Dystopias and my first zombie novel

I just finished reading my first zombie novel, ‘Rise Again’ by Ben Tripp. I have no idea if it is a good zombie novel because I am ignorant when it comes to this genre, but I liked it. I think it appealed on the same level as a lot of novels for adolescents, I was entertained but it also made me think about humanity.

One of my classes has started novel studies with a focus on dystopias. A student suggested that zombie books are dystopian, and though I hadn’t really looked at it that way before I supposed they must be and it fits so nicely with the trend of zombie books and dystopias if they are all lumped together. In class we aren’t reading a zombie book, students are in groups reading ‘Fahrenheit 451” by Ray Bradbury, or Margaret Atwood’s ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’. This has led me to search for supplementary materials on dystopias, and Bradbury, and Atwood, and I was delighted to find a zombie novel co-authored by Margaret Atwood: http://www.wattpad.com/8283993-the-happy-zombie-sunrise-home-chapter-1-clio#!p=1. Now I have more zombies, and more Atwood, life is good.

One of the things I am growing to appreciate this year is my increased use of web- based resources, almost everything I do in class is on-line content, the novels are the first real exception. No one is burning or banning books so I don’t think I’m in a dystopia but without the print sources I am accustomed to having at GMD, resources are almost all computer based. This has made me think about the paper vs. screen arguments, is paper still the best way to go for learning? While I think that maybe it is for now, I’m not convinced that it will stay that way, we are still learning how to use the screens after all and for many of us paper is still more familiar, not so for our juniors.

In another class we are watching ted talks from a playlist titled: Our Digital Lives, in the last one we watched Clay Shirky makes reference to how the printing press gave us erotic novels 150 years before it gave us scientific journals, his point (I think) being that we have yet to see what the internet can really do for us. I think the screen reading issue might be the same, given time I think we will learn to get more out of it than we currently do and the longer we cling to paper the longer it will take us to make the transition. But what do I know?

For the record, I prefer books, lying in bed and reading on my computer just isn’t the same as reading a book, it’s just not hygge.