It gets stranger and stranger dealing with [some web sites]. Sometimes, you contact customer service to find out why [some major project] was treated like [something bad], and receive a not so positive response for such a simple question. You then mention it on your blog as a heads up to other people who might have the same problem happen, then find out that [some web sites] use search engines to [some form of tracking] anyone who says [something negative] about [some websites]. If you read the post earlier, you know what I mean.
It's an inconvenience to receive e-mails from [some web site]'s [some employee] because you dared to question logic. My idea of fun? Not deleting and redoing posts because [some web site] suddenly cares about [someone's feedback]. Let's just say: not working with [some web site] anymore. So the next project is removing [some content] from [some website] so there isn't even the temptation to mention [some website] in the blog.
Let's say: if I ever wound up needing [some unpaid college laborers], I wouldn't waste everyone's time and efforts having [some unpaid college laborers] search for any comments about [some web site]. Confusing? Yes. Yes it is. And awfully petty, too.
Contemporary Rec: World War Z by Max Brooks
If an alternate history/science fiction/horror novel is so convincingly written as a chronicle of a war that never existed that it winds up in non-fiction sections of some libraries, it had to do something well, right? Right. That's the case with World War Z by Max Brooks.
Yes. The Max Brooks who wrote the checkout counter impulse-buy-zone favorite The Zombie Survival Guide. Yes, the very same book that many of my friends have purchased for me without handing over a gift receipt. That dog-eared book on the end of the book shelf signed by the man himself at a horror convention. That Max Brooks.
How do you take an almost absurd camp-fest and give it a sequel without repeating yourself? By tapping into your college degree in history and writing what could be the most insightful account of the zombie war, aka World War Z, ever known to man. Naturally.
Following an unspecified ten year period of history, Brooks travels around the globe to interview survivors of the zombie conflict. The results are printed in World War Z. And they feel real. But they're not. It's hard to describe it in terms of fiction. It is.
If you've read the Survival Guide, you'll recognize many of the techniques (successful and lethal) that the survivors speak of. But it's not a comedic novel. It's drama. And it's good. I've come to the conclusion that I really can't do justice to this book. I can only urge you to visit your library or local bookstore and read the first few pages. It only gets better from there.
There's a recent paperback edition that costs a lot less, but the text is comparatively tiny. It might be worth it to go with the hardcover. I don't think my eyes would have held up long enough to get through the paperback.
Labels: contemporary rec