The Dog Stars

I loved Gary Paulsen's The Hatchet as a kid, and this feels like that book all grown up. It's a tale of one man's struggle with loneliness and survival in a world where most of the population has been wiped out by disease and the chaos that follows it. It's poetically written with powerful realism. A lovely and engaging book. ( )

Reason read: ROOT, RandomCAT: Dog Days of Summer challenge,Bingo features a dog
I've had this book since 2018 so I was happy to finally read it. I do like Dystopian/post apocalyptic books and this is one of those. In this one, populations have been wiped out by a man made viral accident, a super flue (sounds familiar?). This was written in 2012. Station 11 also is a post epidemic, 2014. So did these authors and these books promote the current not so pandemic and the government use of emergency measures. The book offers hope, violence, sex not handled so well. This is the first book by this author for me. I would read more. ( )

Like a lot of highly touted books, I found Heller's to be a bit disappointing. It takes a long time to get started, for one thing, and in the end the plot line is somewhat simplistic, hard to believe, and full of coincidences and wish fulfillment. The narrator, one of the survivors of an epidemic that kills most of the world's population, is also a bit unconvincing in his relationships with others (except for his beloved dog)--and he has absolutely no sense of time, which leads to the book's final (again wish fulfilling) events. The language of the book, while poetic (especially when he is quoting Chinese poetry) is sometimes effective and moving, but at other times is so totally removed from how folks actually speak that it doesn't help the novel's sense of reality. The best scenes, by far, are those of violence, when the narrator and his current ally have to defend themselves. Good thing he has allies who turn out to be gun nuts or Navy Seals (so sick of that trope). Compared to Cormac McCarthy's The Road, The Dog Stars is like a B-Movie. We do learn a bit about fuel for airplanes, however. I listened to the audiobook, and the narrator was excellent. ( )

Check out my review at:
http://www.shannonsbookbag.blogspot.com/2013/06/the-dog-stars-heller.html ( )

Whoa. This amazing book, which demands to be read s-l-o-w-l-y (due to Heller's inspired choice to subtly alter the protagonist's language, to reflect the fact that he's had almost no-one to talk to in nine years), is a perfect blend of the end-of-the-world brutality of Cormac McCarthy's The Road, with the loveliness of Nevil Shute's On the Beach. Extraordinary, realistic, and profoundly moving. ( )