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RC and Moon Pie posted:On the other hand, I thought the exposition was the best part of the book. Me too. I honestly thought the best part of the Stand was the first half. Basically from the introductions to them meeting everyone on the road. Once they got to Nebraska and met the old woman I started to care a lot less, and I thought the ending was mostly slog, outside the series of events around Harold setting the bomb and the immediate aftermath. Best part of the whole book was the Lincoln Tunnel. But the "Derry Interludes" were easily a high point for me in It. They felt like little contained short stories while they world built. In fact, I think one of the reasons It works so well is the entire book is kind of a series of short stories within an interesting frame. Most of the book is basically each kid's interaction with It, framed by the adults reminiscing and some other elements to tie it together. Every chapter felt like it's own fairly contained tale, telling it's own saga while simultaneously serving the major plot. The book sort of loses that by the end but at that point things get weird and you are already too invested to care.
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Jul 21, 2012 03:51
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Febreeze posted:The book sort of loses that by the end but at that point things get weird and you are already too invested to care. What exactly gets weird about it?  It's been a while since The Scene was mentioned
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Jul 21, 2012 04:13
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Pheeets posted:I would love that. I've been hearing rumors that he's ready to retire though That's been floating around ever since he got run over. He might slow down, but he's probably going to keep writing until he drops dead over a manuscript.
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Jul 21, 2012 06:11
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I ended up re-reading Duma Key while on vacation last week. I forgot how much I seemed to fall into the book, and how much I enjoyed the whole story. I think Wireman may be my favorite character. Definitely the best King I've read in a really long while. I still have not managed to slog through 11/22/63 yet. I keep picking it up, but can't get into it.
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Jul 21, 2012 14:24
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I hated the Derry interludes in "It" when I was a lot younger, like 15 or so, but now I will often just read those parts and put the book down. The Stand is a love/hate thing for me because I absolutely LOVE reading about the random people and their fates after the plague, the army trying to contain the plague, the Lincoln Tunnel, everything about Flagg, the parts set in Vegas, everytime Harold gets a scene, everything about Trashy and the Kid. I really dislike Franny and Stu, Mother Abigail, basically everything once the sides are set between Boulder and Vegas. They just seem preachy and timid and I really never found myself empathizing with any of the good guys. They bored the poo poo out of me. It was like all they did was keep me from reading about the infinitely more interesting characters. I cannot overstate how much I dislike Franny.
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Jul 21, 2012 18:25
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oldpainless posted:The Stand I love Harold because he's up there with Ignatius J. Reilly when it comes to characters that are eerily prescient of how the dregs of the internet would be like in the future. I could totally see Harold angrily writing on Reddit about how he's being friendzoned.
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Jul 21, 2012 18:34
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Finished Misery. I said in my previous post that most of the novel wasn't very exciting, but I think it really stepped it up in the final fifty pages. The climax and denouement were excellent, especially surprising for a King book. Anyway, going to take a break from King after reading 5 novels and one short story collection in the past half a year. Outside of IT, there aren't many of his great works that I haven't read. I'll probably finally get to IT before the end of the year, though.
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Jul 21, 2012 19:09
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Ridonkulous posted:There is also supposed to be a third book eventually. Hopefully just as "connected" as the first two where (read:barely). Since Speedy Jack is ostensibly stuck in the Territories it would be a pretty interesting how the story plays out. I just hope he hangs out with more Wolves. Sunny Gardener's Twinner is still alive too (I think, dont quote me on that), maybe he would be the antagonist. Jack could finally get some just ice for poor ol' Wolf 
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Jul 22, 2012 11:14
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I just finished Under the Dome, I highly enjoyed it even though it was pretty black and white as far as the good guys versus the bad guys. Any word on when the TV series is going to come out?
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Jul 22, 2012 13:34
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oldpainless posted:I hated the Derry interludes in "It" when I was a lot younger, like 15 or so, but now I will often just read those parts and put the book down. I agree with you for the most part. Although I really liked Stu until he met up with Franny and Harold. His time in the medical facility and meeting Glen was good stuff. I also really liked Larry until he met Nadine (I hated Nadine, though her final act was cool). Basically I loved reading about poo poo going down, but once they all started teaming up it got really dull for me
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Jul 22, 2012 18:00
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Farbtoner posted:I love Harold because he's up there with Ignatius J. Reilly when it comes to characters that are eerily prescient of how the dregs of the internet would be like in the future. I could totally see Harold angrily writing on Reddit about how he's being friendzoned. I really liked the part when Harold realises that he's being a complete tool, and he could just accept things the way they were, be happy with his life, and move on. Instead, he decides not to.
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Jul 23, 2012 00:48
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Recommendation question: Is it worth it for me to keep trying to get into On Writing? I've heard it lauded as one of the best books ever written about writing, and I have a deep fascination with how stories are formed, but every time I try to dig into the 15-page kindle sample, I'm rolling my eyes at his repeated forewords and meandering, egotistical narrative of seemingly pointless details of his own childhood. Does this thing eventually get going and keep going strong, or do I just hate reading Stephen King writing about Stephen King?
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Jul 24, 2012 19:47
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ProfessorProf posted:Recommendation question: Is it worth it for me to keep trying to get into On Writing? I've heard it lauded as one of the best books ever written about writing, and I have a deep fascination with how stories are formed, but every time I try to dig into the 15-page kindle sample, I'm rolling my eyes at his repeated forewords and meandering, egotistical narrative of seemingly pointless details of his own childhood. As a somewhat practicing writer, I thought it was a great resource (particularly, his endorsement of "Bird by Bird", which helped get me out of a rut). That said, the entire book is a character study of his relationships with his mother, his wife, and alcohol and concludes with a look at the car accident that destroyed his leg. I may be remembering the order wrong. Along the way, he gives some good writing advice. So, if you can't bear all of that, then I wouldn't recommend reading it. I read it ten years ago and thought it was invaluable.
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Jul 24, 2012 19:53
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ProfessorProf posted:Recommendation question: Is it worth it for me to keep trying to get into On Writing? I've heard it lauded as one of the best books ever written about writing, and I have a deep fascination with how stories are formed, but every time I try to dig into the 15-page kindle sample, I'm rolling my eyes at his repeated forewords and meandering, egotistical narrative of seemingly pointless details of his own childhood. It's mostly an autobiography.
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Jul 24, 2012 19:55
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Gray Ghost posted:As a somewhat practicing writer, I thought it was a great resource (particularly, his endorsement of "Bird by Bird", which helped get me out of a rut). That said, the entire book is a character study of his relationships with his mother, his wife, and alcohol and concludes with a look at the car accident that destroyed his leg. I may be remembering the order wrong. Along the way, he gives some good writing advice. Got it, looks like I'll be skipping that one after all. Back to his fiction I go!
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Jul 24, 2012 20:01
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ProfessorProf posted:Got it, looks like I'll be skipping that one after all. Back to his fiction I go! It isn't quite as bad as Gray Ghost made it sound. If you really do care about how stories are formed (and not the just the mechanics of writing), it's worth reading.
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Jul 24, 2012 23:17
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Install Gentoo posted:It's mostly an autobiography. And telling you to use adverbs sparingly.
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Jul 24, 2012 23:29
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For what it's worth: The first 103 pages out of the 185-page book are autobiographical. Those pages follow his early development as a writer, including his first published book, Carrie. I found that first section to be well-written and enjoyable, and it gives some insight into why he writes what he does. The other 180 or so pages (except for 23 pages about his accident) are about writing, and I found that part to be among the best and most helpful books on writing out there. I thought it was worth buying and now it's worth keeping on my bookshelf.
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Jul 25, 2012 02:19
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JustFrakkingDoIt posted:And telling you to use adverbs sparingly. Yeah, that too. So I thought it was amusing that in The Stand he says one of his characters "cocked his arm cockily" out the driver's side window.
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Jul 25, 2012 02:21
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crankdatbatman posted:Finished Misery. I said in my previous post that most of the novel wasn't very exciting, but I think it really stepped it up in the final fifty pages. The climax and denouement were excellent, especially surprising for a King book. Yeah...well, looks like this guy found a copy of Pet Sematary tonight, so he's going to be starting that as soon as possible.
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Jul 28, 2012 03:41
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I'm about halfway through Heart-Shaped Box, so far I love it because you can tell that Joe is his father's son when it comes to writing but he seems to be avoiding a lot of his father's hang-ups: he hits the ground running (the ghost shows up in less than 20 pages and then he weaves the exposition in and out instead of having 200 pages of people farting around before anything actually happens) and when people have sex he fades to black instead of throwing out some TMI first.
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Jul 28, 2012 08:00
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I thought Heart Shaped Box was a little boring and silly, and Hill put a lot of effort in to trying to show how  cool the main character was.On the other hand, his latest book Horns was really good. If you like Heart Shaped Box, definitely give Horns a read as well.
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Jul 28, 2012 18:00
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I just read the Shining, I found it every bit as nervewracking and unsettling as Salem's Lot, and I didn't want to go to sleep last night. Good book, in other words. Even if I was kind of left wondering two things - 1 where does the fuel for the boiler come from, is it coal? It was unclear... 2 - Phones are out, OK, what about power? Does the hotel have generators? Is it power lines? Logically, the powerlines would be overhead, right? Ah I'm probably overthinking.
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Jul 29, 2012 11:42
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Two Finger posted:I just read the Shining, I found it every bit as nervewracking and unsettling as Salem's Lot, and I didn't want to go to sleep last night. Yeah, you're probably overthinking. That said, my dad used to manage a ski lodge, and while it wasn't hotel sized, it was still a large commercial building on a snowy mountain. Yes, it had a generator for when things got lovely (which was actually pretty rare). The generator ran on the same poo poo the boiler did, which was a huge underground tank of fuel oil that only needed filling every few years. The power lines to the whole resort ran up the mountain on big metal frame towers separate from the phone lines, but within the resort it was buried power lines, because apparently regular overhead lines get lovely in the snow. The phones going out wasn't uncommon, but power outages were pretty rare. But yeah, fiction.
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Jul 30, 2012 03:04
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AlphaDog posted:Yeah, you're probably overthinking. That said, my dad used to manage a ski lodge, and while it wasn't hotel sized, it was still a large commercial building on a snowy mountain. I kind of can't help it when it comes to this kind of thing, because boilers are a big part of my job :/
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Jul 30, 2012 06:22
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Haha no worries mate, I do historical fencing (court sword, small sword, longsword, a couple of other more fun things) and I have the same problem with sword fights in books and movies. Part of my brain goes "It's fiction! Get over it!  " and another part goes "Haha, suuuuuuuure that works!  ".
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Jul 30, 2012 08:51
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Farbtoner posted:I'm about halfway through Heart-Shaped Box, so far I love it because you can tell that Joe is his father's son when it comes to writing but he seems to be avoiding a lot of his father's hang-ups: he hits the ground running (the ghost shows up in less than 20 pages and then he weaves the exposition in and out instead of having 200 pages of people farting around before anything actually happens) and when people have sex he fades to black instead of throwing out some TMI first. The second you finish Hear Shaped Box, pick up Horns. I loved every single page of that book. I've been rereading all of the gunslinger books, and I'm about halfway through Wizard&Glass. Somehow, I forgot Rhea masturbates with a snake.
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Jul 31, 2012 16:37
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Your Gay Uncle posted:The second you finish Hear Shaped Box, pick up Horns. I loved every single page of that book.
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Jul 31, 2012 17:41
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Your Gay Uncle posted:The second you finish Hear Shaped Box, pick up Horns. I loved every single page of that book. Words can not express how much I hate every second of that flashback that isn't the showdown in the tavern or the one with the thinny. Goddamn I hate that book so much.
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Jul 31, 2012 20:59
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King loved that teenage romance even more than the unbearable town in 11/22/63. It's good if you skip 50 pages here and there.
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Jul 31, 2012 21:07
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iostream.h posted:Contrary to the opinions in this thread, I LOVED Heat Shaped Box and really enjoyed Horns up until the last 1/3rd of the book. It was nothing in particular related to the plot or anything, it just felt like it started to drag a little and got somewhat stale. Still a good read, nonetheless. I loved Heart Shaped Box too, im just a giant sucker for a Devil story. Plus, Ig was an awesome main character. I feel like I'm in the minority because I loved Wizard&Glass, its one of my favorites. Have people in here been reading Locke and Key? Your Gay Uncle fucked around with this message at 05:36 on Aug 1, 2012 |
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Aug 1, 2012 05:31
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I've been trying to clear out my "to read" stack before I buy even more books, but at the hospice thrift store the other day, I found three SK books I hadn't read before: Needful Things, The Talisman, and Gerald's Game. So guess which book I bought. Guess which book I bought and read it has to get better at some point it just has to from cover to cover. Gerald's Game has a single good section, comprised of chapters thirty and thirty-one, in which the heroine escapes from her handcuffs with the aid of aself-inflicted degloving injury. Those fifteen pages draw from the same well as "Survivor Type" and that one scene from Misery. The result is fantastic, harrowing and cringe-inducing in all of the right ways. Unfortunately, the other ninety-five percent of the book is harrowing and cringe-inducing in all of the wrong ways. I initially wanted to read GG because I'd read Dolores Claiborne and... "enjoyed" seems like the wrong word, but I appreciated it. Hard, grey, perpetually middle-aged Dolores was a welcome change from most of SK's other female viewpoint characters, and though I think there were some missteps here and there, her portrayal overall seemed believable and sympathetic. By contrast, Jessie Burlingame never seems like anything other than dear old Uncle Steve-O wearing a blond wig and a pair of falsies-- big, touchable, blood-smeared falsies that get mentioned more and more often as the prose drags on. At that stage in his career, c. 1991, I think that writing from a female perspective was still very much a novelty for King; I can only hope he's gotten better at it over the last twenty years. It's like he had to pause every few paragraphs to remind everyone (including himself) that Jessie is a woman, and he never really succeeds in convincing himself. Toward the end of the book, there's a bit where Jessie is writing to her old friend Ruth about all the unfairness and misogyny she had to face before, during and after the main events of the novel; this drags on for a bit, and then she finishes by saying "this is not the time to discuss women's issues. This is the time to talk about [man who had almost nothing to do with Jessie's story]." And then "she" writes thirty pages about him. Then, of course, there's the sex. In brief: Jessie's father molested her when she was ten years old, almost thirty years ago. She alternates between blaming herself for the molestation and denying that it ever happened; during her time spent handcuffed to her late husband's bed, she confronts the event and its continuing impact on her life for the first time. This is the central theme of the book*, and it has good potential, as long as it's handled knowledgeably and sensitively. It isn't. In the first half of the book, King hints at the molestation of Jessie so frequently and blatantly, that anyone can figure out exactly what happened based on those hints alone; then he goes ahead and describes the scene in detail anyway. It's a bit like that thing where he writes "X never saw Y alive again" twenty pages before Y's gruesome death, but with more incest. Oh, and Jessie eventually decides that, since it wasn't penetrative sex and it only happened once, getting molested by her father wasn't actually the worst thing that could have happened to her.** I have not been so angry at a book since Memoirs of a Geisha. If you're really curious about Gerald's Game, I suggest the following reading strategy:
* ... until it's suddenly about a deformed serial killer on the loose. "Space cowboy," a.k.a. "Rudolph," a.k.a. Raymond Andrew Joubert doesn't appear completely out of nowhere, as some in this thread have suggested; but there is so little overlap between his story and Jessie's that they may as well have been separate books. ** Someone suggested, some months and many pages ago, that the reason SK keeps writing about child abuse is that he himself was abused as a child. If that's the case, then why do his depictions of sexual abuse always ring false? Statistically speaking, he probably grew up knowing a few kids who were abused, and he may have met some truly creepy adults in his time; but if his firsthand knowledge of abuse goes beyond that, then his apparent naivete on the subject is stunning.
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Aug 1, 2012 23:08
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So why did you get angry at Memoirs of a Geisha?
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Aug 2, 2012 09:01
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RoeCocoa posted:If that's the case, then why do his depictions of sexual abuse always ring false? He's also probably spoken to a black person, spoken to a child, had sex with a lady and taken public transport, but he sure as poo poo can't write any of them with any veracity either.
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Aug 2, 2012 13:03
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jfjnpxmy posted:He's also probably spoken to a black person, spoken to a child, had sex with a lady and taken public transport, but he sure as poo poo can't write any of them with any veracity either. What loving parts are there to "taking public transport" that an author could get wrong?
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Aug 2, 2012 15:05
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jfjnpxmy posted:He's also probably spoken to a black person, spoken to a child, had sex with a lady and taken public transport, but he sure as poo poo can't write any of them with any veracity either. But Stephen King has never been a black person or a lady (or a black lady in a wheelchair), and it's been so long since he's been a child or needed to ride public transportation, he's probably forgotten what that's like. He could make up for this deficiency of knowledge by doing research (e.g. talking to many black persons and children and ladies), but that would take time, and he prioritizes volume over accuracy in his writing. Vorgen posted:So why did you get angry at Memoirs of a Geisha? Same basic reason-- Arthur Golden tries to write from a woman's perspective, and even though we spend almost the entire novel inside her head, she comes across more like a fetish object than an actual person. Not just in the sense that geisha are fetishized in Western culture and their own, but in the sense that the viewpoint character never makes one decision or has a single thought that doesn't revolve around a man. I don't have the book anymore, or I'd cite some examples. It's one of the very few books that I actively regret reading. edit: The difference is that I've enjoyed many books by Stephen King, but hated the only Arthur Golden book I ever read. RoeCocoa fucked around with this message at 17:28 on Aug 2, 2012 |
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Aug 2, 2012 17:26
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RoeCocoa posted:But Stephen King has never been a black person or a lady (or a black lady in a wheelchair), and it's been so long since he's been a child or needed to ride public transportation, he's probably forgotten what that's like. He could make up for this deficiency of knowledge by doing research (e.g. talking to many black persons and children and ladies), but that would take time, and he prioritizes volume over accuracy in his writing. The main reason I don't want to re-read the Dark Tower series is that I can't stand the way he makes Odetta/Susannah sound. Like "Sho!" for "sure", and many other sterotypical locutions. I felt she was a sympathetic character, but I hated the way she spoke. It's like King read Uncle Tom's Cabin once and called it good.
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Aug 2, 2012 19:21
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Pheeets posted:The main reason I don't want to re-read the Dark Tower series is that I can't stand the way he makes Odetta/Susannah sound. Like "Sho!" for "sure", and many other sterotypical locutions. I felt she was a sympathetic character, but I hated the way she spoke. It's like King read Uncle Tom's Cabin once and called it good. Detta was supposed to be a caricature of a deep south negro. And even after the two personalities merged to make Susannah, Detta was still there, fo sho.
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Aug 2, 2012 19:49
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ConfusedUs posted:Detta was supposed to be a caricature of a deep south negro. And even after the two personalities merged to make Susannah, Detta was still there, fo sho. Don't defend him you honkey muhfa.
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Aug 2, 2012 20:25
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Jealous Cow posted:Don't defend him you honkey muhfa. In general, I'm not. He gets it wrong more often than he gets it right. See Speedy Parker in The Talisman and pretty much every black person with a bit part. But in Detta's case, it's deliberate.
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Aug 2, 2012 20:42
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