• Going Home – A. American
• A Canticle for Leibowitz – Walter M. Miller, Jr
• Earth Abides – George R. Stewart
• The Last Ship – William Brinkley
• The Destiny Makers / Down There in Darkness (sequel) – George Turner
• Area X: The Southern Reach Trilogy – Jeff VanderMeer
• Farnham's Freehold – Robert A. Heinlein
• On the Beach -  Nevil Shute

• A small, isolated community of technologically-dependent city dwellers who suddenly are cut off from the rest of the world after a volcanic eruption. In addition to lacking outdoor survival skills and resources, they find themselves under siege by a clan of Bigfoot.
• A story about a group of completely unprepared people. If you read it, try not to knock yourself out from smacking your forehead in frustration...

• Basic plot: A paleoanthropologist finds a protohuman boy from a breed thought to be extinct and then goes in search of the rest of his tribe. 
• This book irritated me so much that I actually got rid of it (I usually hang onto books once I've purchased them), so I'm not recommending it here, but wanted to touch on it. 
• Where it failed me: the scientist dude literally goes into the middle of a war zone in Africa without any supplies or weapons, while racing a bunch of other interested parties to find this tribe.  Yeah, things go wrong.... *sigh*

• Probably my least favorite book by Patterson.  To me, this is reminiscent of the movie The Happening by M. Night Shyamalan (aka the Farting-Trees-Kill-All-Humans).  In this case it's the animals reacting to people using electricity. Eventually, what's left of humanity end up retreating to the polar areas where there are few enough animals that they can survive and plot how to return to normal.

• Survival manual about zombies, containing information about zombie physiology and behavior, defense strategies and tactics, and includes case studies of possible zombie outbreaks throughout history. Despite its fictional subject matter, the book also includes practical information on general disaster preparedness.

• This is basically our forum in book format!

• First person, interview-style accounts from survivors of a zombie plague and how they survived.

• A fictional account of the authors travelling across the U.S. five years after a limited nuclear attack in order to assess how the nation has changed after the war. The novel takes the form of a first-person narrative research article and includes government documents, interviews with survivors and aid workers, and present-tense narration.
• Equal parts fascinating and terrifying.  They did an excellent job of creating a variety of people to "interview" in the book, and then created "documentation" that went along with it.  The beginning even includes a group of survivors building their own Kearny fallout meter to measure radiation.

• After a limited nuclear exchange, a small town in Florida tries to survive
• This was my first exposure to anything more than the typical YA individual survivor books and probably has had the greatest impact on my prepping.  Yes, it's overly optimistic, and obviously the racial issues are problematic, but that's because it was written in 1960.  At the very least, it is a classic of post-nuclear war fiction and can provide some thought-starters for things that you may need to consider with your own preps.

• It's mainly a WW3 book, but the sub-plot around the soldiers in Iceland is an interesting view of Escape and Evasion, as the group works to avoid the Russians, gather intel, and communicate it back to command without getting caught

• Classic novel about Earth being hit by a comet, what people do to get ready for it and how they survive afterwards.
• I was fairly late to this one.  I do find it somewhat depressing to read, as is the case with many of the "Armageddon" style books where the whole of the human race is barely hanging on.  It does present a variety of different scenarios for things that might occur in such an event though.

• Set in the 1940s (written in 1946) about a huge blizzard that buries the east coast. The main character is a wealthy attorney who lives up state and who heads home just as the storm arrives. He gets home, the power fails, the food is running low, and there are all manner of upper-class, visitors there to have esoteric conversations with over expensive highballs, while they try to intellectualize man's survival (some of them do not make it).
• This is a relatively unknown book, although used copies are readily available (I picked one up at a book sale).  It is another example of characters whom you'd like to shake, just to get them to actually DO things instead of just talking about what to do / why they can't.  Toss in a few affairs, wildly improbable travels via boats and planes in the midst of the storm, and the rehabilitation of a falcon, plus a bunch of dated references to the arts and such that we don't get, and you still have a fairly mediocre book.

• A fictionalized look at being a veterinarian, starting in the late 1930s and continuing into the 1980s. There are some plot lines that extend through the books, but mainly the five books of the series consist of each chapter being a sort of short story about various animals, the people, and his life. All of it is based on real cases, real people, and the real area where he lived.
• Obviously, given that even the newest cases described in the books are now from almost 40 years ago, the treatments, methods, and medications have all changed. However, there is still good information in the books about caring for animals.  Not to mention, the books are just delightful – they're some of my go-to books when I'd just like some light-hearted stories.

• A series of stories about a boy growing up in rural Indiana in the 1830s, centered around his experiences with bears.  The main characters are his family and a few neighboring families and describes some of what frontier life was like at the time.
• This is another childhood favorite and was actually published in 1905!  The stories are all fictional, of course, but there are aspects to them that are interesting, like collecting nuts in the forest, trapping, bee keeping, and such.  An easy read.

• In prehistoric times, a young human girl is adopted by neanderthals and grows up learning about their medicine.  She ends up being forced out and eventually meets other humans.  There are six books in the series and you'd better be prepared for a lot of sex scenes!
• The interesting survival aspect of these is with the detail that Auel included.  She spent decades doing research and has descriptions of medicinal plants and how they are used, how shelters are constructed, flint knapping, domesticating animals, curing skins and making clothing.  I've often thought that it would be interesting to put together a companion book that would separate all of this sort of stuff out of the series.

• A huge asteroid is headed for Earth and everyone knows it.  Society is breaking down, but the main character tries to continue to do his job as a policeman.  The first book is him investigating a murder. The second is him being hired to search for a woman's missing husband. The third is him searching for his own sister who has gone missing.  At the end of the 3^rd book, the asteroid is about to hit and it leaves off before that occurs, so you don't know if anyone ends up surviving
• Very bleak and shows the sort of miasma that might permeate society in a situation like this (where everyone knows that they're almost certain to die within the year).  Some people try to plan out how to survive, hoping that the strike will be far enough away that they can escape some of the effects, but mostly society is just coming apart at the seams. Not a well-known series of books, but I applaud the author for the atmospheric nature of these books.

Quote from: Red Tamarillo on September 16, 2025, 07:19:33 AMJust like it's fun to flick open a folder, it's probably ?80% as much fun to draw a small fixed blade from a sheath.

QuoteRobert Redford, the dashing actor and Oscar-winning director who eschewed his status as a Hollywood leading man to champion causes close to his heart, has died

Quote from: NT2C on September 15, 2025, 08:08:28 PMI've never bent or broken a toolant bit.

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