The Stand in flight paths

Jun 10, 2010 Kamakana rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: fantasy, thrillers, bestsellers, king-stephen, xlong-over-400, speculative-fiction, horror, xxlong-over-800, aa-unitedstateslit, postapocalyptic

.???90s watching the old miniseries trying to decide if i want to read this again as i do not remember ending (friend told me...) eight painless? hours television versus however long it takes to read...

260817: trying to remember plot, characters, writing- try to see how it is adapted. king himself wrote screenplay so along with industry money concerns it should follow what he felt important, in plot, in actors, in action... i say i 'read' this but did end reading around 900 pages... enough to g ...more

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Dec 16, 2011 Robert Delikat rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, dystopia

There are a number of popular writers out there that I have not had much contact with but for whom I have felt the need to become more acquainted. Stephen King is one of those writers. Given how much he has written, I wanted to find something that represented what many readers felt was his best work. There seemed little sense in reading something that was anything less, draw a false conclusion about an author’s appeal to me personally and read nothing more by him. That doesn’t seem fair.

I starte There are a number of popular writers out there that I have not had much contact with but for whom I have felt the need to become more acquainted. Stephen King is one of those writers. Given how much he has written, I wanted to find something that represented what many readers felt was his best work. There seemed little sense in reading something that was anything less, draw a false conclusion about an author’s appeal to me personally and read nothing more by him. That doesn’t seem fair.

I started with my exploration of King with The Gunslinger of the Dark Tower Series. I wasn’t impressed. It was only a 7 hour investment in listening but I was particularly frustrated by the ending. The first installment was obviously a tickler, a tease, only an introduction into a much larger investment in time and money that is the Dark Tower Series. I felt somewhat manipulated but I did not give up on King. I wasn’t going further down the path of the Dark Tower but The Stand sounded interesting.

Apparently there is more than one version of The Stand. Recently released is a rather tome-ultuous [sic] version that is 41 hours longer than Gunslinger. Now we’re talking a serious investment in time that had better be worthwhile. I hate wasting my time on a less than worthwhile book. But alas, that was the conclusion I came to with my second Stephen King novel. If you have read the contradictory, original rather abbreviated but not abridged version of The Stand, this, iteration, I am told, is not that.

I felt that The Stand: Expanded Edition: For the First Time Complete and Uncut was
bloated, trite and fraught with hackneyed cliches. For me, it lacked any kind of originality, suspense or intrigue. I read The Passage by Justin Cronin about a year ago that many folks have compared to The Stand. For me, there is no comparison. Cronin’s writing is head and shoulders above that of King. There were parts in The Passage I almost wanted to skip they were so scary and I was so heavily invested in its characters I feared something terrible was going to happen to them. Not in the Stand. There are books that I read or listen to slowly for the purpose of savoring the story and its writing. Sometimes it’s clear the writer is drawing out the story and that’s okay if it’s well written and a good story. Not in The Stand. This was pure, unobfuscated, drivel that I couldn’t wait to end.

At the risk of protracting this review more than King did the original work, I will only conclude with a word about the narrator, Grover Gardner. I am a firm believer that a narrator can make or break a book. I did not care for Mr. Gardner at all. He at times lapses into an actual “performance” of the the book and that’s when it really gets bad. Some narrators “interpret” a book so wonderfully, that it becomes the best part of the listening-reading experience. Maybe Mr. Gardner just didn’t have enough to work with but for me, it was like nails on a blackboard.
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