Y’all crazy. TDT series is great.
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IIRC Book 2 was more than twice as long, I couldn’t risk it
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Yes but you won’t need to read the whole thing to know whether it’s worth it.
Seriously. The opening chapters are BANGERS. If you don’t like those then sure give up and never question your decision.
For me, the character who makes book 2 so good is the drug addict destined to become a gunslinger Eddie. He transforms the dynamic of every scene with Roland.
Dude hasn’t even met Oy yet
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Let’s be real the lobstrosities are the real stars of book 2
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If we’re being real then I’ll admit I couldn’t picture anything other than a dozen Sebastians lol
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Nah those guys are a lot bigger. Chop chop
Anyway back on topic. Im reading Bosch #2 by Connelly. Black ice. Surprised it took me so long to start reading these.
Read all the JLB robicheux books. Similar feel.
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I finished ‘salem’s Lot. I didn’t know this going in to it, but the book is based in my hometown which was a pretty wild discovery in the moment. In the book, the Lot sits east of Cumberland, which is…the Atlantic Ocean (Casco Bay). Most of the town’s geographical descriptors that are actually real are pulled from Cumberland or neighboring Yarmouth. I’m pretty sure that the spot just off the Royal River where Eva Miller’s boarding house sits is just 1/2 mile from my parents’ house now. That’s what I’m telling myself, anyway. So the nostalgia while reading this book was always dialed up to a 10.
The last third of the book was captivating, and I had a hard time putting it down which is unusual for me and book reading. I found the first two thirds of the book pleasant, but I struggled to buy into Ben and Susan’s love story. I know that this is because all love stories will pale in comparison to Jake and Sadie’s from 11/22/63 - nothing will ever compare to that. Not that everything has to compare, but feeling is believing and I just found myself not feeling particularly strong about Ben/Susan. Maybe if King had spent an additional 400 pages developing their relationship arc lol I would have bought in.
Specifically what I found intoxicating about this book was King’s descriptions of Maine and the changing of seasons.
In the fall, night comes like this in the Lot:
The sun loses its thin grip on the air first, turning it cold, making it remember that winter is coming and winter will be long. Thin clouds form, and the shadows lengthen out. They have no breadth, as summer shadows have; there are no leaves on the trees or fat on the clouds in the sky to make them thick. They are gaunt, mean shadows that bite the ground like teeth.As the sun nears the horizon, its benevolent yellow begins to deepen, to become infected, until it glares an angry inflamed orange. It throws a variegated glow over the horizon - a cloud-congested caul that is alternately red, orange, vermilion, purple. Sometimes the clouds break apart in great, slow rafts, letting through beams of innocent yellow sunlight that are bitterly nostalgic for the summer that has gone by.
Fall and spring came to Jerusalem’s Lot with the same suddenness of sunrise and sunset in the tropics. The line of demarcation could be as thin as one day. But spring is not the finest season in New England - it’s too short, too uncertain, too apt to turn savage on short notice. Even so, there are April days which linger in the memory even after one has forgotten the wife’s touch, or the feel of the baby’s toothless mouth at the nipple. But by mid-May, the sun rises out of the morning’s haze with authority and potency, and standing on your top step at seven in the morning with your dinner bucket in your hand, you know that the dew will be melted off the grass by eight and that the dust on the back roads will hang depthless and still in the air for five minutes after a car’s passage; and that by one in the afternoon it will be up to ninety-five on the third floor of the mill and the sweat will roll off your arms like oil and stick your shirt to your back in a widening patch and it might as well be July.
But when fall comes, kicking summer out on its treacherous ass as it always does one day sometime after the midpoint of September, it stays awhile like an old friend that you have missed. It settles in the way an old friend will settle into your favorite chair and take out his pipe and light it and then fill the afternoon with stories of places he has been and things he has done since last he saw you.
It stays on through October and, in rare years, on into November. Day after day the skies are a clear, hard blue, and the clouds that float across them, always west to east, are calm white ships with gray keels. The wind begins to blow by the day, and it is never still. It hurries you along as you walk the roads, crunching the leaves that have fallen in mad and variegated drifts. The wind makes you ache in some place that is deeper than your bones. It may be that it touches something old in the human soul, a chord of race memory that says Migrate or die - migrate or die. Even in your house, behind square walls, the wind beats against the wood and the glass and sends its fleshless pucker against the eaves and sooner or later you have to put down what you were doing and go out and see. And you can stand on your stoop or in your dooryard at mid-afternoon and watch the cloud shadows rush across Griffen’s pasture and up Schoolyard Hill, light and dark, light and dark, like the shutters of the gods being opened and closed. you can see the goldenrod, that most tenacious and pernicious and beauteous of all New England flora, bowing away from the wind like a great and silent congregation. And if there are no cars or planes, and if no one’s Uncle John is out in the wood lot west of town banging away at a quail or pheasant; if the only sounds is the slow beat of your own heart, you can hear another sound, and that is the sound of life winding down to its cyclic close, waiting for the first winter snow to perform its last rites.
This kind of writing energizes my heart and soul.
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Bag of bones is great
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A perfect book. That first page already has me hooked. The ending in particular stands out as one of the few times the story kept going way beyond what felt like the traditional finale of a story, and yet King delivers a true ending afterward that felt absolutely essential and inevitable.
I’d gobble Bag of Bones up again right now if I didn’t have this beauty on tap.
Reading/Listening to the 2nd book of the Miss Peregrine’s Peculiar Children books after watching the film wasnt such a great idea. I read the first book a long time ago but now listening to the 2nd book after watching the film took some time to get adjusted. In the film the abilities are on the wrong kids. For example in the books its Emma who can burn stuff when its Olive in the film. I will finish the book but I decided that this series wont be a priority for now.
Going on vacation next week I will take:
1984
Convergence(its a Star Wars novel, actually according to different fan canon pages its the the first of the whole timeline thats currently on the market, will see how it goes and if that hits my taste.)
Still deciding if I also take Dune with me. Not sure what my parents bring as we are going on a big family holiday for the first time in over 20years but I try to take mostly books written in German so they could try it if they want to.If they have the latest Jussi Adler Olson(Natriumchlorid) then this would be my 3rd book.
Amazon suggested Clive Clussler to me. I loved the Dirk Pitt novels 20 years ago but eventually I grew tired of the “too far fetched” stuff. But it brings back memories.
Will see if something pops up on my way to the airport. There are usually book stores on the bigger train stations and the airport itself.
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I feel like I should mention Cold Enough for Snow by Jessica Au, an Australian author. It’s a short book that nonetheless took her ten years to write and definitely feels polished to a gleam. It’s won three different novel prizes.
It’s written in this beautifully calm, lyrical prose. It’s hard to say exactly what it’s about and there isn’t much plot to speak of. The best I can do is that it’s about the realization you have as you age that your parents had a whole life before you were born, but that the truth of that life and the truth of them as people will forever be just out of your grasp. There’s both great intimacy and great distance in the relationship, and that’s the feeling the book evokes.
Recommended if you like great writing and don’t mind extreme levels of subtlety and lack of resolution. If that sounds like it might annoy you, you’re probably right about that. It was polarizing in my book club; I don’t think anyone hated it, but plenty were “meh” about it.
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All the talk of self-flagellation in the GOP thread reminded me of this curiosity which I found on a curated table for new books on Monday:
Perhaps you’re thinking “What’s that have to do with jerkin’ off?” Well, for those who are too young to remember, Hoffs was the lead singer of The Bangles, and she was as cute as a button. Actually as cute as a whole drawerful of buttons, and more than once during puberty she inspired me to commit self-abuse. Here’s why: (she’s the short one with the Rickenbacker guitar)
So…Will I read her novel? Nope, too much to read, especially with the Nobel and Man Booker prizes upcoming. Will I continue to allow her to star in my masturbation fantasies? Hell, yeah.
Shortlist for Booker Prize just out:
Just one British writer makes the Booker prize shortlist | Booker prize 2023 | The Guardian.
Things They Carried fans - Tim O’Brien has a new book that releases next month - America Fantastica. Murakami gave it a nice blurb.
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