. Somehow, it seems less cold at the busstop when the characters in your book are fighting starvation, stealing shoes off corpses to trade for some string beans and trying to decide who will go out to shovel snow because they're least likely to get a heartattack from all the work.
The idea of the book is based off the idea that a meteor hit the moon, which knocked it out of orbit and closer to the earth. Because of this, there's floods, tsunamis, the tides go crazy. Later in the book there are earthquakes and lots of volcanos, even supposedly dormant ones, errupt, making the skies gray and killing crops. The winter sets in way sooner and harsher than ever before.
Life as we knew it dealt with the countryside, through the diary of a young girl named Miranda. The Dead and The Gone centres around Alex, a Puerto Rican New Yorker whose parents never return home after the accident.
I didn't think The Dead and The Gone would be able to live up to Life as we knew it, especially because it wasn't written in the first person, but it did. The style was different, but you still felt for the characters. It was interesting to see the differences between what was happening in New York and what was happening in the small towns in the countryside. New York's schools seemed to stay open much longer, but they suffered more from dead bodies and rats and flooding. There were also paralels. Both families had a head start, because they managed to get a lot of food stored up before it was all gone. Both families suffered from the flu sweeping the country.
Another thing that really struck me was how even with all the death, the endings are still... happy. Well, they feel happy. Hopeful. The characters could die right after the book ends and you're left with a lot of questions, but still, it's hopeful.
... and now there's no more in the series, and I'm running out of books. I still have The Zombie Survival Guide, though that's not really train-reading and Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age. The rest of my books are still in England. I'm thinking of ordering Richard Matheson's What Dream May Come, because I liked reading I Am Legend and... well, the movie with Robin Williams was brilliant and heartbreaking.
Anyone have any book recommendations?