I recently read Freedom by Jonathan Franzen http://www.blogger.com/imhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifg/blank.gif and Day by Day Armageddon by JL Bourne.
For the first 300 pages I thought Freedom had gotten robbed by not getting a Pulitzer. It had the deepest, richest characters I'd ever read about and as the book went on, I thought characters besides Patty would develop. They did, but by the time the thinly plotted book was over, you knew the rest of the family but you didn't. Or you just didn't like them, and the plot that seemed to have been thrown in when Franzen realized all he had was 300 pages of Patty and the people she knew, he put in a half-baked plot about environmentalism and population with an anti-climax of protecting birds while selling out to strip mining coal conglomerates (and being used in the process but not realizing until too late).
I'm not sure how Franzen could have gotten out of the character web that was the most interesting part of the book (and those 300 pages DID need to be published as they are brilliantly written) but I doubt I'm the only one unsatisfied with the second half of the book.
Day by Day Armageddon is an incredibly fun bubble gum of a book. It's great to chew on for a while but provides no nutritional substance, which is a great part of its charm. The book is written as a diary of a military pilot trying to survive the zombie apocalypse. He's a character perfectly suited to ride it out and going along for the ride is a hell of a lot of fun. The literary equivalent of an amusement park roller coaster, I felt like the character is the type I'd be if the time did come to build my bunker and stock up on canned goods. I can't wait for the sequel, which was just published.
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