Review of Station Eleven

Book Link: Amazon (smile)

I had heard about this book but was reluctant to read given its about a flu pandemic killing most people on earth, and *gestures broadly at current pandemic*. I felt it was more about the evolution of relationships through lifetimes and how the world events impact those for better and worse. I liked how the book regularly changed the storyteller and provided the different takes on the same events and how they impacted the individuals. It also was fun to be based in and around Michigan for some nostalgia and 'member berries feelings. As enjoyable as the story was, I thought the end left me unfullfilled in that there wasn't really a resolution or journey that was completed. It almost felt like this was the first in a multipart story that still needs to play out. I just saw that this is an HBO Max series, so I'm curious if they take any liberties with the story and especially the ending.

Some highlights/thoughts from my reading: 1. Jeevan was crushed by a sudden certainty that this was it, that this illness Hua was describing was going to be the divide between a before and an after, a line drawn through his life. 2. All three caravans of the Traveling Symphony are labeled as such, THE TRAVELING SYMPHONY lettered in white on both sides, but the lead caravan carries an additional line of text: Because survival is insufficient. 3. Yes, it was beautiful. It was the most beautiful place I have ever seen. It was gorgeous and claustrophobic. I loved it and I always wanted to escape. 4. Clark had thought he was meeting his oldest friend for dinner, but Arthur wasn’t having dinner with a friend, Clark realized, so much as having dinner with an audience. 5. The beauty of this world where almost everyone was gone. If hell is other people, what is a world with almost no people in it? Perhaps soon humanity would simply flicker out, but Kirsten found this thought more peaceful than sad. So many species had appeared and later vanished from this earth; what was one more? 6. First we only want to be seen, but once we’re seen, that’s not enough anymore. After that, we want to be remembered. 7. He’d adopted new speech patterns. But of course he had, because since she’d last seen him there had been eleven years of friends and acquaintances and meetings and parties, travel here and there, film sets, two weddings and two divorces, a child. It made sense, she supposed, that he would be a different person by now. 8. she would find herself troubled and at moments even a little amused by the memory of how casually everyone had once thrown the word collapse around, before anyone understood what the word truly meant, 9. He bought another tea, because the first one had gone cold, and also he was beset now by terrible fears and walking to the kiosk seemed like purposeful action. 10. He found he was a man who repented almost everything, regrets crowding in around him like moths to a light. This was actually the main difference between twenty-one and fifty-one, he decided, the sheer volume of regret.