I Hope You Find Me

Written By Trish Marie Dawson
Original Publication Date: 2012

Rating: 3 and a Half Stars

Review:

Riley survives, she doesn't know how or why, but she survives the Red Death.  The rest of the world has been wiped out by plague, her two children, her ex-husband.  She and Zoey, her faithful dog, set out for the city when they run out of water, though Riley doesn't actually know what she plans to do.  What she does know is that before the phones went out, she called everyone she knew and told them that if they made it to her house that she'd leave them a trail.  She leaves notes everywhere she stops, telling the people who she hopes will find her where she plans to go next.

In the city, she meets Conner, who had been in town on business when the plague closed the airport and wiped out everything he loved, across the pond.  He brings her back to the hotel that he's been living in, that has a generator and therefore the food hasn't gone bad and there's running water.  She finds herself drawn to him and stays with him, until someone does follow Riley's notes to them at the hotel.  The new couple of people leave the hotel in the night, and not on good terms with Conner and Riley.

Riley and Conner decide to move on after having an experience in the city with the dead that they cannot explain.  They go into the mountains to a "green" resort, figuring that it would be more likely to be sustainable and still have power. (Considering the world has been dead a couple months, a lot of these places seem to still have hot water)  There they meet up with various people, and what follows makes the bulk of the story.

The book was pretty enjoyable, on readability and flow it gets five stars.  On the creepy dead ghosts, it gets five stars.  On the journey it gets five stars.  Where it loses stars is that Riley must have a goddamned golden vagina.  At one point in the novel, the romance becomes a love pentagram, for Godssake.  Every male who meets Riley, wants her.  Fucking ridiculous, and the romance ended up taking up a bulk of the story, the dead things were creepy as fuck and I wanted to hear more about them, have more experiences with them, anything to do with them, really.

Conner and Riley were sort of an oddball matchup.  I enjoyed it, even though she kissed everyone else, but what I realized is that they're something like if Frannie and Larry Underwood were the main characters in The Stand, instead of Frannie and Stu.

The Stand, this book was not...  Entertaining, however, this book definitely was.

The Last Myth: What the Rise of Apocalyptic Thinking Tells Us About America

Written By Mathew Barrett Gross and Mel Gilles
Original Publication Date: 2011

Rating: 2 Out of Five Stars

Book Notes:

Page 23

We really did delude ourselves, as a culture, in the 90s that we were living in a never-ending Golden Age.

Page 67
The apocalypse is new to our era; the nature of Endings that were in other cultures were also Beginnings.  The cycle of living was important.  It's our understanding of history as linear and unique, rather than cyclical and mythologically repetitive that created the idea of the END.

Review:

First of all, I received this book in a Goodreads giveaway, back in ...March?  I kept trying to pick it up, I swear!  For some reason it just sat on my bedside table, totally ignored.  I'd put it on my bedside table, ignore it, put it away, rinse and repeat.

Turns out my instincts were right.  It's not really worth reading.  The first couple of chapters are very interesting.  Those chapters are a conversation of when apocalyptic thinking first existed.  In very early history, there was no history as we understand it today.  Everything was cyclical and a re-creation of a myth. Nothing ever truly ended, because it was always reborn as a beginning.  It was when humanity started thinking of history as linear, as we do today, that apocalyptic thinking was even possible.  When history was cyclical, apocalypse as was understand it today wasn't possible, but when history became a straight (random) line, we wanted to know when that line would end.

For many hundreds of years, the apocalypse-thought-process didn't even focus so much on the end, but on what came after.  Isrealites lost their homes over and over and over again, but because they believed that after the judgement day came, they'd have everything - more than they could ever have imagined - this is why they never lost hope.  The apocalyptic thought was actually a positive!

From those two points, we can very clearly see how the advent of science created an apocalyptic thought process that focuses more on the end, than on what comes after the end.

Alright, that was interesting - it really was.  I enjoyed the first 100 pages or so.  Then all of a sudden, it got repetitive.  The sentence structures felt like they'd simply been transplanted from earlier in the book.  They couldn't even bother to write new sentences!?  Copy Pasta is not how to make an interesting book.  Maybe if they'd simply focused on the history, or hell, even ended the book after those 100 pages, it would have gotten a higher rating.  But once it hit the 100 page mark, I felt like I was re-reading what had already been said.

Truth be told, I skimmed the last 50 pages or so.