It's the end of the world as we know it. And I feel fine.

Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel, made so many Top Books of 2014 lists that I knew I had to read it.  Much like my trepidation around The Martian, I was mostly nervous because I didn't want to read a really depressing book.  And the premise of Station Eleven is that over 99% of the world's population is wiped out, seemingly within weeks, by a horrible strain of the flu.  20 years later, a small traveling symphony makes its way around the Great Lakes region, performing musical revues and Shakespeare plays.

So, obviously there is a lot that is depressing about this book.  Certainly for anyone (as all readers are) that remembers the world prior to the pandemic and can compare that life to what remains now.  But humankind marches on despite major setbacks, and there is something immensely comforting in the thought that people might still perform Shakespeare and classical music even when less than 1,000,000 people live on the entire planet.  There's a truism here about how you can kill people, but you can't kill art.

But obviously, when an entire global society breaks down so completely, so quickly, there are quite a few negative effects.  One of those is the rise of cults and religious zealots.  Another is the horrible loss of knowledge.  Perhaps the two are related.  It is so sad to think that everything we know, everything we've learned over thousands of years, could just be lost because no one remembers and there is no infrastructure to keep the books or photos or memory alive any more.

I actually wanted this book to be much longer than it was.  I feel like there was so much Mandel could have explored but chose not to.  I understand her decision; she wanted to make this a story about people, not about how to rebuild a society.  But gosh, I was truly thirsting for more of everything.  More on the disease.  More on its spread.  More on how people lived those first few years, completely shattered.  More about every single character.

That's the trouble with life, though, as Mandel makes clear.  You make grand plans as though your life will come to an end at the exact right moment when you have finished everything and have no regrets.  But instead, something happens and all you have are frayed edges, empty promises, and thoughts on what might have been.  And you make a life for yourself from all those mismatched pieces.

I enjoyed this book a lot, but I enjoyed it in a completely different way than I expected to, if that makes any sense.  I was expecting dramatic scenes and stand-offs and science and symbols of lost civilization.  Instead, I got deep personal introspection and vignettes of lives ended too soon.  It was a wonderful story all the same, populated by characters that I wish I could know better and spend more time with.