The zombie survival guide

From what I'd heard about this book and what I had in mind that it was, it fell very flat. Sadly, bits people find clever, I find stupid. The things I thought were going to be clever ended up being something different and stupid. So, overall, I don't care for this book.

I'm was not a fan of zombie movies, but my husband is, so we've consumed quite a bit of zombie culture. Brooks is essentially making up his own type of zombie and then not-so-slyly cracking on every other rendition of the zombie genre and saying every one else is wrong. To me, this seems like an outsider coming to play in someone else's sandbox and changing all the rules.

Usually I give a book about 30 pages to give up. However, it has taken a week for me to read 10 pages. I need to read books a little faster than 10 pages a week, and I'm not going to waste 3 weeks on a book I'm not going to read. The 30 page rule used to be because that would give me about a half-hour with a book and if I didn't like it after that, then so be it. The fact that I haven't pulled this out on a bus ride during the past week to get 30 minutes to read shows that my level of interest from just the introduction is pretty poor.

I'm not sure I get this book. It is like two books glued together which kind of totally contradict each other and not quite sure what it wants to be overall.

The first half is a mildly interesting instruction manual to survive the zombie apocalypse. So, there are lots of lists of supplies (this many guns, this much water, etc). And there is some deep thinking about the realities of fighting zombies, i.e. wear tight clothes which can't be grasped, use these sorts of weapons instead of these others, etc.

It is sort of like Tolkien's Silmarillion, loads of back story to build new imagined worlds. It can be a bit tedious to wade through the lists and world building.

Then the second half becomes a completely different book. While the first half seems to imply that zombie attacks are well known and maybe a commonplace event in the world it is addressing. But the second half becomes a (imaginary) historical survey of zombie attacks (i.e. the Roman legions fighting zombies). It takes the position that only a select few know about these are there are vast cover up efforts by authorities. It kind of destroys the internal consistency of the book.

The second half does include much more actual storytelling (as opposed to lots of lists) and is probably much more interesting.