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For me, Station Eleven falls squarely into the category of extremely dull books that seem to be highly-rated by everyone else.

The premise totally intrigued me. You put words like pandemic and apocalyptic times together with the promise of a civilization having fallen into chaos and ruin, and I sign up every time. I honestly can't resist. But it turns out that was the only interesting thing about this book, I'm sorry to report.

First, the whole story is told in nonlinear format, jumping around time-wise from years before the pandemic to 20 years after. Is there a particular reason for this jumping around? I honestly couldn't tell, unless it's to make it hard to follow the characters and what happened to them.

Speaking of characters, the ones in here are among the most uninteresting I've ever encountered. There was nothing about them that grabbed my attention and made me care about them. And they don't have distinguishing personalities from each other. In fact, they all seem to be approximately the same person, talking and thinking in the same tedious manner. It doesn't help that we are introduced to so many people in the Symphony and they are called by their instruments instead of their actual names, as if the author couldn't be bothered to give these people proper names, let alone personalities.

Probably the worst of all is the boring plot. It seems the whole point is that there are some people who seem loosely connected at the beginning of the book, but then we follow them and realize by the end that there are a few more connections between them than was first realized. Ok...

In the first two-thirds of book, hardly anything happens, which is amazing considering this is a book about the apocalypse! It mostly switches between following a self-important actor as he goes through his acting and his successive wives, and the main character Kristen as she walks through barren desolate landscapes. There are so many descriptions of rusted out cars, dusty houses, grass and weeds, no electricity, being vigilant, etc.

I have to mention that there is also a comic book in here and we are treated to prose description of various parts of it. In case you're wondering, there's a reason why prose renditions of comic books has not taken off as a genre.

To me, the most interesting part of a premise like this is reading about what happens to civilization in the aftermath of a cataclysmic event and finding out how the people who managed to survive did so. But that isn't covered until way later in the book and its treatment was disappointing. In what is meant to add suspense to the plot, there is also a weird prophet who goes around taking wives and killing people in his way. What?

I just don't understand this book at all. So many people loved it, but to me, it's one of the most dull and disjointed books I've ever read.

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