02/2009 Winner: "World War Z: An Oral History Of The Zombie War" by Max Brooks

GWC Community Book Club Winning Nominees and Polls
#21

So I just read World War Z. Well, am reading… I have about 80 pages left. It. Is. Amazing. I have looked forward to having my 20m to read before bed each night of the last week more than I have in a good long while. I am not sure what it is that makes the book so compelling. Perhaps the verissimilitude in the structure and the voices (I keep thinking of the docu-dramas that are very popular right now which explore the Iraq war) and in the way that all the actions seem so logical.

To revive a dead thread (or perhaps just make it reanimate), what are people’s favorite vignettes from WWZ? Mine:

-Mets Fan and the Air Force pilot
-the story of what happened to Cuba
-the bombing of Kiev

#22

My favorites are I think I probably listed them in this topic before…apparently not.

Uh let’s see.
Any of Todd Wainyo’s stories
Old World Castles story
French Underground story
The Japanese kid (I was gonna say the weeaboo kid but that doesn’t work cause he’s Japanese…and living in Japan)

#23

Excellent! I absolutely loved The Zombie Survival Guide. I’ll have to pick this up.

#24

I remember seeing this and the Survival Guide a while ago but never got round to buying it and kinda forgot about it. I may have to track it down now though thanks to you guys. :smiley:

#25

I just started reading this and am deeply in love with it! I’m not a zombie genre fan in the least, but this book isn’t really about them, it’s about the survivors and their stories. I think Brooks handled this brilliantly - with just enough realism without going over the edge into technobabble. Just great writing and great science fiction that is also intellectually stimulating without being dry at all.

#26

What made me love WWZ so much is that the stories felt so real that I couldn’t get them out of my head. I would hear something and go straight to, “Well, this relates to the hypothetical zombie apocalypse because…” I totally even had a pillow-talk discussion of how zombie’s like Brooks’ could come to exist because it’s just so interesting to think about that it had my attention. Eventually she smacked me and said, “Enough of this!”

#27

Heh. I can relate.

#28

This book was a-frakkin-mazing! i’d higly recommend it to anyone. Even those whoa re not horror fans would likely enjoy it. IMHO :smiley:

#29

The Outbreak

Is anyone else playing this? It’s an interactive zombie movie, I just started playing it. Looks like fun.

#30

I messed with it a bit, but didn’t bother finishing it. It is fun, but dying can get tedious.

If you haven’t seen it, it’s pretty much a video version of a choose-your-own-adventure novel.

#31

I just finished it. I have to say, I had expected more of it.

#32

What I really didn’t like about The Outbreak was that the first choice decided whether you eventually lived or died

#33

Based on this thread I have bought the book…will return when complete!

#34

AWESOME book

#35

Enjoy Solai! As noted in previous posts however, be prepared for your friends and family to look at you like you’ve gone mad when you begin many sentences with “well, that’s a lot like what happened in the Zombie apocalypse,” or as I did the other night at a dinner party, “the war on terror reminds me a lot of world war z in that in both cases we faced situations in which everything we knew about warfare was basically useless.”

#36

That’s not quite an accurate analogy. If you said WWZ was roughly 100x worse than the WOT in that way I could agree

#37

it’s so true that it’s almost not funny any more

#38

Dios de FRAKKING Mios! Just in case y’all haven’t seen this, here’s a video intro of Brooks’ next project, a graphic novel titled Zombie Survival Guide: Recorded Attacks http://www.randomhouse.com/crown/recordedattacks/

I can’t wait to see what he comes up with next!

#39

Spring 09? Apparently I can’t have any fun until next year.

#40

I can’t wait to ahem acquire that man. There’s already like. Something else he’s done zombies but I haven’t gotten my hands on it just yet