Saturday 6 February 2016

In Which We Discuss The Wastelands

I am really getting into the Dark Tower series now.  The Wastelands was something rather like the DLR - a cross between a roller-coaster and a train ride.

This third novel in the series has Roland dealing with his newly contradictive memory and the Ka-Tet moving further along the beam towards the tower.  There's also a bright pink, crazy, train, a mechanical bear god and a killing spree set off by 80s music.  It all works, somehow.

Following this, there was a six-year-gap before the next installation was published.  This means I need to read the following before I find out what happens next;

Needful Things - 1991
Gerald's Game - 1992
Dolores Claiborne - 1992

Nightmares and Dreamscapes - 1993
Insomnia - 1994
Rose Madder - 1995
The Green Mile - 1996
Desperation - 1996

The Regulators - 1996
Six Stories - 1997
The Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass - 1997

In this case, the bolded books are the ones I've read previously.  Gerald's Game and Dolores Claiborne are part of a loose series, which is thematically similar to my favourite, Rose Madder.  Nightmares and Dreamscapes is another short-story collection.  I've read Insomnia once and Green Mile twice, I think.  The move was pretty good.

Hopefully, those ten books will take less than six years for me to read.  Eight more after that and I'll be out of the nineties!

This has been a very long-running project.  It's taken me almost three years to read thirty-two books, and that's out of a total of ninety-three.  In other words I'm 34% of the way through!

I can (and do) read faster than that, as you can tell from my weekly logs.  But I can't read just one author.

In the afterword, Stephen King seems to indicate that this is his favourite of his own series'.  His magnum opus.  James Smythe points out that this is where the series began to take shape, to find its form.  It's an excellent post.

Onwards to Needful Things which loosely follows the Sun Dog from Four Past Midnight.  I've read it before, about a decade ago, though I don't remember too many of the details.


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