... I think Earth Abides was just all wrong. I can't believe an entire generation of people would just give up technology and go back to a hunter gatherer type of living and just being too uninterested to learn how to read, use electricity or machinine steel objects.
As one of my favorite novels, I feel compelled to defend it...

Earth Abides isn't nearly in the same vein as a "prepper" novel like Patriots, 299 Days, etc (which are about the only two series I've read in this genre). It was written as a post-apocalyptic novel. It's much more similar to A Canticle for Leibowitz and, to a lesser extent, Alas Babylon. It has a grim post-WWII/Cold War concern about the outright destruction of humanity on a global scale much like Canticle and Alas Babylon.
Given sufficient depopulation like that depicted in Earth Abides, how would mankind preserve electricity, machining, etc? Reading and literacy is probably the only item that I would believe isn't realistic in Steward's world - and even then I think it would take on a "priestly" hue. Few people alive today are as even half skilled as the average farmer, homesteader, or whatever of a 150 years ago. And those people stood on the shoulder of those that came before. That's Jack's whole point with 13skills.com in a small, small way. I work in IT, am fairly good at it, and I couldn't preserve computing technology in a massive collapse of society like Earth Abides depicts because the resources and knowledge capital just isn't there. Few modern industries or skills could survive because the decades and centuries of build-up to have them requires, well, decades and centuries to build up. If you wipe out just about everyone that knew how it worked in one massive wave, you'd be starting from scratch... or maybe at least 16th century Europe or China.
(Spoiler alert if you haven't read Patriots or Survivors) I think the worst prepper novel I've ever read is Survivors. I always enjoyed Patriots even though it was clearly an evolving work and I never found it terribly realistic. But Survivors was just plain awful. You follow one main character through a big portion of the first part of the book on a trek through Europe, he sails off on the boat across the Atlantic, and then ..... just randomly travels through all of Mexico on a horse in a chapter or two and arrives safely?? Are you kidding me? This is the same continent where the people in Patriots couldn't even drive to the next state over while being heavily armed without casualties?? The book also introduces characters that in no way advance the plot (like the lady who stocked seeds) just to talk about some random thing. I didn't even bother with Founders. If someone gave me the book for free or if I (literally) fell over it at the library I might read it. But otherwise, I'm done with Rawles' fiction books.