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5 Great Books About the End of the World

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CatsCradle

It’s coming on Thursday.

Doomsday.

Well, maybe not the true “End of the World,” but financial collapse and the end of our collective 401(K) plans. Hopefully, the less extreme elements of the Republican Party will come to their senses and save us from this dismal fate.

If not we can always cuddled up in the fallout shelter with a good book.

Here are my 5 favorite books about the end of it all.

THE STAND

Stephen King wrote “The Stand” all the way back in 1978 – but it still holds up. A super flu – nicknamed Captain Trips – sweeps across the globe and kills 99 percent of humanity. The ragtag collection of survivors have to deal with all kinds of issues – like what to do with a lot of dead bodies. They fall into two camps: Good and Evil. The good in Boulder, Colorado and the evil in, well, Las Vegas, of course. I don’t think King picked Boulder because it’s a liberal stronghold or Vegas because it is conservative – but heck it works for me.

THE ROAD

Don’t read Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” if you have any suicidal tendencies because it may be one of the bleakest novels ever written. If you can get through it without shedding a tear you may already be a member of the Tea Party. The story is about a man and his son as they try to survive in a world without a sky and without any nature. There are no trees. No flowers. Nothing, but a scarred landscape of ash and misery. The two follow a road to the ocean where they hope to find some remnant of civilization.

WORLD WAR Z

Max Brooks did the impossible. He wrote a literary zombie novel. World War Z takes place 10 years after a zombie apocalypse. It compiles stories from all over the world about how individuals survived the plague of Republicans undead. It is compelling, action-packed and also taps into what makes us human. An amazing achievement for a book about zombies.

I AM LEGEND

From zombies to Tea Party members blood-sucking vampires. Richard Matheson gives us both an End of the World yarn about the last surviving human in a city infected by human beings transformed by a virus into vampires. But he also gives us a real vampire tale – when vampires were horrendous, misshapen monsters instead of GQ models with pouty lips.

CAT’S CRADLE

It would have been fun to get Kurt Vonnegut’s take on the pending default and government shutdown. He was no fan of totalitarian extremists so it is fair to say he would not have like the Tea Party. Instead, we get his wonderful and hilarious novel “Cat’s Cradle.” Let’s just hope that Ice-9 is fiction and isn’t something the Republicans are going to roll out on Thursday. Get ready to laugh, but cry at the same time as Vonnegut’s satire guts modern man and all our foibles.

Have an End of the World novel you’d like to recommend? Please do!



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