***SPOILERS FOR WORLD WAR Z BY MAX BROOKS***
Hello Internet!
I hope everyone is doing well and staying healthy! I also hope that all the American readers out there enjoyed their Thanksgivings. I know that I ate enough Turkey and mashed potatoes to feed a small army. Or at least it felt like that. After several days of eating nothing but Thanksgiving leftovers, I had to eat something else. Actually while I was home visiting friends and family, I managed to go to the local Mexican Food Place and got an amazing burrito. It was incredible. Anyway, I’m back from my short break away and I want to talk about the fact that I have recently gotten into audiobooks. But before I talk about that, I want to quickly talk about the pieces I’ve published recently.
On Thanksgiving I published a Special Weekly Blog all about Thanksgiving. Obviously it had more relevance the day it came out, but it’s still a good read if you want to read all about what I’m thankful for this year. Spoiler alert it’s things like my health and modern medicine, my friends and family, the ability to pay my bills, and all of the wonderful readers out there. That’s right, I’m thankful for you, the person who is reading this right now, and everyone else who reads my stuff and supports me. So thanks for doing that! I really appreciate it. Then on Wednesday, I published a Poem titled “Christmas Lights”. Thanksgiving is over and now it’s time for the Christmas season. You know what that means. It’s time to put up the Christmas tree and hang some Christmas lights. Truly I am very excited for Christmas this year (Or really any year. Christmas is my favorite holiday.) and I’ve already got the tree up in the apartment. I really do love Christmas lights and this Poem touches on that point. Finally, on Saturday I published the final chapter of my Pokemon Fanficiton series – Pokémon HGSS #35: Epilogue. This is a series I started in late 2018 and decided I would bring back over the summer. I hoped to be able to wrap up Jonathan and Beatrice’s journey through the Johto region by the end of summer, and whoops, it’s December now. But that’s alright. Spacing out this series helped me think about the story more and I’m happy with how it ended. I also gave a little tease if I ever want to continue on with the series. Maybe Gen 1 nostalgia will be big in 2023 and I’ll bring it back, who knows!? For now I’m happy with the series as a whole. I hope that you will give it a read if you haven’t already. Honestly, you should read any or all of those past pieces if you haven’t already.
Moving on from the pieces I’ve recently published to something I’ve recently been doing. Now I currently work from home and a lot of the time I will have videos or music playing on my phone while I work. This is how I catch up on all my favorite YouTubers as well as Critical Role since I can’t watch all of it live on Thursday nights. But sometimes I just don’t have anything to watch or listen to. Sure I could listen to the same songs over and over again or catch up on High Rollers since I’m now four weeks behind.. But maybe I’m not in the mood. Well recently I discovered these things called audiobooks. Well I didn’t discover them. I’ve known about audiobooks for a long long time. I actually remember checking out some books on tape from my local library when I was a kid to listen to when my family would go on vacation and we would be in the car for hours. But for me in my adult life, I never really found the time for audiobooks. I don’t have the time to read books (Ok I probably do but I’m also bad at time management so there, you got me) let alone listen to them. And my brain won’t just let me sit there and listen to something. I need to engage all my senses at once. Audiobooks didn’t seem like a good fit for me. However, after talking to my roommate about how much I love World War Z by Max Brooks and talking about how much I wanted to listen to the Audiobook, I finally just did it. I got the Audiobook and listened to it. Now I wish that this Blog all about Audiobooks was sponsored by someone like I don’t know…Audible… but it’s not because I’m just a tiny blog on a website and no one pays me to do this. Also even though I’m like 90% sure that the version I listened to was exclusive to Audible, I actually found another website that had it for free. So probably not going to get sponsored if I listen to the pirated version…ummm… moving on! I listened to the World War Z audiobook and I love it. So let me talk about it. Also spoilers for this amazing book. Go read it or listen to it because it’s so good!
As you may or may not know, World War Z is a Zombie Apocalypse novel that was published in 2006. It is also the name of a horrible movie that came out in 2013 which, in my opinion, turns a fantastic novel into a boring, generic zombie movie which completely disregards what makes World War Z so awesome to begin with. Like I know that over the past couple decades we’ve been bombarded with zombies. The Walking Dead and all it’s spin offs take up 99% of AMC’s programming. I get that we are oversaturated with zombie stuff. But I believe that World War Z is one of the greats that outshines many in this wide ocean full of zombie media properties. What sets World War Z apart is that 1) It’s narrative structure of having one person interviewing people from all over the world about their experiences during the rise and fall of the zombie plague and 2) The amount of world-building that Max Brooks does. You can tell by reading or listening to World War Z, that Max Brooks did a ton of research into politics, geography, economics, history, epidemiology (the study of disease), and so much more when he wrote this book. Yes World War Z is about zombies but it’s really about how a global pandemic affects things like the government, the military, the medical field, advertising, religion, celebrity culture, etc. World War Z is a collection of stories told from all over the world from so many different perspectives. You can go from “What was it like to try to escape to Canada during the Zombie Apocalypse” to “What was it like living in a military submarine during a civil war during a Zombie Apocalypse” to “What would the US military be doing when the US was pushed to the brink during the Zombie Apocalypse” to “What would it be like to be on the International Space Station when the Zombie Apocalypse breaks out on Earth” all in a few chapters. All of these ideas are really well thought out and it really paints a picture of not only how a single individual person or group would survive, but how the whole world would be affected. It’s truly a global scale worth of stories told through the lense of a guy just sitting down and interviewing survivors. That’s why World War Z is so good and it is one of my favorite books.
I can go on all day about the reasons I like World War Z as a novel, but what about as an Audiobook? That’s what this Blog is all about right? Right you are. I have read World War Z many times, but this was the first time I had ever listened to the Audiobook. I had heard it was good and it was really good. I listened to the “Complete Edition” which was almost more like a radio play. It was so well voice acted and it had some incredible people reading the parts. Max Brooks is the narrator/interviewer and I think he does a great job at it. Then there are some great actors that lend their talents to the Audiobook including Mark Hamill, Alan Alda, Martin Scorsese, Simon Pegg, and more. Mark Hamill and Alan Alda really stand out to me as wonderful performances which really highlight the fantastic writing. This all ties back to my point that World War Z stands out because of the narrative structure. It’s not about one character and their story. It’s about a whole collection of stories that helps touch on all corners of the world throughout the history of the Zombie Apocalypse.
And having all these wonderful actors come in and read these parts helps each story have its own unique voice. There is one story in World War Z where the interviewer visits a home for feral children and speaks to this woman named Sharon who was a feral child during the Zombie outbreak and is mentally a four year old. The voice acting during this part was so good that it was almost haunting. The actress playing this woman and having this child-like voice and doing the child-like mannerisms was just so good that after that part ended, I had to stop listening for a bit. Again, I have to praise the writing of the story, but the acting just brought it to a whole other level. Listening to it also made me realize how much the book goes back to characters and follows their stories. Reading through World War Z, I would sometimes forget names or not realize characters are connected, but when I listened to it, the distinct voices made me realize that some characters actually come back several times throughout the book. On top of that, listening to it made me realize how much care went into making this audiobook. When I say it is almost more like a radio play because of the voice acting, that is a compliment. It’s not just people reading lines, it’s acting. I don’t have a lot of experience with audiobooks so maybe a lot of audiobooks are like that, but I definitely want to praise World War Z for being a well acted audiobook.
So what did I think of The World War Z Audiobook overall? Well I loved it! I love the novel and I think that the audiobook does a great job of highlighting what makes the novel so good. The writing of the novel is fantastic and the acting done by the voice actors makes it even better. Obviously I’m going to favor reading the novel, but if you are someone who enjoys audiobooks or just doesn’t have the time to read the book, I highly recommend you listen to the audiobook of World War Z. It’s just such a great story and I think it really has something for everyone, even if you aren’t that big on the zombie genre.
Thank you so much for reading that Weekly Blog all about The World War Z Audiobook. Hopefully you enjoyed reading my thoughts on the novel and the audiobook. If you really liked it, you can leave a Like letting me know you enjoyed it. You can also leave a comment. Have you listened to this audiobook? Have you read World War Z? Are you a big audiobook listener? Do you have any suggestions for audiobooks I should check out? Feel free to leave your thoughts and suggestions down in the comments. I’d love to chat with anyone and everyone about World War Z because I truly love this novel/audiobook. If you are new here or if you just want to see more of the stuff I write, I highly recommend that you Follow me here on WordPress. Following me puts the stuff I write in your reader feed and helps me expand my community here on WordPress. I’m trying to build a positive and creative community and we are getting really close to 800 Followers. I’d love to hit that number before the end of the year and you can help make that happen. I really appreciate all the love and support I get from readers new and old and I’m really thankful for all the people who read my stuff and seem to enjoy it. You really make my day/week/month/year by just reading the stuff I write.
Thank you again for the support and I hope you have a wonderful week!
-Allen_The_Writer
Header Photo Credit to Audible (Again, not a sponsor)
https://www.audible.com/pd/World-War-Z-The-Complete-Edition-Audiobook/B00BIKAVHS
Allen The Writer 