Tuesday, July 24, 2012

Reading Stephen King

My oh my. How time flies. My first Stephen King novel was the doorstopper Under the Dome, published in November 2009 and probably read shortly thereafter when the OCR'd copies were still pretty crappy.

Maybe that's what colored my perception of the book. But then I read other reviews on Goodreads, and I realize that it probably wasn't the quality of the OCR. The book could be divided into two parts. The first showed the characters reacting to the dome's appearance, while the second... I don't even want to think about the second part. It was just that bad. The ending... It was not well-written, and I feel like I was cheated by the lack of foreshadowing. Maybe there were some hints, but I doubt it.

FINAL GRADE: C-

Turning my attention to the present time, I managed to finish reading Bag of Bones from September 1998. My interest in this book was first sparked by the A&E miniseries of the same name, but the first copy I got was a whopping 1400 pages long. Yeah. That number does not inspire excitement towards reading the book. The next copy was a lot more manageable at 770 pages. In May, I started to read the book. And promptly forgot to finish it until about 3 days ago.

I think it was the beginning that got me for a while. It was slow, but I think that it was a good kind of slow, showing the difficulties of the main character that led him to return to his little cabin by the lake where all of the really good stuff happened. The book had a lot of twists and turns, and even though I ended up awake at 4 in the morning today (and had been awake for about 25 hours), I couldn't put it down. I had to see what happened to the characters. I feel like even though 11 years separated these two books, Bag of Bones stood out as being better written.

FINAL GRADE: A


Just curious, but have you guys read anything by Stephen King? And if so, what books and what did you think about them?

Images from Goodreads, with links to the books in question.

No comments:

Post a Comment