Book Talk discussion
What Are You Reading?
"Because it wasn't boring. The pace was slower, yes, but that doesn't make it boring. I found the characters and their interaction very interesting and the descriptions of the camps and the town fascinating. Cronin is an excellent writer. "Did you like "The Stand"?
Marc wrote: ""Because it wasn't boring. The pace was slower, yes, but that doesn't make it boring. I found the characters and their interaction very interesting and the descriptions of the camps and the town fa..."I loved The Stand. Read the abridged and unabridged versions. One of my favorite King novels.
There we go, then. If you can put up with a novel that rambles that much, and with such thin and cornball characters, then you can put up with pretty much anything. Your invulnerability to interminable mediocre writing strides the world of fiction like a mighty colossus!(By the way, I didn't like The Stand.)
:D
Really?I couldn't tell. ;)
I loved The Stand as well. It's also one of my favorite King novels. I love the characters in the book more than I love most of my extended family. : )
I've never been so glad to finish a book, nor so determined not to repeat the experience.
*chuckling*You got me with that one. : )
Charlene wrote: "What didn't you like about it?"Like I said, "a novel that rambles that much, and with such thin and cornball characters." It was just a really flabby read. We spent a lot of time with dull characters thinking deadly dull, corny thoughts and doing nothing that needed doing. He could easily have told the story in half the space ... and then he released a new and even longer version.
Finished the first short (though not very) story in Laird Barron's collection, "Occultation." It's a combination dirge and prolonged fugue, mixed with a bit of Lovecraft flavor, an odd use of metaphor, and an indulgence in thesaurus spelunking. Wouldn't recommend the story, but now let's see about the rest of the collection.
I really couldn't disagree with you more, Marc, regarding the characters in The Stand. I loved almost all of them. I do respect your opinion though.
And what about when Tom Cullen finally says, "M-O-O-N, that spells moon" :)
I remember enjoying "The Stand" but didn't like the ending. Don't want to spoil it so I will just say that and hope you know what I mean. I was on an apocalypse kick back then and read that one and "Lucifer's Hammer" at around the same time and liked both of them. I still like a good apocalypse story.
The conversational style with lots of diversions and a leisurely pace in some sections is sort of what you get in most Stephen King books. Could they be shorter and tighter? Yeah, probably. But they are what they are and I love reading King.
King's longer works are like Sons of Anarchy. Could it be shorter and more concise? Sure, but do you really want it to end that much more quickly?
King is a campfire storyteller.Just sit back, relax and enjoy the ride.
You want literature, go read Peter Straub.
Chris, I read Lucifer's Hammer too! It was one of the first books I re-read once I got my Kindle. It still held up. I agree regarding literature and Straub. Sometimes he does get a bit wordy, though.
I may get it and re-read it. I was in high school and we drove back east from Texas to visit my relatives in Boston and Pittsbugh and I read both of them on that trip.
Jon Recluse wrote: "King is a campfire storyteller.Just sit back, relax and enjoy the ride.
You want literature, go read Peter Straub."
And if you want pacing and lack of flab, King is also not your man. Not past his first few books, anyway. I love the earliest King, but after that, he grew too self-indulgent and dangerously editor-free.
While driving?That's apocalyptic....
Marc wrote: "There we go, then. If you can put up with a novel that rambles that much, and with such thin and cornball characters, then you can put up with pretty much anything. Your invulnerability to interm..."The Stand is anything but interminable mediocre writing.
Yes, it's interminable mediocre writing times 10 and then with, what ... 400 more pages added just to rub it in?I had been too kind.
Gosh, it's killing me that you disliked it that much, Marc. Have you no feeling for poor Nick Andros, Tom Cullen, or Larry Underwood? Baby can you dig your man?
No feeling at all? : )
Charlene wrote: "Gosh, it's killing me that you disliked it that much, Marc. Have you no feeling for poor Nick Andros, Tom Cullen, or Larry Underwood? Baby can you dig your man?
No feeling at all? : )"
I'm not saying there weren't good parts to the book, Charlene, though I did not think all the characters were well drawn. It's that the good parts were buried so deeply in so many tons of dreck. This was written in King's "drink heavily every day" phase, as I recall, and IMO it shows, moreso than in any of his previous work. I think that's what claimed the first 50 pages of The Shining, too. The Shining recovered splendidly, though. The Stand just seemed to take a lack of focus and run with it to its furthest limits till it was all spooled out. It was lazy and undisciplined.
That was really hard for me to admit at the time, as I had adored his first few books, back when hardly anyone had heard of King. But he took a big downward turn, IMO, and early on loosened his style and focus tremendously, opting to write flabby doorstops. He wasn't as focused and committed to adding value to every scene pretty shortly after he first came onto the national scene.
Of course, he's prolific enough that his "shortly after he came onto the scene" could cover whole career spans of other authors. It's not like he didn't put out a number of good, focused books. But he's pretty much the textbook case of a guy who outgrew editing, with predictable results.
I wasn't driving but it would be cool to drive on a long road trip and play both of those in audio-book format. I never thought about that, Kealan, but it was an ideal environment for that. Even better if I was driving through the desert.I grew up reading King so his writing is so familiar to me that I just sort of fall into the experience of reading another one of his books and don't think that much about whether he is taking the long way around in telling the story. He could stand having an editor but it ain't gonna happen so I don't think about it too much. Jon said it best when he said he was a storyteller rather than a writer. King would probably agree.
I will strongly disagree with him being characterized as "mediocre." He is a very good writer and he appears multiple times on my all time favorites list.
Well said, both of ya!I think that King has some of the best characterization skills out there. For me, it's the best feature of his writing.
The lack of editor criticism is well taken. I haven't read The Shining since I was a teenager so I can't respond. I am almost afraid to re-read and discover that I agree with you....LOLMy favorites of his are the shorter ones. Salem's Lot, The Shining, Pet Sematary, Misery and his novella length works like Apt Pupil, Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption and The Body. All of those are some of my all time favorite reads.
But I read it all and enjoy just reading another King book because I love the characters he creates and his narrative voice---except I have read none of Dark Tower since I am not much into fantasy.
I agree, Charlene, especially with The Stand. Those characters developed as the story went on and became memorable in their own right. It's the classic good v. evil story with King's brilliant touches and attention to detail that make the pages pass by effortlessly. You don't end up with an epic like that by being lazy and undisciplned. What amazed me about the unabridged version was that it never felt bloated. The new material fit in with the original version seamlessly. It's a testament to King's talent as an author and storyteller.
Gator, that's a great point about the unabridged version. I found that the additional portions really added to the story as a whole and I liked that version even more than the original release.
DREAMCATCHER is the only King book I couldn't finish.
I credit Marc for actually plowing through the Stand all the way to the finish. I could not complete such a Hurculean feat. I think I already weighed in on my thoughts on King a few weeks back (interesting thread on that recent article crushing King) a la Joshi... minus the polemical overtones of course. No need for me to ruffle any more feathers... ; )
So, how long have you been a closet masochist, Marc?
I think it's genetic.I used to have some weird sense of honor about finishing a book. I'm glad that I don't anymore. Still, I kind of miss believing that it was somehow some sort of right thing to do.
I think we all do, to one degree or another.But a book that big, I would be doing a lot of second guessing before I picked it up.
I think The Stand was one of the first true doorstoppers in genre fiction, and the only books I had read that were that long were James Michener's. Even when Michener wrote an introductory 100 pages about rocks and water tables, you knew his heart was in the right place. And the book was bound to get better as it went along, not worse. I guess James Clavell (Shogun, etc.) was one of the very few authors that wrote doorstops back then. I wasn't prepared for genre work that didn't really go anywhere but took forever to do it. At that point I was still a big fan of King. It was after The Stand that I realized I need to seriously reevaluate.I think the next horror writer I remember getting into doorstops was Clive Barker. In an interview, he noted how well they had sold for King, and that that prompted him to write very long novels. I had really liked (despite a lot of poor characterization) his Books of Blood ... but when I saw him move into doorstoppers, I took a big step back and never returned.
That's one reason I largely decide whether I want to read an author's novels on the basis of their short stories. You get a chance to test their mettle over and over again, and the commitment level is low. By the time I get to one of their novels, they've earned it.
I've found that some of the best short story authors can't write novels well. And vice versa.I've read doorstoppers by Tom Clancy, Dan Simmons, Peter Straub and George R.R. Martin.
Clancy's books are torture.
That happens sometimes. It's not a foolproof system, but then again, it isn't an 800-page investment, either.
One who stands out immediately in my mind was Jayne Anne Phillips, who burst onto the literary scene with what might have been the progenitor of flash fiction, her book of very short stories called, "Black Tickets." Not every story worked, but I fell in love with that book. It was brilliantly dark and adventurous. She came out with a few novels that sounded a bit tame and merely morose, perhaps drawing-room in tenor, and I never wanted to explore further. It's hard to believe how huge she was for a while, but when she moved to novels she seemed to garner polite approval, and quickly fell off the map.
Time is short and keeps shortening. It's surprising how quickly the spool runs out.
Are you all saying that doorstoppers are a bad thing?I've thoroughly enjoyed the doorstoppers by the authors Jon mentioned, (except for Clancy novels, *shudder*).
I most especially enjoy Dan Simmons' stories. His sci-fi is imaginative, his horror is actually scary and his research is beyond reproach. I've loved everything by Simmons, except for Flashback-and that was a decent story I just didn't enjoy the politics.
I would never NOT read a book I was interested in just because of its length. Would you?
I am with Kealan on this one. I am still willing to read a doorstopper, but I have to be pretty sure going in that I am really going to like it or it is something that I always wanted to read.
I thought The Terror was awesome! Plus I learned a lot about the explorers of that time. They were CRAZY!
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Marc, I think that was very well said.
Normally, I go with the 10% rule, meaning if I don't like it within that limitation, then I ditch it. I kept up with this one because so many people insisted that it would pay off.
I normally love doorstoppers-if they keep me engaged. I read The Stand and IT (both more than once) and never once did my engagement wane. When I'm not that engaged with the story, I find myself dragging my feet to get back into it. I am sure that contributed to why it is going so slowly for me. (Though it's an 800 page book and I started it a week ago Saturday, so that's not THAT slow!)
Plus for part of that time I was drunk off my butt in Martha's Vineyard swearing and making gestures at Oprah's yacht. : )