I read Station Eleven (Emily St. John Mandel) back in 2014 when it first came out and absolutely loved it. The novel imagines a post-apocalyptic landscape, set 20 years after a pandemic wipes out most of the human race—which can be a hard sell these days, but at the time was something only to be imagined.

There’s a chapter—Chapter 6—that is only one page long. It is entitled “An Incomplete List,” and features very specific things that no longer exist in the world of this novel. It’s such a thoughtful list, conjuring up all of your senses and a lot of very specific memories, and from that point on I knew I would love Mandel’s writing. As a bookseller, Station Eleven is probably the book that I have handed to the most people throughout my career. Before 2020, my descriptor for this book was that it was the Most Positive Post-Apocalyptic Novel I had ever read (to be honest, I still say it). And often if people had a minute to spare in the bookshop, I would open a copy to page 31 and suggest that they read Chapter 6. Just about every person who's had that experience with me ended up taking a copy of the book home. Like I said: It’s a great chapter.

So, as most book lovers do, I became incredibly nervous when I heard that HBO was making a limited series based on Emily St. John Mandel’s novel. This was actually announced back in 2019, in pre-pandemic times. I (and probably many others) managed to forget about the announcement over time, except to occasionally wonder if it was still going to happen with everything else going on in the world. But I follow the author on Instagram, and as more information became available about the upcoming series over these past few months, it has become clear that she herself is excited about it and happy with the finished product. And so, it is with great enthusiasm that I look ahead to Thursday 12/16 and the release of the first episode of this new adaptation. Kristian and I will definitely be watching. And it may be time for a re-read of the novel too.

Kari Meutsch and Kristian Preylowski run the Yankee Bookshop in Woodstock.

Previous Enthusiasms:

• Carin Pratt on Ash Davidson's Damnation Spring
• Peter Orner on Shirley Hazzard's The Evening of the Holiday
• Rena Mosteirin on Sybille Bedford's A Legacy
• Allie Levy on Chris Bohjalian's Hour of the Witch
• Jared Jenisch on Marc Hamer's Seed to Dust
• Kari Meutsch on All of Us Villains, by Amanda Foody and Christine Lynn Herman
• Carin Pratt on Stanley Tucci's Taste: My Life Through Food
• Peter Orner on poet Ruth Stone
• Rena Mosteirin on Little Women
• Allie Levy on Louise Erdrich's The Sentence.
• Jared Jenisch on Nastassja Martin's In the Eye of the Wild.