The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is one of those books whose titles I would occasionally come across throughout my lifetime of reading, but never really knew what it was about or even why it was famous. Recently, I decided to watch a 2008 film called Blindness in which a strange, unexplained disease rapidly spreads striking people suddenly blind. Because it spreads like a disease, we follow its earliest victims who are quarantined, but much like The Day of the Triffids, it explores society's collapse. Because I found the movie so intriguing, I explored its background and found a reference to this book which I eagerly ordered so I could finally read it.

In some ways, it's classic 50's science fiction with all of its faults and favors. However, putting aside both of these and reading it in a 21st century context, I found it still held up quite well. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and the apocalyptic tale that quietly unfolds. In many ways, you could replace triffids with zombies and imagine a host of Triffid literature and movies (The Walking Green, Night of the Man Eating Plants) that might have followed. The parallel is there in that the triffids are dangerous, but they weren't the cog that caused society's collapse. They only took advantage of it once it happened.



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The Ends of the World: Supervolcanoes, Lethal Oceans, and the Search for Past Apocalypses by Peter Brannen

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I'm normally not a fan of geology, but this book takes a complicated subject (the entire history of the Earth) and makes it manageable. Even though the time span is truly incomprehensible, it's a mesmerizing look into the distant past and the titanic forces that created the world we now live in. It took me some time to read, however, as I kept visiting the internet to look up images and further details about some of the specific extinct creatures he describes (such as Dunkleosteus and Phorusrhacidae). Definitely a worthwhile read.



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