Dorie’s Different Reality

is a book by James Howard Kunstler. It’s a sleeper sort of book. There is literary buzz building, so it might end up a bestseller. Though that often is no gauge of the quality of a book, I think this one is worth reading.

It’s lumped in with the Science Fiction, because it takes place in the future- a few decades from now. It’s America without oil. And somebody dropped “The Big One” on Washington DC. Of course in the beginning after The End, there was chaos, disease epidemics and some people giving in to despair, killed themselves or went mad. Others, banded together intentionally, forming communities according to their visions of what the world they’re living in should be. This is the story of some people in a town in Upstate New York. Their life isn’t so much Mad Max, as it is Mark Twain. Maybe even earlier than that. It reminds me of everything I learned studying the Andrew Jackson era and life on “the first Frontier” They think like Americans, try to do things like Americans, only all those machines we’re so dependent on won’t work again ever.

Made me realize how much Mike & I bought into the dreams of Middle America. “Cities are bad, move to the suburbs” But it’s a life made possible by the automobile. The supermarket is ten miles away. Every time we have a substantial power outage here, I’m reminded that no electricity=no water. We get it from an electric powered pump. We observed Earth Hour last month, and as it happened, on a cold night. I should have made a video! You would have laughed at me, trying to read by candlelight in a house getting colder by the minute.

Anyhow, it’s a good read. I was going to tell you more about the plot but wow- look at this- I’ve never seen a video “trailer” for a book before.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 8th, 2008 at 8:59 am and is filed under Books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.