Top Ten Tuesday...

 

Top Ten Tuesday is a fun weekly meme hosted by Jana at That Artsy Reader Girl.

This week's theme:  GENRE FREEBIE.

And I was going to go with my favorite historical mysteries, because there are several series I'm currently reading and loving, but then at the last minute I changed my mind. Instead, here's a list of 10 of My Favorite Post-Apocalyptic Books:

 Alas Babylon by Pat Frank

(Because it was the first one I ever read in this genre.)

 

Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

(Because who didn't read and love this one?)

One Second After by William R. Forstchen

(This is one of my favs.)

Until the End of the World by Sarah Lyons Fleming

(Yes, there are zombies in this one.)

The Wolves of Winter by Tyrell Johnson

(I read this one with Melody.)

The Stand by Stephen King

(It'a classic!)

Day Zero by C. Robert Cargill

(This one has robots. And Pounce is the best!)

Going Home by A. American

(Dystopian survival at its best.)

Outage by Ellisa Barr

(A great YA survival novel.)

Positive by David Wellington

(You knew there would be a 2nd zombie book somewhere on this list.)

Other books I've read and loved that I could have added to this list: World War Z, The 5th Wave, Divergent, Autumn, Feed, Life As We Knew It, When the Power Is Gone, Devil's Wake...and the list goes on and on. I do love reading these kinds of dystopian novels. So if you know of any good books to add to my list, please let me know! 

Happy Reading!

The Wolves of Winter

Lynn and her family moved from Chicago to Alaska when she was twelve, before the nuclear bombs fell. They thought they'd be safe there. Until the flu pandemic began. When her father succumbed to the deadly outbreak, Lynn and her mother, older brother, and her Uncle Jeryl, headed for the Yukon.

I was sixteen when we left Eagle, Alaska. When things got bad, when everyone seemed to be leaving, we up and left too. We headed into the Yukon Territory. To the trees, hills, mountains, valleys, rivers, snow, snow, snow, snow, snow. The vast wilderness of nothing.....It really was a beautiful place. You just had to get over the freezing weather, the darkness, the loneliness, the cabin fever, the boredom--oh God, the boredom--the shitty food, and the repetitive routine.

Now Lynn is 23, and her boring routine is unexpectedly interrupted when she meets an enigmatic stranger in the woods while she's out hunting. His name is Jax and he's got a dog with him he calls Wolf. And he's hiding a dark past.

Something was off about this man. I knew the potential danger I was in. Alone with a strange man, in the middle of nowhere, too far away to call for help. What a stupid idea it was to invite him back to the cabins. Why had I done that? God, it was so exciting.

Jax is not the only stranger who's come to the Yukon. Immunity, the government group from before the war, is searching for Jax. But he's not the only one they're interested in. Soon, Lynn and her entire family find themselves fighting for their lives.

What had happened to the world had made animals or monsters of us all. Survivors or murderers. Sometimes the line between the two was blurry....

MY THOUGHTS:  Compelling characters, lyrical prose, and Lynn's poignant relationship with her dad are three of the reasons why I liked this postapocalyptic novel by Tyrell Johnson so much. The two twists at the end weren't completely unexpected, but they worked. And I liked how Johnson wove pieces of Lynn's past throughout the entire novel, including her grief for her dad and snippets of the Walt Whitman poems he loved so much.  It made her feel like a real person. I also really liked Jax and Wolf. For me, The Wolves of Winter, is a 4-star read. The fact that I got to read it along with Melody made it even better. Be sure to check out Melody's review of this awesome book, too.

Happy Reading!

P.S. Whenever Melody and I do a "buddy read" she always asks me some questions at the end. Here they are, along with my answers:

Q. With the war and the flu pandemic, do you think Lynn and her family, as well as Jax, would be happier living on their own even if it means they have to hide forever?

A.  They might be safer hiding and living on their own, but even before they met Jax they didn't seem very happy in their isolation. I mean, look how excited Lynn got when she saw Jax just because he was someone new. And Jax didn't come across as a super happy person out there on his own. I think people need love and friendship and other people to laugh with in order to be truly happy.

Q. The author has painted a scary world in The Wolves of Winter. What do you think is the scariest in this story?

A. For me, the scariest part is the fact that almost everything bad that happened in this story--the nuclear bombs, the flu virus, the fires--were all engineered by humans. It's scary to think about how good people are at destroying one another.

Earth Abides by George R. Stewart

Written in 1949, Earth Abides is a post-apocalyptic novel that explores what happens to civilization as we know it when a viral pandemic wipes out the vast majority of people. Isherwood "Ish" Williams, a solitary graduate student with an interest in ecology and in studying the relationship between man and nature, is one of the few survivors. His curiosity to see what will happen next is what helps keep him alive.

"In spite of the horror of the situation he felt a curious spectator's sense about it all, as if he were watching the last act of a great drama. This, he realized, was characteristic of his personality. He was a student, an incipient scholar, and such a one was necessarily oriented to observe, rather than to participate."

In Part I, Ish criss-crosses the country with his beagle, Princess, hoping to find a community of like-minded survivors he can join, but the few people he meets along the way are not people he wants to make a life with. So he returns to his home in California where he chances upon a woman named Em.

The strangeness! In the old world, it might well never have happened. Out of destruction had come, for him, love.

Part II begins 21 years later. The Tribe, made up of Ish and Em and their children and a few other families has survived, but they haven't really begun to create their own society; they still depend on scavenged items like matches and canned food (which would NOT still be good after 20+ years). And none of them seem too interested in perpetuating even the most basic skills like reading and math. Ish tries, but there is a lethargy to the others in his tribe that he is helpless to change. And at last he gives up.

His observation of what was happening kept him interested in life. At first, just after the Great Disaster, he had devoted himself to observing the changes in the world as the result of the disappearance of man. After twenty-one years, however, the world had fairly adjusted itself ... now, the problem of society--its adjustment and reconstruction--had moved to the fore and become his chief interest.

Still, the Tribe continues on, and Ish continues to observe them until the end of his life. Children are born. Others die. The rats from the city reach a population crisis and swarm. As do the ants, and the  wild cows. One stranger threatens their way of life. Typhoid strikes. There's a fire. And civilization as we know it dies out along with Ish, the last one who can remember it.

"Men go and come, but earth abides." --Ecclesiastes 1:4

This is a quiet, introspective novel, and a thoughtful look at what could happen if 98% of mankind was wiped out all at once. But for me it was a little disappointing. I kept waiting for what was happening to matter more to those involved...or for something more to happen. But the novel, like the members of Ish's tribe, just kept plodding along. Year after year, with little sense of urgency. I found it a little frustrating. There should be more drama when the world ends, shouldn't there? Don't get me wrong, this isn't a bad read, and Stewart writes well, I just found it hard to care about any of his characters other than Ish, and Ish himself held back a lot and mostly thought about and observed what was happening without taking action to change any of it. Although, he did teach the children to make bows and arrows. And his Tribe does end up surviving. So there you go. But it all felt so removed from me that I wasn't that invested in any of it; mostly, I just didn't care.  Supposedly, this is the novel that inspired Stephen King's The Stand, but King's post-apocalyptic saga is a much more interesting and compelling read, with lots of characters that you can root for, at least in my opinion.

Happy Reading!

Survive this!

"The missiles, Fin. Something's gone very wrong. We don't know much, but it looks as though regions in the north of Asia have been hit as well as the Gobi Desert. Word is it's a nuclear test gone wrong, but it might have been deliberate..."

By the time we got into town the sky had changed. It was like the sun was being choked with thick orange dust. The sky glowed, throbbing with colour, but it was like it had swallowed up all the sunlight. ... It was beautiful--and wrong.

In one afternoon, Fin's world changes--from warm summer to nuclear winter. Now there's no internet, no phones, and no power. The water supply has been compromised and the food is running out. With their Mom over an hour away in Sydney and their father missing, Fin and his younger brother, Max, must figure out how to survive on their own.

In The Sky So Heavy Claire Zorn has written a post-apocalyptic YA novel of survival set in Australia that's "scarily realistic", fast-paced and entertaining. I really like these kinds of novels, especially when they're well-written and believable. And this novel is both (although there were a few times when I felt things happened a little too conveniently). Fin is resourceful and smart; I liked him and his pesky younger brother. And I liked the friends he teams up with, too. This book made me wonder how I would survive in a similar situation...and what choices I would make. Which is what I like about these kinds of books:  they always make stop and think....and stock up on extra chocolate! This particular survival/disaster book is as good as John Marsden's Tomorrow, When the War Began and Life As We Knew It by Susan Beth Pfeffer. All three are worth reading if you happen to like post-apocalyptic novels like I do.

Happy Reading!

Another similar read:

The Road to Winter by Mark Smith