FTWBooks2023

  Dream Town by David Baldacci I got this book because I thought it was the first in the 3-book series featuring private investigator Aloysius Archer. When I finished the book I realized it was actually the third book. Perhaps if I had started with the first book I would have enjoyed this more. Too many characters, too many complications, cross relationships to keep straight (even the character names are similar enough that it is confusing). I learned from reading other reviews that many of the characters are introduced in earlier books. It was also strange to read a book set in the 1950s. The story is good, Archer trying to find a missing woman after discovering a dead body in the lobby of her home. There's a lot of violence and while I don't normally mind it, somehow this seemed over the top and bothered me. On the whole I was disappointed in this book.

  This seems the perfect time to re-read this book, written in 1949. I read it during college, but remembered very little of it. The character Isherwood Williams ("Ish") is in the mountains for some "time away." He is bitten by a snake and ends up in his cabin for a couple of weeks, recovering from the snake bite and some sort of illness. When he returns to civilization, he discovers that there has been a massive pandemic and everybody is dead. He is able to get food, a better car, gasoline, etc. by taking what has been abandoned. He settles in his family home in Berkeley and then drives across the country, finding other individuals or small groups who have survived. Returning to Berkeley. he continues to explore and finds, first, a woman with whom he partners, and then a handful of others who have also survived. Together, this small group start a tribe, with the birth of babies and learning how to deal with what has been left behind and how to cope when, for exampl...