absolutereality's Reviews (47)

STATION ELEVEN is the first book I’ve read to ask the brave question, what if post-apocalyptic fiction were boring?

I feel like I missed the moment when Station Eleven would have felt realistic to me. I found most characters very samey in thought and speech patterns. For example, dialogue from a 15-year old boy who was born after the end of civilization makes the kid sound like a 35-year old philosophy graduate student. None of the characters came across as distressed as I feel now, February 2025, and I’m not even living in a post-apocalyptic society (yet).

Lately I’ve been struggling to figure out if the kinds of books I’ve usually been drawn to have gotten worse or if my taste or standards have changed significantly. Something about living through all of this makes me tired of books about the end of the world, whether realistic or allegorical. Now just want to read weird freak experimental shit. I understand Dadaism way more now.

With how people talk about A WRINKLE IN TIME, I was expecting something on the level with Narnia, The Hobbit, or The Golden Compass. Maybe I would have liked this better if I had read it as a child who felt left out and nerdy, but as an adult woman this book did nothing to recommend itself to me.

Also, apparently this book is about communism being bad because it makes everyone the same, and yet here I am an American 60+ years after this book’s publication thinking “wow these themes of brutal suppression of individuality sure do speak to me today, the day Trump is inaugurated for his second term.” 

This book felt incredibly bleak, although I’m not sure if that was the author’s intent or not. I think we are supposed to see Keiko’s realization

that she functions best as a convenience store worker as a happy development. I don’t. I see it as an indictment of the society she lives in that she is unable to navigate unwritten social conventions and ostracized for it, so she is pushed to the point where she doesn’t even see the point in sleeping or eating if she’s not doing it in service to a corporation.

I also wish Shiraha had been more fleshed out as a character. I was rolling my eyes at his third lecture about the Stone Age. I know incels are hung up on that, but they do have more than one talking point, even if those talking points are bullshit.

Still, this is an incredibly fresh, straight-forward style of writing that I really appreciated. I liked getting inside the mind of someone very different from me, and I found Keiko’s insights interesting if a little off the mark.