In Which We Discuss Wizard and Glass and the Little Sisters of Eluria

Wizard and Glass and Little Sisters of Eluria are a novel and a short story set in the world of the Dark Tower. Wizard and Glass was published in 1997 while Little Sisters was published in the Legends anthology in 1998.

I actually read Legends way back in 2004 or so because it also included the Discworld short story, The Sea and Little Fishes. I hadn’t read any of the Dark Tower books at that point, so it didn’t make a huge impression on me, aside from creeping me out a little. The one that did make an impression was Terry Goodkind’s Debt of Bones; maybe I should actually read his Sword of Truth series!

Both stories are set in Roland’s past, for the most part; Little Sisters entirely, and Wizard and Glass almost entirely, apart from the opening and ending. At some point in Wizard and Glass the characters travel to the world of The Stand, while the titular Little Sisters speak in Tak’s language at times.

After this point, King took a brief break from the Dark Tower; the next book in the series, Wolves of the Calla, wasn’t published until 2003. So, the next book I’ll be reading – or listening to, rather – is Bag of Bones, another book I’ve read before.

In Which We Discuss Books I Read in my 28th Year, Week 1/52

10 books last week!  Well, slightly over a week; the 11th to the 19th of August.  This was a leap year, so my birthday was on the Friday not the Thursday.

Six rereads.  I'm reading (listening) to the City Watch books of the Discworld series in order, starting with Night Watch which adds a sad poignancy to the first few.  Poor young Sam.  It's interesting to observe that Sam is a man made by Keel, Carrot, and Vetinari, and then, ultimately, by himself.

How to be Good is one of my favourite of Nick Hornby's novels.  For a man who writes in a genre known as "lad lit" he writes excellent women.  Which kind of indicates that the people who try to gender genres are idiots.  I've also listened to The Upside of Rationality before; it's one of the first audiobooks I ever owned.

I started listening to Yes Please the other day when I walked the Birmingham-Worcester canal, from Birmingham to Worcester.  30 miles.  I also listened to Guards Guards during this trip.  The wisest line in the whole book is "your divorce will be like your marriage".  I've never been married or divorced, but that's certainly true in my experience.

The Silkworm is the second in the Cormoran Strike series.  I got it for Christmas and only just got around to finishing it.  I'm trying to get books off my unread pile before I move so I don't have to carry the bloody things!

The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar is my favourite of Roald Dahl's works, with some competition from Danny the Champion of the World.  I did notice some interesting similarities with The Great Gatsby.  Henry Sugar is like the Benjamin Button version of Jay Gatz; a playboy who finds a goal, devotes all his time an energy to it, and finds he's a better person with a meaningful existence.  As opposed to starting as poor and ambitious, finding a goal, devoting all your time and energy to it, and becoming a playboy.

Unseemly Science is the second i the Gas Lit Empire series.  I'm re-listening to them all, eventually.

I read Cursed Child in the first hour of my birthday.  Cried five times!

Little Sisters of Eluria has a slightly longer post to come.

Finally, Men Explain Things to Me.  Very short, took about an hour and a half to read.  For my feminist bookclub; definitely good for bringing righteous feminist anger.  The next book is Atlas Shrugged, which I really look forward to discussing!

In Which We Discuss Books I Read in my 27th Year, Week 52/52

Four books last week; the last week before my next birthday!  4th to the 10th of August.

Two rereads, both audiobooks; The Bullet Catcher's Daugher and Poison.  I listened to Poison on the OneClickDigital app, which let me borrow it from my local library.  Unfortunately, it doesn't let me change the bloody speed, which was very irritating.  Some people have found a way to listen to the files on other apps, but that would involve having a cable which let me link my phone to my PC, which I do not.  My cables only charge.

There'll be a longer post to come on Wizard and Glass.  I'm really into The Dark Tower series now, but it'll be a while until the next one, once I've finished rereading Little Sisters of Eluria.

Finally, What If...All the Boys Wanted You?.  A Choose-Your-Own-Adventure style book aimed at teenage girls.  Very silly.  Tends to forget which bits you will and won't have already read on each path, so some elements are nonsensical and come out of nowhere.  I read all of it, using my normal method of pencil marks and folding pages over.

I'll start my 28th year posts a week after my birthday...on Friday the 19th of August.  See you then!

During my 26th year I read a total of 261 books over these 52 weeks, at an average of 5.05 per week or 0.72 per day.  Here's a graph.

 

26th Year

During my 27th year I read a total of 303 books, at an average of 5.83 per week or .83 per day, so a little faster, which surprises me considering that I was studying for most of it!  Here's another graph.

27th Year

Another spike around Christmas/New years, but even that pattern is a bit of a push.  My unread pile is down to 42 books, with 15 of those being physical books.  I'm moving to Manchester on the 19th of September, so I'm going to focus on getting those down before I go so I don't have to carry them.

In Which We Discuss Books I Read in my 27th Year, Week 51/52

Five books last week!  That's30th July to the 3rd of August.

Two were audiobooks I've read before; Kind of Cruel and Blind Faith.  I also reread The Gift of Fear, which is the kind of book you need to review every so often.  It's pretty useful, to have it reconfirmed that you can and should trust your own instincts, over being 'polite'.

The Regulators and Six Stories were both new to me, and I wrote a longer post on them here.

In Which We Discuss Desperation, The Regulators, Six Stories, and the Dark Tower

Warning!  Spoilers for the Chronicles of Narnia Below!

Desperation and the Regulators were a very interesting concept that I’ve not seen done elsewhere.  They were published at the same time in 1996, one openly written by King, the other purporting to be by his long-dead alias, Richard Bachman, the manuscript having been found by his widow and published posthumously.  Both include the same characters – including Cynthia, of Rose Madder – though they’re in slightly different situations, with, for example, parents swapping places with children in one nuclear unit.

In Desperation, a small town is slaughtered en mass by the sheriff who then begins luring other victims in.  One of the characters, David, made a vow to God when a friend of his didn’t die, and is thus enlisted as God’s representative, to save the town.  His thoughts on this reminded me a lot of Neil Gaiman’s The Problem with Susan, a story about the elder Susan Pevensie after her family die at the end of the Narnia series.  

In Good Omens – by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman – it is stated that, if God is omniscient and all-powerful, there cannot be a war between good and evil.  There can only be one long, unfathomable game of solitaire.  Both Susan and Desperation reminded me of that; both point out that their respective gods could have prevented the accident in the first place, but didn’t.  Not a tame lion.

The Regulators involves an autistic boy who is given reality warping powers by the same unpleasant being who is behind the events of Desperation.  I do wonder if the Regulators isnt’t real at all; if, instead, Tak has just moved the world sideways, into one in which he can try something new.  We see in Wizard and Glass, after all, that sideways worlds exist.  As well as in that short story where Little Tall became the home of the zombie apocalypse.

I found Desperation to be one of the more horrifying of King’s novels, on the basis of one single line.  Long before the events of either book, there was a cave-in which trapped seventy Chinese workers.  No one tried to get them out, and when asked why, a character explains “because they were Chinese”.  The line’s delivered as a criticism of the people of the time, not as a justifiable reason, or at least, that’s how I took it.

Six Stories is a special edition of, well, six stories, published in a limited run of 1100 volumes, each signed by King.  I cheated; the stories were later published in Everything’s Eventual and Hearts in Atlantis, so I read those versions instead.  They’re heavily edited, in some cases, but I viewed this as an acceptable compromise, given the difficulty and expense it would take to track down one of those limited editions. 

Although I’d read Everything’s Eventual before, and thus had read five of the six stories, the only one I really remembered was Autopsy Room 4.  Possibly because of my fear of locked-in syndrome (I’m also cleithrophobic and trypophobic – don’t google image search that last one).  I quite liked Luckey Quarter [sic], I think because it was slightly more optimistic than King’s normal work.

I’ve already started Wizard and Glass, the next book published by King, and the fourth part of the Dark Tower Series.   Then I’ll reread Little Sisters of Eluria, and there’ll be a long, long stretch before I get to Song of Susannah, which was published in 2004, immediately before The Dark Tower.  The final (or, at least, most recent) book of the series was published in 2012.

Interesting, the first book I read in 2016 was the first book of King’s published in the 1990s; Four Past Midnight.  There are only six books left in the decade after Little Sisters of Eluria; Bag of Bones, Storm of the Century, Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, The New Lieutenant’s Rap, Hearts in Atlantis, and Blood and Smoke.   The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon is pretty short, especially for a King novel, and Hearts in Atlantis only contains six stories.  The New Lieutenant’s Rap is also a short story.  I’ll aim to finish those by the end of this year.