Tag Archives: books: dark tower series

The Drawing of The Three

fiction November 24, 2013 Leave a comment

It took me months to read Stephen King’s The Drawing of The Three because my life is like that now.

I found it really enjoyable throughout most of it until Eddie “fell in love” with Odetta after talking to her for, I dunno, half hour. I really have very little patience for love stories.

As with many books I read, if we’d cut out some of it, I wouldn’t have minded. As much as I like Eddie – and I think he was my favorite of the new characters introduced – if we’d spent slightly less time focused on him on the airplane, I think we would have been served just as well.

I tend to skim a lot of King’s physical descriptions. Yes, it probably is realism to describe all the ins and outs of taking a dump, but I feel as though we can skip that in books.

The biggest problem I see going forward with this series is that Odetta/Detta/Susannah…I just don’t really like her. I’m reading this series because two of my friends and my mom really like it, but I don’t think I like her. My mom says she improves or becomes more likeable, but I dunno.

In spite of this, I went all over St. Maarten looking for a bookstore to buy the next one in. Sadly, I had to wait ’til I was back in the US to pick up the next one: The Waste Lands.

Like ‘A Song of Ice and Fire’ I think I’m going to have evaluate this more in depth once I’ve read them all.

Of all the made up words in these stories that I’ve encountered so far, I think my favorite is “lobstrosities.”

The Gunslinger

fiction July 5, 2013 Leave a comment

Two of my friends and my mother have read ‘The Dark Tower’ series by Stephen King and loved it, and since I needed a break between ‘A Song of Ice and Fire’ books, I started The Gunslinger, the first book of the series.

Now, I was in a beach house for four days about two weeks ago, and I have to say I blew through The Gunslinger in record time. Even for me. I don’t know how I got through it so fast, although it’s not very long.

The one thing everyone did tell me about The Gunslinger is that I should be patient. It doesn’t make a ton of sense in the beginning. There are more questions than answers, but what is made very clear is that there is one guy, the Gunslinger, chasing another guy, the Man in Black, who seems always to be one step ahead.

We get some of the Gunslinger’s history, as well as some of the history between him and The Man in Black. I found the whole thing very compelling, particularly his relationship Jake (and how he ultimately betrays Jake to catch the Man in Black).

You begin to realize that the Gunslinger is in a universe other than our own. It’s similar, but not exactly the same, and that there are other universes out there that can be traveled between (and dying in one doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve died in all of them).

How to travel between said universes isn’t made clear, but that’s part of why the Gunslinger is chasing the Man in Black and has something to do with The Dark Tower, which seems to be the point at which all the universes are connected.

Right now, the genre of the series seems unclear. It seems a dark sci-fi/fantasy/horror series, and I can’t wait to see how the series continues. Since King considers ‘The Dark Tower’ series his magnum opus, I expect big things.

So far, beyond this book, I’ve read It and some short stories by King, and my mom says a lot of his books borrow from this series. I don’t consider King an incredible writer, per se. His writing is average in terms of expression and beauty of prose; however, he’s a hell of a storyteller. I got sucked into The Gunslinger within the first few pages and read the whole thing in three days. I would have finished It much faster, but that book involved my two biggest fears – spiders and clowns – so I had to keep putting it down and kept having nightmares about a clown with pointed teeth that was out to kill me.

I’ve bought the next book, called The Drawing of the Three, which is supposedly more like a regular book than like reading a comic book, at least according to my friend.

But The Drawing of the Three will have to wait, at least until I’m done with one of the two books I started. I’m currently in the middle of both A Storm of Swords (the next book in the ‘A Song of Ice and Fire’ series) and Blue Magic, the sequel to Indigo Springs, by A.M. Dellamonica.