I'm about one hundred pages into "World War Z." I'm not terribly impressed with the style of story telling or the writing, If you're looking for an incredibly well-written zombie book, I can't over-recommend "Zone One" by Colson Whitehead. I've also just finished Franz Kafka's "Amerika." Reading this has been very educational in that I now feel that I have a very good understanding of what people mean when they say something is "Kafka-esque." It's also a pretty interesting book full of symbolism. While I didn't love it, I appreciate the way it brought forth feelings of stress and anxiety in me as the reader.
What? Really? I loved that book! I guess I should say that I'm personally really quite into supernatural stuff, but zombies come at the very bottom of the list because they don't really have a motivation, if that makes sense? So I'm actually not that much of an authority on zombie books.. BUT WORLD WAR Z WAS SO GOOD! Did you really not like the way it was written? I thought it was a fantastic way to do it! Like I said, zombies themselves can get quite boring and I thought taking the thing from a fake sociological perspective is genius. You get the benefit of having a variety of different perspectives - which makes the whole thing a lot more real in the 'it could happen to me' way, and the way that he examined each country/society individually is brilliant - he obviously did a ton of research and it really paid off. I thought the bit about NK was fucking chilling!
I'm not really into zombie stuff, so it takes a lot to impress me in that vein. I'm really reading it for a book club that I direct at my university. Maybe I'm not far enough into it yet and it just has yet to really grip me. Anyway I'm glad you liked it so much! You're right about the unique appeal of zombies; I think it's interesting to see how engrossed people get in zombie stories. I'm actually attending a lecture soon all about why our culture is so obsessed with them, as well as vampires, and the post-apocalyptic in modern storytelling.
That sounds really interesting! I'd love to go to something like that. I think zombies fall more into the realm of disasters or pandemics and stuff like that. Like, stuff about zombies seems to be more focused on the survivors and how they deal with the collapse of society rather than the ~mindset of the zombie.