Books, books, books

[Zombie]

Originally Posted by Erin

I guess I'm just relating the sadness of the story with depression. I certainly wasn't happy after I finished reading it, although it was a good read. I took a class on the history of disease as a grad student, so I think I've spent too much time with the Black Death.

Oh, I see. I would love to take a class like that - what was your degree in, that you would have that class, if you don't mind my asking?

I always cry much of my way through the last quarter of the book, but I also marvel at the way the experience made history real for Kivrin, and by extension, the reader. At the beginning, before she's sent through, she's all about observing quaint customs and crop rotations and whatnot, like she's going to look at an ant farm and make note of where the ants go instead of living with actual people she might actually come to care about.

I think, for a lot of people, things like the Black Death are just ideas - really remote. We can read scary statistics and say, "Wow, that must have been horrifying," but it happened so long ago, we don't have a frame of reference for really empathizing with the actual people that lived it. And we see through Kivrin's initial experiences that the ideas everyone had about what it was going to be like were really wrong. The concept fascinates me, so even though the book makes me cry, I guess I look at it differently?