The Girl with All the Gifts (4), M. R. Carey

Update: You guys! I finally did the .2 second google search to figure out how to add a spoiler button. Welcome to 2015, blog. Or 2000. Whatever. I am awkwardly slogging through my backlog of books that I never wrote blog posts about because I'm reading a really "good" book that is too long ("good" = beautiful/intriguing/incapable of holding my attention with the surplus of shiny unicorns surrounding my tiny brain). So things may be minimalist for awhile. 

ALSO: Apologies to the 10-12 people who have been clicking on my blog post when it comes up for the last TWO MONTHS. I like to believe its the same 10 people who desperately crave my book reviews, who click each time. To you ten, I apologize. I thought if I scheduled a post for every week it would mean that I would actually write the posts, at last. Instead I wrote papers. Lots of papers. I also read lots of books. So I still had a couple weeks of empty blog posts when I stopped it today. And I read like 20 more books. The Stack of blog posts is looking as insurmountable as The Stack of to read books I have on my shelf. 

Today, I am recovered and may write more posts. I may also do the things I should be doing, the jury's still out on that one. If I ever catch up it will be a Christmas miracle. I assume, if it happens, it will be around Christmas time. 

I got really excited about this book when I stumbled upon it on Goodreads and read the entire 5+ chapters excerpt in one sitting. But then I didn't buy the book for awhile because I was poor and in the middle of eight books and I think I was in finals.

Melanie is the brightest girl in her class. Every day soldiers come to her room to escort her to her classroom. Some days her teacher is one person, some days another. The best days are the Miss. Justineau days.

It's more fun if you discover what this book is about as you read it, but if you're not that kind of person, I will talk more about what's going on at the end of this post. So skip that if you want to read the book with a fresh outlook.


Click below if you want the first couple chapters of the book spoiled for you. It's more fun if you don't know...

Melanie and the other children are zombies. They are locked into wheelchairs so they cannot attack the humans. They shower in chemicals and eat maggots once a week. The humans that work with them get sprayed down with chemicals to block their scent so the zombie children don't want to attack them

Reading this book from a self-aware zombie's perspective was fascinating. Having a zombie/human student/teacher relationship to discuss the love we have for each other was so great. I devoured this book.

World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War (5)

 Well I just started my free trial of Audible. So far I’m pretty excited. Also, so far I haven’t paid for anything so that makes it extra exciting.

What is Audible?

Basically Audible is like Netflix, but for audiobooks. And you keep the book. And you only get (X) number amount (I chose one). So basically you’re just buying audiobooks at a steeply discounted rate because you’re signing on to buy one (or whatever you choose) a month.

I would think it was even cooler if it was more like Netflix/the library and you get one at a time. I realize that the library has this through OverDrive, but I’ve never gotten overdrive to work with audiobooks so either a) I’m an idiot or b) it’s a bad service. (Now I feel my bi-annual need to try it again.)

What I like about it is that you deal in terms of credits. So I’m signed up for one credit a month, 1 audiobook is 1 credit, so if it takes me a little over a month to listen to the audiobook, I still have my 1 saved up. If I don’t listen to audiobooks for a month after that, now I have 2, and then if it gets cold and I sit around knitting and binge-listening to audiobooks, I can blow through those two I have saved up.

Why are you such a geek, Jana?

I have a really hard time running. I get so bored. And I saw this little graphic about people who listen to audiobooks and it reminded me that I should try running with an audiobook. I figured I would probably like it because I loved running with Zombies, Run! but then I realized I was running out of episodes and stopped using it because I wanted to save it for an extra special run (read: I stopped running). So, naturally, the audiobook I chose was World War Z, in sticking with the running-from zombies theme.

I come here to read reviews, not have you try to sell me things

Right, right, sorry. World War Z is written as a history of the zombie war, with many short stories loosely strung together by the researcher, Max Brooks.

And I am loving this in audiobook style. I feel that this is the only way to read this book, actually. The full title is World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War. It is meant to be listened to. The voice actors are great, and there’s a teensy bit of soundtrack between chapters.

Normally, I have a hard time with the short story format (as you heard from my This is How You Lose Her review). I just can’t read a string of short stories the same way I can marathon-read a book. It feels weird dipping in and out of characters like that. So I’ll try and set up a system for how to read them, like at bedtime, but it generally falls apart if I haven’t finished it by the end of a week. What’s great about this is I have a system set up, I can listen to it while I’m running or in the car. Hopefully I will run often enough that this works, and the biggest problem is that when I’m done running I want to keep listening to it. And there are so many things you can do while listening to audiobooks! Cleaning! Cooking! All of these things I am pretty bad at doing because you can’t do them while your nose is shoved in a book.

It also helps keep me away from my major vice of sitting and reading the entirety of facebook, which I do a lot, but less when I have a good book to shove my nose into. You can’t read and listen at the same time, though lord knows I’ve tried.

RUN. FASTER.

What I really love about World War Z is that you get the adventure of zombies without that really horrifying apocalyptic moments that you get in most zombie movies. The “oh god, they’re going to win, we’re all going to die, and even if we live what’s the point since all we’re going to do for the rest of our miserable existence is keep fighting,” moment. I hate that moment. It is too depressing and stressful. This book is written after the zombie war, telling stories of the survivors. So the voices you hear are people who lived. They’ve seen some really horrifying things, so it’s still kind of terrifying and depressing (I was almost crying during one of my runs), but at least you know that your narrators have survived, and soon you will find out how the zombies were eradicated and humanity was rebuilt. Or whatever happened. I’m only ¼ of the way through the book. You’re right, I shouldn’t write a review on ¼ of a book. Sue me. 

UPDATE: Ok, I didn't actually post this before I finished the audiobook, but I liked what I wrote so I'm just going to post it anyway. All I have to add is that I wish I had binge-listened to it because whenever I "save" something and try not to burn through it even though I want to, I basically stop listening to it or reading it. Also I got OverDrive to work. The library app on my phone is my new best friend. Except if I try to check out an e-book it gives me the stupid non-kindle version which I can't read on my kindle which defeats the whole purpose. But audiobooks work fine. 

Yay! library your technology has caught up with the rest of the world.