Finished up Chuck Wendig's
Wanderers in a couple of marathon sessions this weekend. A very big book that I enjoyed. Can't say that I loved it, but I did like it a lot. For such a large book, I did read it pretty quickly (for me anyway). Very short chapters with alternating POVs can do that sometimes (pushing through the less interesting POVs to get to the ones that are).
I won't place it on the same tier as
The Stand, or
Swan Song, but it makes a pretty good name for itself in that subgenre. My main beef was the extremely overdone
ripped-straight-from-today's-headlines approach. Not every single thing from today's current news cycle needs to have a corollary drawn from it (even if they're the same corollaries I might personally draw from current events) in your story. Once that penchant faded in the later part of the book is when the story really started to shine in my opinion.
I suspect that this book might benefit greatly from putting a little distance between it and today's real-life socio-political setting. Future readers might not feel quite so beat about the head and shoulders by all the real-life trending news/movements
du jour references being made.
P.S. And yes - geek that I am - I DID stop to translate the binary message in chapter 65's epigraph.
I'm going to start either Martha Wells'
All Systems Red or Linda Nagata's
Edges next.