So...I decided at the end of the school year to turn this blog (at least in part) into a book review blog. Even though I'm done with school, I don't want to lose any of the passion I have for discussing literature. So even if nobody reads these things, even if I never get a single comment, I'm still going to write about the books I read.
Now here's confession time...For as long as I can remember, Stephen King has been an important part of my life. Okay, that sounds creepy. What I mean is that I've read Stephen King's books for a long time. When I was a baby, my mom used to read his books to be as bedtime stories...Well now...That doesn't sound too much better...
At any rate, I love everything Stephen King. He is uh-ma-zing. But I did have one tiny complaint: The Dark Tower series. I read The Gunslinger, the first book in the series, once upon a time. Actually, I tried to read The Gunslinger. I quit after less than 100 pages. It was the only book I ever stopped reading. And from that moment on, I hated The Dark Tower. Passionately.
But I decided this summer to give Roland and The Dark Tower another chance. And - gasp - I enjoyed it. A lot, actually.
For me, brilliant writing means nothing if I don't have an emotional connection to the characters. Even badly written novels can have a fun story if I care about the characters. I dislike the Twilight series because I think it's poorly written and I didn't care about the characters. The more I read, the more I didn't care what happened to them. Edward could have cooked Bella in a stew and I wouldn't have cared.
But I digress. The point is, the first time I read The Gunslinger, I didn't care about Roland. Which is a problem because, in case you didn't realize this, Roland is the character you focalize through. For the whole book. In fact, for much of the book, he's the only character there is. So if you don't like Roland, you're stuck. This time, I cared. I was immediately interested in who Roland was, where he came from, and why he was after The Dark Tower. And, of course, like any good series, King refused to give answers. I guess I'll have to read the other six books for that.
After I finished The Gunslinger, I moved on to the second book, The Drawing of the Three. This one, I didn't like as much. Basically, to move on in his quest to get to The Dark Tower, Roland has to draw people from our world into his world. The first person he draws, Eddie, is a heroin addict. I didn't like him all that much. He had some spunk, but in the end, he's a junkie. Then there was Odetta/Detta (she had a split personality. she got better and now she's called Susannah). I wasn't a huge fan of her. Well, Odetta was alright. Detta was insane. Literally.
Essentially, I felt like King spent too much time with Eddie and Odetta/Detta and not enough with Roland. Maybe that's cause I have a tiny imaginary-person-crush on him, but I missed him. It also didn't help that Roland was in a bad way through most of the book - after having several of his fingers snipped off by a lobstrosity (they gave me nightmares. not pretty) - so it's also a quest to get Roland cured before his time runs out.
In the end, I liked The Drawing of the Three, but not as much as The Gunslinger. Never thought I would say that...
What's up next: The Golem's Eye by Jonathan Stroud.
I'll keep reading The Dark Tower series, but I want to finish up Stroud's Bartimaeus Trilogy first.
Oh, and on another note, I just ordered three really awesome books from the UK. The first is More Tales from Shakespeare by Marcia Williams. It's a sequel to Tales from Shakespeare, and it's basically comic panels of Shakespeare's plays. They're pretty neat.
The second and third are by Richard Hammond, one of the presenters on Top Gear, a BBC show. Justin and I recently discovered Top Gear, and we LOVE it! Hammond is uh-ma-zing. He does ridiculously dangerous things (and almost died doing one of them), but he's fantastic. One of his books is a book for kids about physics (called Putting the Fizz Back in Physics) and the other is an autobiography, mainly about the crash that almost killed him
Anyway, enough gushing for the night. I'm off to bed so I can get to work tomorrow.
Mischief Managed.
