I was very excited to read World War Z as I had heard many positive reviews from people I know. I had even over heard multiple strangers talking about it and recommending it to their friends. When I went to read it Season 2 of The Walking Dead had finished recently, bath salts face eating events were occurring - I was stoked for a good apocalyptic zombie book! I am currently 88% done this book according to my Kindle and I am forcing myself to finish it for the mere purpose of finishing it.

There is no question that Max Brooks is a talented writer - World War Z is written beautifully with vivid imagery and great variety of topics that seem well researched. However, that is all that I find enjoyable about this book, and it becomes old and mundane when there is nothing else to keep you engaged.

I find the format in which this book is written to be very distracting, scattered, and disruptive. For those who haven't read this yet, the book is written in a series of "Events." Within these "Events" are a handful of people's recollections regarding that specific event. No person (that I have noticed) occurs in the book more than once. It is essentially a collection of random people's experiences regarding World War Z. There is no single character, or even set of characters, that the plot follows and allows you to connect with. There is basically no character development as each 'interaction' with each character lasts no more than 10-20 pages, then they are gone and never to be heard from again. The lack of solid character development doesn't allow for any character bonding that helps lead to reader's empathy with the problems faced. Consequently, the book had little emotional impact for me and left me feeling unsympathetic to the eloquently portrayed catastrophes. Perhaps if it had followed the same handful of people through each "Event" I would have been more captivated with the book.

This novel seems to have made quite an impact on many people, however, I was overall very disappointed with the way the story was presented and found World War Z to be lackluster. I believe it has tons of potential, but the execution of the plot was unappealing to me and as such I just could not 'get into' this book and did not find it to be an enjoyable read.