Often I do not have time to read as much as I would like and indeed late March and April is the crux of this time for me with the build up to and the actual event of Salute in London. Salute is the only wargame show which I attend directly along with the company and its a big task all around. So I often listen to audio books.
I have done this for many years but over time the technology to allow this has changed dramatically. Back in the 1990’s it was a big box of cassette tapes which then gave way to a portable CD walkman and in turn a small MP3 player with ear buds. In the last couple of years it has become a smart phone (which can carry about 50,000 cassettes!) and the source of the audio has changed too. I used to use the local libraries and purchase the odd box set too. Then the same with CD’s. But once everything went digital this all changed too. MP3 files for audio books and now it seems YouTube has literally thousands of audio books on it which are essentially free to listen to. This can be done online by going to Youtube.
Anyhoo….
I own both of Max Brooks books on the Zombie Wars, the Survival Guide and World War Z. Both are excellent and both are unlike the vast majority of cookie cutter zombie fiction. Where the Zombie Survival Guide is a practical manual much in the same vein as infantry training guides and such (makes you shiver to think that it is actually real and has just been popped into our world from some other dimension) the other book, this one, is a diary account like tale of a war finished already. Its evocative, its brutal and while often deeply personal it is also detached from what it is telling you overall. Brooks does a great job in telling you of the end of the world without actually showing it to you in the ‘big picture’. You get it in little chunks from seemingly random people. It works very well.
The voice acting is great as well. If you are a fan of zombie books but are looking for something more than shuffle and bite check it out and do it in a way that allows you to work on like I did while enjoying it. Go to YouTube.
GBS
I have not read World War Z, but it is on my list. I did read the description of the book before, and that was really the reason for my interest in it. I don’t really like zombie movies. Zombieapocalypse as a plot element is chosen by script writers and directors mainly because it’s cheap. Actors with makeup are after all cost less than CGI/animatronic robots. But I know WWZ is different in that respect, and that it is also a book that is meant to raise some questions about the Zombie genre, and make people think deeper on the subjects of war and survival. And that is what good Sci-Fi literature is about, really, using the setting as a vehicle to bring to the surface the extremes of human emotion.
But onto the reading (or listening) list it gets. Currently listening to the Frank L Baum “OZ” series of books which I got from Librivox. 🙂
Hello Sam,
I enjoyed the book and enjoyed listening to it as well. As I said its not the norm as the Zombies are more of a backdrop to the human story, its a good book.
I have some titles from Libravox but I have found the quality to be sketchy at times.
Next time we meet up I will have to lend you my Terry Pratchett collection.
GBS