If winter is good for one thing, it’s increasing the variety of my entertainment intake. Come summer I’m generally outside and consume little more than music and popcorn flicks.

At any given time, I usually have a book I’m in the process of reading. Right now, that book Chuck Wendig’s nearly 800-page apocalyptic saga “Wanderers,” which as NPR notes is wedged between sci-fi and horror. The 2019 doorstop is riveting, calls to mind the best of Stephen King, and the writing is aces — yet it’s so much more difficult to pick up than the remote control or my phone. 

I’ll read mysteries, sci-fi, literature, you name it, but if there’s a branch of genre fiction I’m most consistently drawn to anymore, it’s books in the dystopian and post-apocalyptic realm. I don’t know if that’s got to do with their themes, or that they overlap with other genres I like, or the fact that these books — certainly “Wanderers” among them — seem as though they’re set in a recognizable universe.  

I’m only about 200 pages in (sorry Deschutes Public Library, it’s been slow going) and there are almost too many parallels to where we are now: the COVID-19 pandemic, the politically divided state of our nation, militia types, religious zealotry, bigotry, and despite it all, good people trying to forge ahead though the noise and the craziness surrounds them.

Maybe it’s the high page count of the book that intimidates me, or maybe it’s the highly familiar content. But I know one thing. I will continue reading it, for the most obvious reason. I want to see what happens.

—David Jasper, reporter and editor