The Last Man

If this book has taught me anything, it's that life is too short to waste on books that are a chore to read. At nearly a quarter of the way through, the only thing that I've read so far is a droning chronology of how five people became friends, married up and had babies. The “story” moved in a predictable pattern of “I totally hated this person before I met them, and then I met them and they turned out to be the most wonderful person ever.” Sorry Mary Shelley, I love you dearly, but I just can't with this one.

I don't feel like I read this as much as survived it, as one would survive plodding through safely shallow quicksand, not deep enough to be dangerous, just a seemingly never-ending, snail paced trudge though annoyance. For some reason “Plodding” is word that comes to mind. It's not all bad, parts are quite good actually, but they a buried in the shear mass of the book.

Also, I am sure it is mostly due to the period it was written, but the characters can be ridiculously irritating at times, Perdita became extremely tiresome for me.

Adding to my disappointment, was that I was hoping for more of a post-apocalyptic story than this was, there was very little actual struggle for survival, just some people not dying while other people did.