What a great book to kick off the year! I cannot believe I had not read it before. It was wonderful, 5 stars, and I really enjoyed taking my time reading it because I didn’t want it to end, and I’m still thinking about it a lot.
So, this is a post-apocalyptic novel, one where the apocalyptic event was a pandemic. This particular pandemic was very fast and killed approximately 99% of the population. Here’s the thing I can’t stop thinking about. In the 20 years after the even world there are lots of the usual post apocalyptic things you might expect–no cars, electricity, people have scavenged, formed little towns, there are cuckoo and violent prophets, and the generation that has grown up in that 20 years don’t have any concept of air travel, internet, smart phones, etc. even though the older people do. And what’s kind of crazy is-it’s not like those things ceased to exist. There wasn’t an EMP. It’s just that without people to keep things going, they don’t keep going on their own. Who will run the power station? Of the few people left alive, do any happen to be scientists or robotics engineers or diesel mechanics or oil rig operators or what have you? The human knowledge of the world didn’t exactly go away-it was still in books. But it was no longer applicable. I really can’t stop thinking about that.
What I thought was great about this was the way the story was put together. All starting with an aging actor’s final performance in King Lear. His death curiously ends up bringing together a variety of people in the post apocalyptic world many years later. I liked it that the characters we followed all had some connection to him. Between King Lear and the Traveling Symphony and the Station Eleven comic book, it is nice to see the arts stubbornly sticking around even in humanity’s darkest times.
There were so many parts of this book that I found just deeply sad. They weren’t flashy bits, no dramatic deaths, just all very realistic and intensely sad things to think about. I found myself today thinking that if there was a pandemic I don’t think I want to be the brave survivor-I’d rather be the person who quickly dies in a couple hours.
This was a 5 star book to start the year!
The Last Book I Read 
Have you read World Made by Hand? it has a similar kind of premise- how people manage after most of the population is wiped out (in this case by atomic bombs). It had a lot about how things fell apart and just didn’t function because there weren’t enough people around to make it happen. Things I’d never think about going defunct like that….
I know of the book but think I haven’t actually read it. I should!!