Afraid to sleep

Well, here we are once again after a prolonged absence on my part. I'd like to say it will never happen again but I'm now in the thick of Summer Reading at work and so I'm fairly certain it will happen again. I had planned to have a bunch of posts written so that I would only have to publish and promote but instead I'm finding a giant writer's block in my path. *sigh* At any rate, if you're reading this I've somehow managed to cobble something hopefully coherent together and I'm going to try to get back on schedule.

The Dreamers by Karen Thompson Walker is a dystopian sci-fi novel that takes place in a small town in California. (Is it still dystopian/apocalyptic if it's contained in one area?) The book begins with a young girl in college who is a bit of a misfit on her dorm floor. She doesn't even have much of a relationship with her roommate...and then that roommate doesn't wake up the next morning. This is the start of a sleeping sickness that spreads throughout the city radiating out from the college campus. Written with multiple narrative lines and only a few likable characters this probably isn't the one for you if you're looking for a more straightforward contemporary fiction. This book explores what happens when a biological contagion that is not fully understood (and clearly not prepared for) rapidly spreads and the ensuing chaos. I'm talking about governmental influence, hazmat suits, and lock-down quarantine with all the requisite fear and panic, ya'll. This is disaster relief (contemporary fiction style) meets sci-fi (those afflicted are experiencing REM i.e. dreaming...and it might be precognition). This was a fast paced book (I zipped right through it) which I enjoyed for the most part but I was left feeling like there were a lot of loose ends that the author didn't adequately tie off. So this was ultimately a middle of the road read for me. 5/10

PS Full transparency: I read this book back at the beginning of April. So since I average 1-2 books a week you can imagine just how far behind I really am. O_O

Source: Amazon

What's Up Next: Dread Nation: Rise Up by Justina Ireland

What I'm Currently Reading: A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness

**If you're interested in buying this book or any books really, you can click here or here. The first will re-direct you to AbeBooks and the second will re-direct you to The Book Depository. These are great websites for purchasing books (AbeBooks carries inexpensive used and out-of-print books and The Book Depository ships free everywhere in the world). Full disclosure: I will receive a commission on all sales made by following either of these links. I wouldn't recommend a site that I didn't use and you are under no obligation to purchase anything. :-) **

The endurance of the human spirit or The Halifax Disaster

It's a little unsettling to me that prior to reading Curse of the Narrows I had never heard of the explosion that caused so much devastation in Halifax, Nova Scotia on December 6, 1917. When the munitions ship, Mont Blanc, collided with the Belgian Relief vessel, Imo, on that fateful day none of the inhabitants in Richmond could have predicted the loss that their town would incur. I have to admit that at the outset of this book I was struggling to comprehend what was occurring as much of the language was 'nautical' in nature which I've always found confusing. However, once Mac Donald began discussing the 'human element' I was hooked. Basically, the entire town was decimated in a matter of moments and thousands were killed, injured, orphaned, and made homeless. Oppenheimer used the statistics from the blast to calculate the effects of an atomic bomb (and used these calculations to create the bombs used in Nagasaki and Hiroshima). One of the unique factors in this event was that there was an historian on the ground that immediately began rounding up accounts and taking interviews in order to preserve the details of the day and the days and months preceding it. I highly encourage any fans of history (in particular WWI-era) to give this book a try. Additionally, the Appendix and Notes at the end of the book were absolutely phenomenal which is always one of my favorite parts in any nonfiction work and if you aren't reading these I highly encourage you to do so. :-D

Next up is Horrorstor (imagine the last 'o' has those little dots over it) by Grady Hendrix. I'm already impressed with the book based on its packaging (yeah, yeah don't judge a book blah blah blah) because it looks like a retail catalog. The reason for this is that the setting for the book is a furniture superstore called Orsk. When five employees agree to spend the night in the store to discover who is causing havoc each night they discover more than they had bargained for. O_O It's a horror story in a furniture store! (I am genuinely wary of mannequins so I really hope they don't turn out to be the baddies in this.) I can't wait to report back to you guys with my review!!