August 2024 Reading
August was the final month of summer break, so I managed to sneak a couple books in before school started up.
North! Or Be Eaten - Andrew Peterson
Book two in the Wingfeather Saga, I read this aloud over several weeks to the middle girls before bed. The Wingfeather family is on the run from the Fangs and have to make their way through Dugtown, which is full of more danger than just Fangs. This is a more bleak novel, but has glimmers of hope shining light into the darkness. It's a great read for all levels.
The Dispossessed - Ursula K. Le Guin
A story contrasting two opposing societies separated by space and ideology. Shevek is caught in the middle, trying to sort out how the two can reconcile. There is a hint of advanced technology in the book, which is why I picked it up, but the theory behind the technology plays a bigger role than the device itself.
World War Z - Max Brooks
I'm not a fan of zombie culture at all. I find that I get really depressed (mostly because the content is depressing) and the lack of hope is more of a distraction than a plot point characters have to overcome. Brooks does a good job of balancing the crisis moments with glimpses of hope. Rather than focusing on the pandemic, the book does a good job of blending government, media, and societal conflict into the narrative giving a global perspective of the human species and not just a core group of survivors like most others in the genre. Because the book is an "oral history," there isn't a real protagonist to follow. There are a lot of different locations and names, some of which return at different points, but you don't notice right away because of how much it jumps around.
This is my second time through this book and I picked it up mainly because I caught the tail end of the movie on TV one night. (The movie was not good.)
Devolution: A Firsthand Account of the Mount Rainier Sasquatch Massacre - Max Brooks
I picked this up after a re-read of World War Z on a whim. The reporting/oral history was done well in WWZ, but this was a little too hard of a try. The detail in the main character's journal was way too high and far too specific to be absorbed. Brooks still weaved in research and other commentary through character interviews, but I think it would have been a more enjoyable read for me if it had just been in a novel format. There wasn't quite enough development for several characters and they ended up just being bodies for the climax.
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