With 19 books done and the chance to hit 20 for the year so close, my initial thought was to read one of the shorter Steinbecks on my bookshelf to close out the year.  Then I looked at my spreadsheet and noticed I had already read two of his in 2015 and that option quickly soured.

So I asked for help:

@cjhannas Have you read Station Eleven? It looks like a good year-ender. ?

— Brooke Shelby (@txtingmrdarcy) December 25, 2015

This turned out to be an excellent cjhannas move.  Emily St. John Mandel’s “Station Eleven” was a tremendous year-ender, which also happened to be about the near-end of the world.  At least the human part of it.

I was a little annoyed at first with the way the story jumps around to different sets of characters in different places and different time periods, but as the book went on I found my reaction to a new chapter was more like, “OH! These people! Need to know what’s going on with them.”

The basic premise is that a ridiculously effective flu has wiped out most of the population and those who remain live in small groups in otherwise abandoned cities or as travelers.  Or as a traveling group that performs Shakespeare plays when they stop in a town.

There’s an old actor and his bevy of ex-wives, a young actress and her comic book, a reformed paparazzo, a prophet, an artist, and a swimming pool with double moon light.  Mandel drops hints and reminders about how they all connect that leave you saying, “Riiiiight, yes yes,” as the pieces fit together and all the players figure out more and more what the post-flu word is.

At times it’s a little depressing, but also made me think a lot about what would happen if the lights went off and never came back on.  And yet, there’s an underlying hope in some of the characters about returning to what they once knew that is refreshing in such a setting.

It was also hard not to think about the Fox show “Last Man On Earth,” which doesn’t explain why many of the people in the world died, but has a similar focus on the small group that is left.  That show is intentionally much more comedy focused but touches on similar ideas like the first task of figuring out if you’re the only one left, and if not, how do you find the others?  In that case the main character spray paints “Alive in Tucson” on billboards and eventually some people show up. 

In the book, people meet by accident in small travels, and then wonder and dream about the world beyond.