Brian

https://www.goodreads.com/dorchadas

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Brian is Currently Reading

Brian is currently reading

The Son and Heir: A Memoir

by Alexander Münninghoff

bookshelves: currently-reading

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Dec 17, 2025 11:06AM

Brian is currently reading

The Fires of Heaven (The Wheel of Time, #5)

by Robert Jordan

bookshelves: fantasy, currently-reading

Reading for the 2nd time

read in January 2013

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Brian said: " This is where the rot begins.

Okay, that's admittedly a bit overdramatic. Nonetheless, it's easy to see some of the trends that plague the rest of the series starting here. The long periods that admittedly do feature character interaction but have ver ...more "

progress:

(page 534 of 912)
"I knew there was a reason I didn't like Nynaeve. Not only is she whiny, pigheaded, and annoying, she's a libertarian." — Jan 21, 2013 05:40PM

Aug 27, 2024 11:28AM · see review

Brian is currently reading

The Drawing of the Three (The Dark Tower, #2)

by Stephen King (Goodreads Author)

bookshelves: dying-earth, weird-fiction, currently-reading

Reading for the 2nd time

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Brian said: " It's honestly kind of difficult to think that The Drawing of the Three is even in the same series as The Gunslinger. That book is terse. Sudden. There is a man in black, fleeing across a desert, and a gunslinger who follows him through a world that h It's honestly kind of difficult to think that The Drawing of the Three is even in the same series as The Gunslinger. That book is terse. Sudden. There is a man in black, fleeing across a desert, and a gunslinger who follows him through a world that has moved on. A post-apocalytpic wasteland, with little life, no water, and no hope. And in the end, the gunslinger finds his man in black.

The Drawing of the Three is nothing like that and at the beginning, almost seems like it's about a different character. Would the Roland from The Gunslinger have fallen asleep in such a way, in an unknown place? I don't think so, but this Roland does. Perhaps its for the best, as the maiming he suffers from the lobstrosity introduces a dependency on others that the old Roland explicitly eschewed with his abandonment of Jake. And that dependency brings forth the drawing of the three, three people plucked through doors from another world, but only two of whom show up in this book, so perhaps it's not the best title. Well.

The first is Eddie Dean, a heroin junkie and one of the characters with the most chutzpah I've ever seen in a literary work. Once he realizes that he has an ironclad excuse for his actions, he starts tweaking people's noses with an ease and grace that's a joy to read. The scene with him being questioned by the customs officers--undegoing the Clearing of the Customs, as Roland thinks of it--is especially amazing. And while Eddie is understandably distressed by being pulled into another world by the man in his head and left there with no heroin and no way back, he never becomes unsympathetic to me. Hauling someone on a wheelchair over rocks, undergoing heroin withdrawl, having to survive on lobstrosity meat after watching those same lobstrosities kill and eat someone else? I'd be on edge too.

Eddie comes through and sticks with Roland even though he doesn't really know what's going on. He knows that Roland seeks the Tower, but even though Roland won't tell him what he's looking for there--he probably doesn't know himself--he still follows him. He's the one who decides to shoot the lobstrosities for food, he pushes the wheelchair through the sand, and he finds the third door. He has more fire than Roland does, in a way. He came straight from New York and did what he had to immediately, whereas Roland had been following the Man in Black for who knows how long after a life spent training as a gunslinger.

The second is O/detta Holmes/Walker, and I can't say that she's handled nearly as well as Eddie is. From the start where schizophrenia is used as a literary stand-in for multiple personality disorder to the way that the personalities are divided up. Odetta is sweet and congenienal and...mmm, articulate, with all the baggage that word implies. Detta is, as Eddie says, a "cartoon black lady" who speaks like a cross between a minstrel show performaner and a jive turkey and is fueled only by hate and the desire to kill the white people who have, admittedly, kidnapped her to a bizarre world on a beach that is certainly not New York. But all I can think of when I read it is that it was written by a forty-year-old white man from Maine. I found it weird when I first read it almost twenty years ago, and I find it worse than weird now. It's really only my knowledge of what happens to the character in the future that allows me to put up with it at all.

The third is not in the book. The third door through to another world leads to a serial killer that Roland uses to gain more ammunition and medicine before disposing of him in perhaps the most poetic way possible. The real issue during this part is Detta's attempt to kill Eddie and Roland, which is inextricably tied up with her portrayal in the book and so I mostly ignored that part in favor of Roland's attempts to navigate at-the-time modern New York by using another man's stolen memories and body.

This is the book that really starts the Dark Tower series, as Roland starts to assemble his ka-tet, and in my youth I would have given it five stars unreservedly. The portrayal of Detta is distasteful enough to me that I'm chopping off a star, though. But it reminds me where the series is going, and I'm going to have to check out the third book get to it sooner rather than later.

Previous Review: The Gunslinger.
Next Review: The Waste Lands. ...more "

Jan 02, 2024 10:20AM · see review

See all 5 books that Brian is reading…

Brian’s Quotes

“People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader and the Imagination

3550 likes

“Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts... A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding...”
― William Gibson, Neuromancer

tags: cyberpunk, cyberspace, internet

368 likes

“I think I fell in love with her, a little bit. Isn't that dumb? But it was like I knew her. Like she was my oldest, dearest friend. The kind of person you can tell anything to, no matter how bad, and they'll still love you, because they know you. I wanted to go with her. I wanted her to notice me. And then she stopped walking. Under the moon, she stopped. And looked at us. She looked at me. Maybe she was trying to tell me something; I don't know. She probably didn't even know I was there. But I'll always love her. All my life.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 8: Worlds' End

tags: death, friends, love

1838 likes

“Only the phoenix rises and does not descend. And everything changes. And nothing is truly lost.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 10: The Wake

743 likes

“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown”
― H.P. Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror in Literature

tags: fear-of-unknown

2425 likes

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