2019
Book #30 for 2019 was The Rising (2003) by Brian Keene. I grabbed it in a used bookstore because I was looking for horror, and the majority of those fall into zombie/vampire sub-genres and I wasn't up for reading about sparkling vampires. It's a zombie apocalypse book at its base, but it gives zombies intelligence and expands beyond only people being zombies.
I thought it was a decent story. Structurally it reminded me of The Stand, with different characters in random locations and some of them eventually converge. But it was overly slow and sometimes needlessly violent/graphic. The ending made up for it, except for the cliffhanger ending(!) I was surprised and disappointed that it ended that way, because now I need to figure out if I'll want to sit through the sequel. If the setup of book 2 is anything like book 1 I may have to lower next year's reading challenge to 10 books. 3/5