I was entirely unprepared for this book. As a general rule, I love starting a new story with no idea what it is going to be about, but I was entirely unprepared to be in a mellow space only to start this book about a natural disaster occurring in a city I know well. It isn't post-apocalyptic.  It is the actual apocalypse--the moment when the world changes and the entire story takes place in that day, with flashbacks that fill in the backstory, but without a future whatsoever set out for the reader.  This is made even more vivid since the first person narrator is 9 months pregnant as the story unfolds.  It is entirely horrifying. The descriptions of Portland and the damage to infrastructure and neighborhoods and stores that I know well was scary. Overall, the writing was so good, really sucking me into the story, getting my heartrate up and making me invested in the story and characters. But, ultimately, while it is the kind of book that I have thought and talked about a lot since finishing it, I was just so unsatisfied with the story ending without resolution. We don't know anything about the future, about the world beyond the disaster, or any of the characters we met and learned about and got attached to along the way. I mean, this might be what happens in a future world like this, but in a story, I want more.

​Not recommended.

I went into this book not knowing anything about it, not even the genre, and I am actually really glad that happened because it meant that I was dropped into a story without understanding the context in which it was told, which I think made it substantially more interesting.  

Fundamentally, though, his is a survival in the woods story about our relationship with nature and living off the land in tune with the animals who live beside us. There is a lot of hunting and fishing and dealing with the bodies of dead animals, which I always dislike. I almost lost my mind reading Moby Dick in high school. But the way this was written was softer and you could feel the characters' reverence for the world and this made it tolerant for me.

It is a short book, making for a quick read with writing that is quite lovely.

Stop here, if you don't want spoilers. I thought that I Who Have Never Known Men was such a unique post-apocalyptic story. This book, written 2 years later, reminded me so much of that book.  Different setting and backstory, but similar in the way that both tell the story of the last human, alone amidst the ruins of a civilization.  Here, though, the story is softer as the last human lives out her life in the company of a bear and a puma.  

Ultimately, I am going to give it a soft recommend.

This is an odd, odd story. I just do not know what to make of it.  It is built like a post-apocalyptic narrative, but it isn't exactly that since civilization wasn't really destroyed in the way that one normally expects from that kind of world building.  Instead of the world being destroyed by technology, there is a vaguely referenced allusion to an uprising of robots who turn on the humans who created them and then [instead either non-existent or forgettable details] happens that causes robots and humans to live without contact with the other for many years.  This is the story of the robot who is sent to check in on the humans and the human the robot encounters.  What ensues is a philosophical reflection between the two of them about the meaning of life, the role of work in ones life, and the value of the  intimacy of friendship in a world that allows for complete solitude. It had the feel of two college freshman who have just taken Intro to Philosophy and are thinking through the classic philosophical reflections for the first time and are Very Into It. I didn't not like it. It was gentle and sweet, especially since it was set in a world that had this massive conflict and was entirely reshaped by that. Sometimes the optimism felt forced, or desperate even, like those first attempts to rebuild the world from the "I think therefore I am" premise.

​Overall, I think I put it in not not recommended.

For some reason, this 1995 book is having a comeback moment in the spotlight, as I have heard it discussed or referenced in a variety of contexts just before and after having read it, including multiple friends who just read it or have it on the TBR pile.  As a post-apocalypse novel, it is bleak even for the genre.  It was originally written in French so I don't know if the original was written this way, but the translation is stripped of pretty much all nuanced language, making it very harsh.  This plainness matches the tone of the story and the directness of the narrator, but makes the read unusually uncomfortable, independent of the topic.

And the plot is also a harsh landscape of incarceration and then a reflection of what it means to be freed from a jail only to find the world outside desolate.  Echoes of other stories of the end of humanity haunted my thoughts as I read this, while at the same time the world never felt borrowed from other works.  

I was left just so sad. The bleakness of the world rarely lifts. When it does, it is fleeting and it returns to the question or what it means to live ones own life without any expectations or pressures, but also with a sense of meaningful purpose beyond mere survival, alone during times when there there are other humans in your close space and when there is no one at all around.  

Introspective and thought-provoking, I think it is not not recommended just because it left me feeling so empty.  Don't read during a depressive episode.

​Not not recommended.

Another post-apocalyptic novel, which really seems to be disproportionately recommended in recent times, this one was extremely graphic in depicting gratuitous violence. This was oddly juxtaposed against explicit descriptions of sexual encounters.  I was disappointed that I did not like it more since the premise of the futuristic world felt well thought out and plausible, though incredibly depressing. 

Set in the dessert of the American southwest, the complicated backstory includes litigation over water rights, complicated interpersonal dynamics, lots of characters with compelling and believable backstories, and  a nuanced world created with attention to details that I really liked.  Ultimately, while there was a lot to like in the story, I really disliked the violence, which I did not think was needed to advance the story and which reflected a deterioration of human decency at a level that was just too dark for me.  I found that I couldn't listen to this unless I was in the right frame of mind and definitely not before bed.  

Not recommended.
​
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This is a post-apocalyptic story from the genre I like to call Depressing AF Futures.  Like Station Eleven, Blindness, How High We Go In The Dark, and The Earth Abides, this book is bleak.  It was definitely well written.  The characters had depth and I loved their complexity and growth, but the storyline just brought one heartbreak after another.  It was another reminder that I don't want to stick around to see everyone I love die and everything I care about disappear.  I found my outlook on life to be significantly impaired while reading the book, unable to completely shake it from my mind.  Unlike Station Eleven, with its sudden world demise, this is a gradual fall into a post-civilization world where only the most hardened survivalists exist. It felt like it could really happen.  Being on the west coast, where one of the characters flees to while the protagonist stays behind in Florida, which is the first to succumb to the irredeemable changes in climate, it felt like this could be happening right now or next week anyhow, that this next hurricane season happens in the opening of the book.  The loneliness of the book, from its very beginning, is haunting.  Well written, I had a hard time putting it aside and yet I cannot say that I enjoyed it or was glad I read it.

​Not recommended.

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Sometimes, a book is just too sophisticated and avant-garde for me.  I started this book twice before I could get past the first 100 pages, plus it took me more than a month to read  The confusion I felt even after reading the beginning three times did not stop there.  After slogging through another 600 pages after that, I remained confused and frustrated with the story on many levels.  First, the main characters in the three different eras are mostly names Charles/Charlie, David, and Edward.  The story starts with an alternative history of the US, the origin of which is the end of the civil war when the South secedes after losing and the West breaks off into its own country.  In this alternative history, racism and classism persist, but homophobia is completely eliminated as prominent men regularly marry each other and take on childrearing, particularly by raising orphans abandoned because of the economic pressures on the poor.  In all three eras, women are relegated to their role as a daughter, sister, (birth) mother, or grandmother.  The book is entirely devoid of strong women, with perhaps one exception at the very end, but she would be considered "strong" in an unconventional way.  Instead, a complicated history unfolds that shows that putting gay men in charge of things does not result in a any better outcome than the mess straight men have made.  

The second section of the book tells another David's backstory growing up in Hawaii, filled with intimate violence and sorrow, and the third section is a dystopian landscape in a future New York under authoritarian rule that comes to power while trying to manage pandemics and natural disasters brought on by climate change.

I spent a lot of time and energy trying to link the three books, thinking that there must be a cohesive family tree I was supposed to be following, but could not.  In reading book summaries after I finished it because I remained so confused (something I almost never do--reading summaries, not getting confused), I think I have finally accepted that the three books were completely independent of each other, other than the tie each story had to a mansion in NYC.  I could have saved myself a lot of intellectual energy if I had realized it was three entirely separate storylines.  I am sure someone more committed to analyzing the books could come up with a lot more themes and B plots that tie it together, but I only caught a couple.  I did find the reuse of the names to be unnecessarily confusing.  

Each of the books were incredibly depressing.  The misery the characters inherit and then create for themselves and those around them is beyond my emotional capacity for the kind of investment this story required.  And yet in many ways the writing, particularly with respect to  character development and the absolutely lovely, detailed descriptions of their misery, was so good that I was sucked into the stories--despite being incredibly confused about who people were and how they related to each other.  As if this wasn't enough, each of the three sections leaves us with a cliffhanger such that I can say that this book at the most unfulfilling ending I can ever remember a book having-- and it had three of them.  I left completely unsatisfied, despite the author having put in an incredible performance in many ways and despite the fact that I invested a lot of intellectual energy trying to keep up with the narrative and figure out what was happening. 

The number of characters alone, many of them introduced quickly at the same time and many of them with the same names, just made this even more complex.  I am all for an intellectual challenge, but I left feeling that I put in a lot of effort only to find that none of that effort actually mattered. Moreover, the story is full of intimate and state violence that was exhausting and was left unresolved and unanalyzed. 

Ultimately, this is one of those books that I feel like I should have loved, but that I ended up feeling like I wasn't intellectually up to the challenge of loving.  

​Do not recommend.
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This is an incredibly depressing read.  As if the apocalyptic pandemic plot isn't gloomy enough, the imagined world has death parks for kids where parents make the decision to euthanize their children when things get so back they can't stand to watch them die any longer and they put them on a rollercoaster that causes their death.  Morbid doesn't even come close to the right word.  

Ultimately, of course, the theme of the story is love--love of family and children, love of people, love of life, but the world is haunting and while the layers of the story are complicated and in many places intriguing, I found the depth of sorrow too much.

​Not recommended.

This book creeped me out.  The premise is that a highly contagious disease that makes you blind, but has no other symptoms, begins to quickly spread from Patient One to others and humanity is unable to maintain its humanity.  It is depressing, violent, and vile with vivid descriptions of dead and injured bodies and bodily functions that I could definitely have done without.  The book wasn't without intrigue, but in the midst of a global pandemic where I continue to be disappointed in the inability of individuals and communities to be kind and act for the collective good, it was just too much.  It again reminds me that in an actual apocalypse, I hope I am out in chapter 1 and that someone else can use my shoes and other things to get through to the end of the story because I am not interested in sticking around to watch the world fall apart and people turn on each other.

Not recommended.  

This post-climate-change-apocalypse novel includes a story line with a highly contagious disease that causes dementia and the ability to hear other people's thoughts.  It is set in a future in which most people do not remember where they came from, governments have all completely collapsed, most (but definitely not all) rich people have died, it is possible to have a life bond with an animal, and capitalism and corporatism have taken over.  It might not have been the best book to read during the pandemic.

I wasn't completely draw into this story, even though there was a lot to like about the world, the characters, and the plot.  Maybe it was because at the beginning of the book, while still reading the set-up about this world and the people in it, I got to thinking about the difference between accepting a changing world and being stuck trying to get back to the world before things changed, which was a fleeting theme in the backstory.  It really got me thinking about how hard the current pandemic has been for me on a personal level and I realized that this is in large part because I was treating it as temporary, as something that was a blip in life, instead of accepting that the world has changed and realizing that the sooner I adapt to the new reality, the sooner my unhappiness about it might pass.  In that respect, this book has inspired me to embrace this new way of being and to actively put into place the  things I need to be content here. Thinking about the ways in which this future world responded to crisis and how I am responding to this crisis really got me shifting my attitude in positive ways.

Other things to love here include that the future includes Queerness as part of its fabric, woven in seamlessly, the way it should be here and now, the connection with animals, and the fairly sophisticated treatment of socialism and capitalism.  I enjoyed the book, but because it had me thinking so much about my own situation in the world at the moment, the plot itself didn't hold my attention.  Overall, I give it the rare not NOT recommended.