Half way through with it (I read when I get the chance). It's interesting for the most part. The stories of people that were on the front line are interesting. Some of the stories of people who were not at the plant, but were affected by the meltdown, are a little slow at times. Some quotes.
"The prayer of the Chernobyl liquidator: Oh, Lord, since you've made it so that I can't, will you please also make it so I don't want to?"
"My little daughter-she's different. She's not like the others. She's going to grow up and ask me: Why aren't I like the others? When she was born she wasn't a baby, she was a little sack, sewed up everywhere, not a single opening, just the eyes. The medical card says: Girl, born with multiple complex pathologies: aplasia of the anus, aplasia of the vagina, aplasia of the left kidney. That's how it sounds in medical talk but more simply: no pee-pee, no butt, one kidney."
"Then we discovered a sign, which all of us followed: as long as there were sparrows and pigeons in the town, humans could live there, too."
Regarding shooting the local animals- "We're dumping them from the dump truck into the hole , and this one little poodle is trying to climb back out. No one has any bullets left. There's not one to finish him with. Not a single bullet. We pushed him back into the hole and just buried him like that. I still feel sorry for him."
"And we saw that all women's uteruses (this we could understand even then) were falling out, they were tying them up with rags. I saw this. They were falling out because of hard labor. There were no men, they were at the front, or with the partisans, there were no horses, the women carried all the loads themselves, and the kolkhoz fields. When I was older, and I was intimate with a woman, I would remember this- what I saw in the sauna."
"He started to change- every day I met a brand-new person. The burns started to come to the surface. In his mouth, on his tongue, his cheeks- at first there were little lesions, and then they grew. It came off in layers- as white film...the color of his face...his body...blue...red...gray-brown." Lyudmilla Ignatenko, wife of deceased fireman Vasily Ignatenko.
While reading it I think it is interesting that some parts of the surrounding areas developed a barter system. Vodka was at the top of the list.