Misery is great, I also think youâll like it. I loved how he compared [something that I wonât reveal] to the push and pull of the tides. Such a creative and useful analogy.
Another book Iâd suggest, based on why youâre interested in Misery, is Dolores Claiborne. @CanadaMatt3004 suggested it to me, and I thought it was incredible. I knew nothing about it, went into it totally blind, and that ended up being such a good decision. Itâs shorter and not a horror theme, so it was a good âbreakâ book for me between two longer/heavier books. I recently finished Liseyâs Story and am gonna read It for the first time soon. I want to get It read before Welcome To Derry comes out on tv.
Re Dolores - Iâm listening to the audiobook now and it is FANTASTIC. I donât even want to explain why, so I donât ruin the surprise, but I thought the book was King just having fun and being creative and the audiobook represents it so well.
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Misery
Needful things
11.22.63
Canât go wrong with these
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Pet Sematary (audiobook): as scary as reviews suggested, unsettling, and wowowow is it a great narration performance from no less than Michael C Hall (Dexter).
MCU: the Reign of Marvel Studios is a huge tome of the history of the MCU as a filmmaking enterprise. I knew Iâd love it because the primary author is Joanna Robinson, and Iâve been her biggest fan since back when she wrote for Pajiba and did co-host spots on podcasts with Dave Chen.
All great suggestions. Needful Things was my second King book and did so many fun things to my brain, especially since I was only slightly older than Brian Rusk when I read it.
Dead Zone was my first. Still an incredible experience. Cool story, heartbreaking, and just enough weird shit without being too outlandish to appral to those who both like it grounded and those who like it weird.
Yeah this is one of the best audiobooks in the King cannon. No surprise that Hall nails it. Speaking of the name Hall, another Hall (Anthony Michael) does a commendable job as Johnny Smith in the Dead Zone tv series (which touches on the book some but expands the universe considerably.) Its an underrated piece of Kingâs cinematic universe
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I am desperately trying to get through Geraldâs Game so I can start Pet Sematary. Iâm enjoying aspects of Geraldâs Game, but all of the SA stuff makes me so uncomfortable. I guess thatâs the point.
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Yeah, the book really doesnt work without it. It contributes to Jessie being a compelling enough character to basically carry an entire novel by herself. That book is such a feat to me. A single character horror/drama has to be massively difficult to write. Its the first book of his feminist trilogy, and both Dolores Claiborne and Rose Madder are high reccomends from me even if they arent at the top of his best rated lists, and it takes some huge swings in how a story is crafted.
As uncomfortable as it is, he writes SA really really well. See Big Driver and A Good Marriage from Full Dark, No Stars (my favorite novella collection) for further reading on female characters who live through the trauma and come out both stronger and broken on the other side. (In A Good Marriage its more focused on the after effects of the SA on others and not the main character but I think he ties even that together really well)
Warning: Full Dark, No Stars is bleak and awful, but there is a certain triumph in all 4 of the stories no matter how awful the subject matter is.
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I remember not liking GG. But itâs been 20+ years
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Honestly, congrats on reading books 20 years ago. At 21, I was an illiterate piece of shit. Lmao
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I read a ton of YA fantasy as a kid (Eddings, Brooks, Weiss and Hickman, Jordan, etc.) and then kind of matured into more adult stuff; but donât read as much as I did as a kid.
I really like epic world building. Malazan Book of Fallen is my favorite series by a mile. It is very polarizing though; people love it or cant stand it.
I read Black Sun Rising, but wasnât really my thing so bailed after Book 1.
Different strokes for different folks.
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I think Iâve read BSR only a couple of times despite the trilogy itself being one of my faves. I canât get enough of the final two books When True Night Falls and Crown of Shadows.
If you ever get a hankering, try out WTNF. Donât worry if you forgot everything in BSR, the second book has a great recap.
I know youâve been curious about sexual fetishes, so Iâll share:
Mark Twain was obsessed with young girls, according to his secretary, especially those who wore âbutterfly bows of ribbonsâ on their heads.
James Joyce was a panty fetishist.
Dostoyevsky was a foot fetishist, as were Fitzgerald, Hugo and Goethe.
Rene Descartes fetishized cross-eyed women. Makes me feel less ashamed of my aardvarkophilia.
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Tell me more about your aardvarkophilia club
Just to reassure you folks, I do insist that all my aardvarks sign consent forms. Iâm not a perv.
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This Is How You Lose a Time War
by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
Cute, interesting idea to have a courtship and love affair occur almost completely through written letters.
Worth a read
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Circe
by Madeline Miller
I donât like historical fiction that much with exceptions here and there, but I guess youâd call it âmythological fictionâ hit home with me. Also I guess because I listened to the audio book the narrator was a prim British woman it gave the book even more gravitas and the prose just had a very pithy British feel even though the author was American. Quotes like
âHe showed me his scars, and in return he let me pretend that I had none.â
âBut perhaps no parent can truly see their child. When we look we see only the mirror of our own faults.â
âSo many years I had spent as a child sifting his bright features for his thoughts, trying to glimpse among them one that bore my name. But he was a harp with only one string, and the note it played was himself.
and one I need to go back and find the exact quote because I want to frame it above our door was something like âA hostâs obligation is to feed his guests, and his guests to feed their hosts curiosity.â
Anyways the story is great, the writing style amazing. Loved it
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The Opium War
by Brian Inglis
The story of how the British Opium War came about. It writing was a bit dry and long so I wouldnât recommend it but the darkly humorous parts were that seeing that the âimperialismâ part was a lot of state capture where people selling opium would get rich and then use that money to buy influence to force the British government to do their economic bidding which lead a lot of bad outcomes, seeing the British imperial agents apply Econ 101 to the drug trade that they were simultaneously tasked with moving product and squashing and trying to balance all that depending on how came into power.
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The Demon of Unrest
by Erik Larson
The history of the short period between Lincolnâs inauguration and the battle at Fort Sumter. The short time frame allows Larson do go almost day by day or week by week and go into a lot of detail. What I took away from Larson is one, the Civil War was undoubtedly about slavery. The book is drenched with descriptions on how the cities were set up to take into account slavery, everyoneâs diaries were revolving around the war and slavery, etc. There was one comical part that highlighted it. A group of Confederate soldiers take a boat to Fort Sumter. They have their slave row the boat like they normally would, but about half way to the fort they realize their slave might row away if heâs left unguarded so close to the Union forces so they have to post some soldiers in the boat just to make sure he stays put.
His other observation, one that I kind of donât agree with was that the Southerners had the code of chivalry whose tenets pushed them towards the Civil War. He starts every chapter with a quote from the handbook of chivalry and he attributes a lot of Southern action to following this code, but to my mind, if the code came into play at all it was just a cover for good old economic self interest, at least at the governmental level. He did have a good observation that Northerners didnât really understand Southerners in the sense that there wasnât a lot of travel or vacationing to the South so the elites in the North were really ignorant of what was happening.
His other observation was that Lincoln didnât really understand the momentousness of what was happening until it was too late. He tried to play both sides, oblivious to the fact that his mere existence as President was a threat to Southern economic interests, and as such kind of waffled during the lead up to the battle of Fort Sumter
A last observation was that there were already divisions between the North and South but that random slights hardened their identities as separate polities. Confederates shooting at ships flying the American flag for example when supposedly the countries werenât at war hardened American resolve that the Confederates really were traitors to the country of the USA and not just some fellow Americans having a disagreement.
Overall recommend it, good book
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A Train in Winter
by Caroline Moorehead
A book about the women of the French Resistance during WW2. This book took me by surprise because the synopsis was about nine tenths talking about the French Resistance with the last line being they went to Auschwitz and only 10% returned, so I assumed the book would be mostly about their time in the Resistance, but the book is roughly divided into one third the time during the Resistance, one third being in French jails, and one third in concentration camps.
The book highlights the women of the Resistance came from all walks of life, of all ages, but mostly young, very young like 14 to 21. The book walks through the gradual ratcheting up of resistance from sabotage to assassination and the eventual reprisals from the German occupiers and from the Vichy government. The book points out that some of the most dogged hunters of the resistance were the Vichy police and not the Germans. Also I didnât know that the Germans had a policy of just mass executing random prisoners as collective punishment for the French resistance.
The Resistance women get rounded up fairly quickly as their tradecraft wasnât super good. Their time in the French prison wasnât too bad and thatâs where they really bonded.
When you read that the Germans decided to ship the Resistance women to Auschwitz I obviously knew it was bad, but I guess no matter how many times you deal with the Holocaust it never really sinks in how bad it was. The women didnât know what they were going to, they thought it was some kind of work camp, but they very quickly as in within a couple of days realize the hell on earth theyâre in. Within a week something like half their women died. Hours of standing in sub zero temperature, no warmth, no care, random killings. Itâs just so hard to read about women that youâve been following along with for the whole book, their dumb teenage loves, their idealism and youthful resistance die from hypothermia or because they attempted to help someone struggling and a capo didnât like that or from an infection that wouldnât heal. I teared up a lot reading this part.
Interesting thing they bring up is that not only did the very old die quickly but the young did as well, like up to 25 or so. The middle aged women seemed to survive the longest.
But in the camps with everything stripped away there was humanity. The women knew they had to bond together or theyâd all die so for instance during roll call they rotated who had to stand on the outside of the formation and bear the brunt of the wind. They constantly stole food for each other, protected each other, until finally they outlasted the Germans.
The book ends with how much the French wanted to paper over the Vichy government. Very few prosecutions compared the number of people who participated in the the Holocaust. Holocaust survivors running into their former French collaborators who sent them to Auschwitz knowing what it was and the collaborator sticking out his hand and saying âno hard feelings?â and talking about former heads of the Vichy government and prison officials living long lives well into the 70â 80âs and 90âs.
Just a good book all around.
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