Zone One discussion

I decided on a whim to peruse my local library, with book list in hand. I found this. It was one of those can't put it down to pee kind of books. I haven't been that caught up in a character in a long time. I will have to purchase this and find it a home on my shelf.

I DID love it. Colson Whitehead has such a way with words, doesn't he? I found Zone One very contemplative compared to some of his other books. It's a thinking person's Zombie Novel.
My favorite of his, though, still remains 'Apex Hides the Hurt'. It has undertones of madcap, and that luscious language he has a knack for. It's not ANYTHING like Zone One at all.

No...I found it slow-paced, wordy, and plain boring. The main character was unlikable...for a better semi-literary zombie story, you'll be better of with Justin Cronin.

I feel that it was a great play on how humans would behave. What would we do with the loss of our culture and sense of ourselves? I don't know if you were really supposed to like the main character, he was afterall a hopelessly average guy. Mediocre really.

I loved the words but the book was quite dull to me.

I read this for a book club and ended up loving it. I never would have chosen it on my own -- zombies are not my thing. That's the beauty of a book club, though. Sometimes you read something great you never would have discovered otherwise.

I loved this book. It was more of a literary novel with just that hint of dystopian/zombie craziness in the first half and the action really picks up in the second half. It was both edifying as a reader AND entertaining!

This book was too slow for me and the "flowery" language even slowed the pace down more. I read books for paradigm shifts and development of characters so those tend to be slow anyways but this book seemed to set out as an adventure book and just stalled for me. Though, I loved the idea that the era of the "average guy" rests within a zombie apocalypse.

Some of the self-consciously showy prose irritated me. Try "The Intuitionist", his debut. Much, much better.

I absolutely adored this book. One of my all time best, but I can't say it's better than The Intuitionist. Still, the best literary zombie book by such a large margin.

Agreed. This book was a distinct pleasure, and I don't even like the genre.

I liked the imagery of a zombie clean-up in Manhattan. The main character wasn't the most likable of characters, but I didn't think he was all bad. He survived that long, didn't he? A person has to have a certain cautious quality to last that long in such a world. It's been a while since I read it, but I really liked it.

I liked it a lot. The major characters seemed very believable insofar as, how would people really act in such desperate circumstances? Mark Spitz was nostalgic for the lost world, but took a strange relish in his ability to survive in the post-apocalypse, and he steadfastly refused to indulge in hope of a better future, which would be nothing but a distraction. I found these qualities very interesting.