Take a photo of a barcode or cover
3.5 AVERAGE
3.5 AVERAGE
dark
tense
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
N/A
Strong character development:
N/A
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
1912'de yazılmış 2013'de yaşanan bir vebayı anlatan bu kitabı günümüz koşullarında okumak çok tuhaf hissettirdi. Aşıya dair muhabbetlerin yine almanlardan çıkması çok trajikomik oldu. Kısa ama etkileyici bir kitap.
If I had read this at an earlier time, I would have found it merely preachy and heavy-handed and not particularly well-crafted; more of a secular tract about the evils of progress than anything else. Reading it now, however--well, I'm fucking terrified.
dark
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
Wow. I can't believe that this was written more than 100 years ago.
Written in 1910 and set in 2073, this is a novel about a deadly plague in 2013 that essential wipes out the human race. There's not a lot of story: an old man, "Granser" tells his plague story to some essentially wild boys in San Francisco, who are on the lookout for wolves and bears. The boys can't believe that something invisible did so much damage (kind of like current Republicans). The story is basically of how the "germ" hits San Francisco and Palo Alto. The victim of the plague dies within a couple of hours after showing its symptoms, but they don't realize at the time that the plague shows symptoms only at the end, and incubates in the victim for some time before. When people think the are safe after none of their comrades in the Chemistry Building at Stanford die after 2 days but that's when things get bad. Not a lot in the story, but it is either an early use or invention of some tropes that we're familiar with now from plague and zombie movies. A fast read, it's mostly interesting to see how London anticipates and uses those tropes, and this before the 1918 flu.
I liked it. It's fascinating to read a post-catastrophe dystopia written over 100 years ago. A terrible Plague strikes people who die rapidly (those descriptions were quite vivid), while the world retreats to a primitive stage.
London was sharp to estimate the population would be at around 8 billion in 2012. Some interesting ideas he thought about include that the speech, too, would change, become more crude. People are gathered in tribes and everyone is too brutalised from the perspective of the survivor- an aging English professor who tells his story to his grandsons, grieving over the loss of a finer, cultivated, arranged world.
Interesting.
London was sharp to estimate the population would be at around 8 billion in 2012. Some interesting ideas he thought about include that the speech, too, would change, become more crude. People are gathered in tribes and everyone is too brutalised from the perspective of the survivor- an aging English professor who tells his story to his grandsons, grieving over the loss of a finer, cultivated, arranged world.
Interesting.
Thought it would be an apt novella for the Age of COVID. It was. It made some interesting prognostications and overall wasn't a bad read, but it was not particularly fun or well written or any other quality that could make it deserve a higher rating.
I appreciated the writing style (especially the diction of the younger, post-Scarlet Plague boys), but otherwise the story was very devoid of action and not what I was expecting from a post-apocalyptic novel.
dark
reflective
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated