The Dog Stars has been in my stack for months and months. I picked it up once, read about 15 pages and thought “this is TOO weird.” But then. Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve seen it on so many “Best Of” lists, heard such wonderful reviews from the podcasters I listen to, that I thought I’d give it another go. And I’m so glad I did – I ended up really, really liking it. Here is the set-up: The world has been wiped out by a super-flu and the devastating blood disease that followed it. Hig and his faithful dog Jasper are among a handful of survivors, and the two of them have staked out a somewhat safe harbor in a small airport in Colorado. They have one neighbor – a gun-wielding tough guy named Bangley. Hig, a pilot, decides about a third of the way in to get in his little plane and leave his safe harbor, searching for a voice he heard on the plane’s radio over three years ago. The writing style is different – choppy, tangential sometimes, staccato. And given my recent obsession with The Walking Dead, I half expected zombies to attack as I turned every page. But there are no zombies. And it is lovely. I cried, I cheered. There are a lot of things to really like about this story (if you can give it a little time to get into).