Joel Swagman (Reviews / TESOL): Stephen King

And Some Random Thoughts
* The actual number, 277, is misleading, and makes me look way more literary than I actually am. In reality, within this 277 are several graded readers, two graphic - novels, several short novellas, lots of children's books (including 7 Books in the "World -Leaders: Past - and -Present" Series --a series of picture books about world leaders intended for children) and lots and lots of audio books.

* Given how little I actually read, I sometimes feel guilty about maintaining a blog dedicated to book reviews. "Who do I think I'm kidding?" I sometimes ask myself. "I'm trying to appear cultured and literary by maintaining a book review blog, but I barely get through a book a month!" (Although most likely I'm the only one who's losing any sleep over this issue.)
On the other hand, if I was the kind of person who knocked off a book every few days (like some of my friends are) then I would never have time to write detailed book reviews on each one. So in that sense, this type of blog is only possible for someone with my reading habits.

* I discovered audio books in my early 20s, and I've had a number of positive experiences with them (both before and after starting this book review project). A number of books I've done only by audio book, and yet I feel like I've absorbed them every bit as well as if I had read the actual pages. In some cases, I think I might even get more out of the book if it's an audio. (My eyes can tend to glaze over sometimes when reading the printed page, but a skilled voice actor can bring the words to life. And also something about the spoken word tends to stick in my mind more than the written word.)
However, over the years my opinion on audio books has evolved, and I've decided that they're not ideal for every situation.
There are external factors that can detract from audio books of course (how noisy it is outside, how distracted I am).
But there are also just some books that can't be absorbed as easily orally--books where the author's prose isn't so straightforward and simple, for example. Also books with lots of characters to keep track of.
There are a few books on this list that I did on audio book that I now have to admit I got very little out of.
The one I feel most guilty about is Anna Karenina . I did it as an audio book back in 2006, and today I can remember just about zero of it, and I feel really guilty having it on my list of books that I've read. I haven't really absorbed it, so I shouldn't really be claiming that I've read it. At some point, I need to go back and re-visit that book. Until that point, I'm living a lie by having that book on my list.

As time went on, I started to get more anal retentive about my audio books. Instead of just listening once and writing a review, I would try to listen to them 3 or 4 times before I truly counted them as "read". But even in this case it should be noted that there are certain authors I still have trouble absorbing audibly, even after 3 or 4 listens.
I've also decided to try to be more forthright about which books I did as audio books, and to make this explicit in the review now. (Something that was absent from the first few years of this project.)

* In my 10 years of blogging retrospective post, I mentioned how embarrassed I am by all the bad writing on this blog over the years.
This is true with my book review project as well.
As I type the words onto the screen, I think everything I write is absolutely brilliant.
When I re-read old posts after a few years have gone by, I'm appalled by how clunky the writing style is. I often have difficulty following my own train of thought, because the sentences are so mangled, and the transitions between ideas are unclear.
And all the typos! So many typos!
There's also the problem of a intelligent commentary--or lack thereof.
When I first started this book review project, I didn't have a lot of intelligent things to say about the books I was reading. For example, my review of The Postman Always Rings Twice is so vague and aimless as to be pretty much just a waste of cyberspace. (I can't imagine anyone getting anything out of that review.)
In more recent years, I think I've gone to the opposite extreme, and started writing way too much about the books I've read. There are several examples of this, but I guess the most infamous one is my review of The Case for Christ by Lee Strobel, which totals 46,375 words. That's an exceptional example, but there are plenty of others. This review on The Age of Reason was pretty dense. This one on At War With Asia went on forever. And many more examples.

* I like having all the books listed in order of date read (as opposed to alphabetically) because they form a bit of a biography over the last 10 years. As my interests and ambitions changed, so did my reading list.
When I thought I was going to go to graduate school in Japanese studies, my reading list was all books about Japan.
When I thought maybe I would go to school for modern European studies, my reading list was all books from this period.
As with most people who like history, I like pretty much all of it, and I do kind of skip around from period to period. But the area that I thought I wanted to specialize in was early modern European history. At my Alma Mater, the early modern period was defined from the start of the French Revolution to the First World War, and I've kept those dates (1789-1918) as a rough guide for my history reading. Also, since literature and history or always very inter-related, I tried to tackle a lot of literature from the same period.
Now that I've decided my career is in English Teaching, I've been trying to read lots of books related to the English Teaching Profession.
When I first started this book review project, however, I still had literary ambitions--I wanted to be a writer. And I was under the influence of Stephen King's book On Writing (A).
I never reviewed it on this blog (I read it a few months before I started the book review project), but it influenced my reading choices for the first few years of book reviewing.
In his book, Stephen King wrote at length about the importance of reading for anyone with ambitions to be a writer. All writing comes out of reading, and if you're not constantly devouring books, King said, you'll never make it as a writer.
What to read, then? Anything and everything, King said. All written works can help you develop your literary technique. A good book shows you what to do. A badly written book, however, is equally as valuable, because you can get a very clear sense of what not to do.
In other words, there is no such thing as a book that's a waste of time.
"If you're looking for permission to read all those trashy books that you've always wanted to read, but that you thought were a waste of time, then I'm giving you that permission," King said. (Or something like that. I'm paraphrasing because I'm quoting from memory.)

For someone of my temperament (a geek) the idea of being able to read all sorts of trashy pulpy novels AND get to feel like I was being productive at the same time was a gift from heaven. And so I jumped head first into all those wonderful trashy pulpy novels: Vampire Blood Trilogy, The Stand, Harry Potter, The Left Behind series, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Starship Troopers, The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu, The Princess of Mars, Conan The Barbarian, Magician, The Golden Compass, Ilium & Olympus, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Eventually, I dropped my literary ambitions. Much like my flirtations with going into graduate school for history, or for Japanese studies, it was just not a realistic career path.
(And much like graduate school for history, or Japanese studies, it took me far too long to realize this. Boy, is it embarrassing to realize how long it took me to grow up!)

So, for the most part, the pulpy sci-fi/fantasy books that dominated the early part of this book review project are over now. Although, (once a geek, always a geek), I still relapse back into them once and a while. (Just last year I reviewed Anno Dracula, and Hothouse for example.) And I'm still enough of a geek to enjoy the sheer imagination that comes from the better writers in this genre.

The one thing that I am really and truly over, however, is superhero comic books.
10 years ago when I started this book review project I still had a fondness for the comic books of my youth. I had long ago stopped reading them because they seemed like a huge waste of time. But, based on Stephen King's advice that this was no longer a waste of time, I dove back in to comic books in the form of tie-in novels based on the DC Universe (52: The Novel, Infinite Crisis: The Novel, Crisis on Infinite Earths: The Novel, DC Universe: Inheritance, Justice League of America: Superman--The Never-Ending Battle, Justice League of America: Exterminators, Kingdom Come: The Novel, Challengers of the Unknown.)
Sure, I knew they were terrible, but I loved the pulp cheesiness of the superhero world.
Now, however, I'm tired of it all.
It's a bit hard to pinpoint exactly where my disillusionment with comic book superheros began. And, as with all ex-lovers, once the spark has gone out of the relationship, it's hard to identify what went wrong, because the question changes from "Why did I stop loving her?" to "What did I ever see in her to begin with?" And it's almost impossible to get back into that old frame of mind to remember what the original attraction had been.
It's possible that after an extended adolescence, I just finally grew up. (I usually think of myself as fully cognitively mature at 27, but maybe tastes can still change between 27 and 37).
It's possible that with all the superhero overload in the media the past few years, I just got sick of the whole thing.
It's possible that with all the resets and reboots in the comic book publishing world, the thing that attracted me to comic books in the first place was no longer valid. (I used to be fascinated by the idea of one long continuous story going all the way back to the 1940s. But in the past 10 years alone DC comics has reset it's continuity several times. It's now clear that any advancements or developments that happen in any issue is just temporary until the next reset a few years later, and that takes all the investment out of the story.)
But whatever the case, I'm over it. Comic book superheroes seem stupid and juvenile to me now. And to be quite honest, I'm embarrassed to have these book reviews in my blog archives.

**************************

Anyway, those are all my thoughts on this project in general.
Over the next few days, I'll post some top ten lists:
Top Ten Worst Books: Fiction
Top Ten Worst Books: Non-Fiction

(I'm doing the worst books first because it's very easy to identify the books I hated. Because this book review list is mostly elective pleasure reading, I don't read a lot of books I don't like.
The books I really enjoyed, on the other hand, are so numerous that it's going to be difficult to pick favorites, but I'll give it a try.)

Top Ten Best Books: Fiction
Top Ten Best Books: Non-Fiction

Stay tuned for all that.

Saturday, July 21, 2007

Hearts in Atlantis by Stephen King

(Book Review)

I was in the bookstore a few weeks ago, and looking over the cover of this book, and it looked just interesting enough for me to shell out a few Yen and give it a try.

(A bit of digging around on the Internet reveals that this book was actually made into a movie in 2002, but I never heard of it before. Perhaps because I was in Japan at the time).

The book jacket advertised it as Stephen King's take on counter-culture, the Vietnam War, and the 1960s. (King being a member of the Baby boomer generation himself).

Being a bit of a 60s nut, and having moderately enjoyed the last two Stephen King books I read ("The Gunslinger" and "The Stand") I thought this book might be right up my alley.

It turns out the story isn't exactly as advertised, but it was still a great read nonetheless.

Actually before I started up this book review project, I also read one more Stephen King book: "On Writing". In that book, among other things, Stephen King emphasized that the best books are not plotted out before hand. You just start writing the story and see where it goes. (Chester Gould, the creator of Dick Tracy, used to say the same thing: "The best stories are the ones you make up as you go along, because if I don't know what's going to happen next, how can the reader?")

There may be something to this, but all the same in my (albeit limited) experience with Stephen King, when I get to the end of one of his books I always think to myself: "you know, I could tell he made that up as he went along." There's always too many themes and plot lines that don't seem to go anywhere.

The same can be said about this book. It is not so much a single story as a collection of 5 stories with some overlapping characters. King makes an effort to emphasize some of the same themes throughout, but I highly suspect that these started out as 5 unrelated stories that he rewrote into one book.

That being said: It's a real page-turner. I don't remember the last time I was as hooked on a book as I was on this one: staying up late into the night to find out what was going to happen next, sneaking in little breaks at work to read a couple pages, et cetera.

The first half of this book takes place during the summer of 1960 when Eisenhower is still President. A mysterious stranger moves into the block, and he appears to come from another world. It probably more accurately belongs as one of King's "Dark Tower" series than a 1960s time piece. (I didn't get very far into the "Dark Tower" series, but I am familiar enough with the general concept to recognize the cross over).

This part doesn't fit exactly right with the rest of the book, but it is well written and suspenseful.

The next part is about a college experience in 1966. An entire boy's dormitory is in danger of flunking out of school because of an obsession with Hearts card game. At the same time the beginnings of consciousness about the Vietnam War are stirring.

At first I had a hard time believing a stupid card game could be addictive enough to cause everyone in the dorm to be in danger of flunking out. (I played Hearts a couple times in college, and never felt it was anything I wanted to give up my GPA or my social life for). And then I remembered all the people I knew from college who almost flunked because of on-line video games. So I guess in the days before video games, Hearts is as good a reason to flunk out of school as any.

Whether King accurately captures the atmosphere of the 60s is not for me (born in 1978) to say. However he does a good job of recreating the tension of a boy's dormitory. At times it reminded me of "A Separate Peace" or the beginning of "Catcher in the Rye". King never quite rises to this level, but at his best parts he gets close.

The last 3 chapters are in the 80s and 90s, and deal with the legacy of the Vietnam War.

The themes, like the plot lines in this book, are a bit too jumbled and numerous to come out too distinctly and be neatly summarized. King manages to touch on a variety of subjects, but doesn't linger on any of them: human nature and "Lord of the Flies", the potential of the Baby boomer generation and their failure to live up to it, the irony of the peace movement turning towards violence, the My Lai massacre and the horrors of Vietnam, the lives of the veterans after the war, et cetera.

It's almost a pity King wrote this book in 1999, because I'm sure the conflict in Iraq now, and the similarities to Vietnam, would allow him a whole other direction to go in. As it is however this book should just be taken as a pre-Iraq War take on the legacy of Vietnam.

The book also showcases King at his usual macabre self. Even when not writing horror, King never seems to get away from his fascination with gore and death. Some of the Vietnam War scenes, with pilots getting their skin burned off, could easily have come out of a horror book instead. And yet at the same time, this book comes off as strongly anti-war.

Link of the Day
Bush administration opposes increased pay and benefits for soldiers

Hearts in Atlantis by Stephen King: Book Review (Scripted)

Saturday, April 15, 2006

The Stand by Stephen King (Complete and Uncut Edition)

(Book Review)

This is my second foray into Stephen King. This time tackling what is probably his most famous work (and one of Sarah’s recommendations).

First note: this is one of the longest books I’ve read in a long time. My paperback copy is 1141 pages, but that’s with very tiny printing. I’m sure it would be many more pages in normal type setting.

And quite frankly, it doesn’t need to be that long. There are a lot of dead ends, reverses, sub-plots that really don’t go anywhere or have tangential importance to the main plot, and just wordiness. King obviously loves his job, and loves writing, but I kept thinking an editor should really have hacked away at it. I guess that’s what I get for buying the uncut edition. Ordinarily I’m a stickler for all the details, but in this case I think I would have been quite happy with the abridged version.

As King explains in the introduction, this edition was released in 1990, twelve years after the original edition in 1978. King says that most of the original cuts made from the 1978 version were made because of economic publishing concerns and not editorial reasons, so he justifies re-inserting the cut 400 pages. And I suppose that’s an author’s prerogative.

What I find more troubling is that King also updated his book for the 90s. I think this was a terrible idea. While I understand that it might be strange to publish a book in 1990 that predicts the apocalypse in 1980, I think the great thing about books is that they act as miniature time capsules from the time they were written. You’re bound to screw it up if you try and update it.

As wikipedia points out, the revised edition has a lot of anachronisms and fuzzy math probably due to sloppy editing. But updating a book is more than revising the dates and changing which war the characters fought in. The mood of the story is also trapped in the time period. The pre-apocalypse world of “The Stand” is filled with racial tensions, student activism, political extremism, and references to “long hairs”, all of which obviously belong to the 70s instead of the 90s. (More accurately to the late 60s, but I figure art is always five years behind reality).

There’s enough sex, swearing, blood and gore to insure that this book will never be a favorite of the religious right. And yet it’s a very religious book.

Almost all American horror movies and books are somewhat religious in the sense that they exploit Christian mythology to create horror stories of demons, devils, and hells. But “The Stand” emphasizes the power of God just as much as the power of Satan. Cut out all the “bad” stuff, and it could easily be re-written as part of “The Left Behind” series. The human characters are not so much free agents as they are pawns in a game between God and “the dark man”. They are guided by visions and prophecies and the occasional miracle.

In my more optimistic moments, I like to believe that God actively intervenes in this world. However I get uncomfortable when God intervenes too much in fiction. It seems like cheating. Whenever the characters get in a jam, the author creates another supernatural act to guide them. I believe the literary term for this kind of cheating is “Deus ex machina”, and there seem to be a lot of places where this term applies to “The Stand”.

All those criticisms aside, I enjoyed this book a lot more than “The Gunslinger”. The prose is very readable, and during the climax at the last 200 pages or so I was absolutely hooked and couldn’t put it down. Of course, that’s a lot of set up, about 1000 pages, to get to the final climax.

Useless Wikipedia Fact
The Green Hornet is the grand nephew of The Lone Ranger

Link of the Day
(From This Modern World)
Can there be any doubt that George Bush as one of the most corrupt and dishonest political figures in our nation’s history? He’s a man whose arrogance and incompetence have led to a string of scandals that combine the worst aspects of Teapot Dome, the Pentagon Papers, Tammany Hall, the Whiskey Ring, Watergate, and more. Misleading the public about the Iraq war, the use of torture as an interrogation tactic, spying on American citizens, looking the other way while war profiteers raid our treasury, diverting war funds without Congressional approval, blah, blah, blah. You’ve seen variations of this lists everywhere, yet corruption has become so normal at this point that the Bush’s latest misdeed, selectively and secretly “declassifying” a national intelligence estimate to provide to a single Administration-friendly reporter (aka. “leaking”), feels like more of the same.

Video Review

Saturday, April 08, 2006

The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger by Stephen King

(Book Review)
This is the first Stephen King book I’ve read, which obviously means I’m a bit behind the times. Since I share a juvenile fascination with his macabre subject matter, I’m not sure why I’ve waited so long to read one of his books. Probably just intellectual elitism I guess. I avoided him because he was popular.

Not having much of a base of comparison, it’s difficult for me to say with any certainty, but I don’t think this book is typical Stephen King. Apparently it was originally written when he was 19, and then published much later in 1982 after he had become famous with his other books. And the 2003 edition, which I read, was expanded and revised by the author. So at times it is difficult to know which Stephen King I am reading, the young one or the old one.

I found the book a very difficult read, which doesn’t square with my image of Stephen King as a pop fiction author. In the introduction to the revised edition, King says, “I should say a word about the younger man who dared to write this book. That young man had been exposed to far too many writing seminars, and had grown far too used to the ideas those seminars promulgate: that one is writing for other people rather than one’s self; that language is more important than story; that ambiguity is to be preferred over clarity and simplicity, which are usually signs of a thick and literal mind. As a result, I was not surprised to find a high degree of pretension in Roland’s debut appearance…”
So this might account for the confusing nature of the book. And yet King goes on to say that he cleaned as much of that junk up as he could, and so it is difficult to know who to blame for the muddledness, the young King or the old King.

It’s a shame the book is such a tough read, because the people who would enjoy it’s story most are undoubtedly younger readers. They wouldn’t want their parents to know they were reading it of course, but I would have really gotten a kick out of this kind of story 10 or 12 years ago. I’m not sure if I would have bothered to wade through the thick prose 10 or 12 years ago though.

(In a way, this is similar to what I call the “horror movie” paradox. When you’re young enough to actually be frightened by these movies, your parents won’t let you watch them. By the time you move out and can watch whatever you want, you find nothing really seems to scare you anymore.)

The plot of the book, at least as far as the forward moving story is concerned, is incredibly simply. I think I could summarize absolutely everything that happens in a couple paragraphs. (I’m not going to. That’s what Wikipedia’s for.)

The back-story is somewhat more complex. Who is this Gunslinger? Where did he come from? Why is he on this quest?

The back-story is hinted at and given in pieces throughout the book, yet when we come to the last page, we still don’t know what is really going on.

I’ve done my rant against serial novels before. I’d be more willing to forgive the Dark Tower because it’s an epic story, and epic stories always come in several books. But after working all the way through the book, the fact that I still don’t know the back-story is annoying. I could handle the suspense of “What comes next?”, but not knowing what is going on at all really bugs me. Now I’m going to have to track down and buy the next books in the series just to figure out what’s happening.

Or on the other hand…
King says he makes up all his stories as he goes along, and he himself didn’t know what was going to happen in the next installment of the “Dark Tower series” until he wrote it? Does this include the back-story as well?

King claims the best stories are made up as they go along, because that makes them seem real and character driven instead of slaves of the plot. And maybe he’s right. But as a reader it spoils the illusion for me. I like to think the writer has everything planned out perfectly from the beginning. I mean, if King’s just making this up as he goes along, I could do that myself. I could imagine my own end to the story and my own explanation of the back-story, and probably be just as satisfied with that as with the real thing.

Link of the Day
Sandra Day O'Connor, a Republican-appointed judge who retired last month after 24 years on the supreme court, has said the US is in danger of edging towards dictatorship if the party's rightwingers continue to attack the judiciary

Video Version

Joel Swagman (Reviews / TESOL)

Thursday, January 21, 2016

10 Years of Book Reviewing

Saturday, July 21, 2007

Hearts in Atlantis by Stephen King

Saturday, April 15, 2006

The Stand by Stephen King (Complete and Uncut Edition)

Saturday, April 08, 2006

The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger by Stephen King

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