In Which We Discuss Insomnia, Rose Madder, and the Green Mile

I've been getting really behind on these posts, huh?

Recently, I've read Insomnia (on Kindle) and listened to Rose Madder and The Green Mile as audiobooks, hence the speed.  Audiobooks always go quicker, now I've gotten used to listening on 3x speed.

All three were books I'd read before.  Insomnia only once; I remembered being surprised that someone as old as Ralph could be the protagonist, something James Smythe echoes in his own article on the book.  I also hadn't read any of the Dark Tower series when I first read this book, so all of those references went totally over my head.  They're a lot more meaningful now, and I'm sure that will be even more true once I've read all of the Dark Tower novels.

Rose Madder, as I've mentioned before, is my favourite of Stephen King's novels.  I've read and listened to it several times.  I love the life-building aspect of it, how Rose escapes and builds something good for herself.  I also love Blair Brown's performance.

I'd forgotten how horrifying The Green Mile was, particularly Delacroix's death.  I have the film on dvd as well, though I've not rewatched it yet.  Hearing the description was somehow worse than watching it or just reading it.  Delacroix, despite being a rapist and a murderer is the closest thing the novel has to a clown, and his death is utterly heartrending.

The Green Mile was published, Dickens-style, as a series of short novels, with the ending unknown even to the author as they were written and published.  I've always liked Dickens; for his tenacity - there's a lovely story in How to Win Friends and Influence People about how, as a poor teenager, he wrote his first novel and sent it to a publisher in secret, because he was so embarrassed about thinking his work might be good enough to be published -and for the fact that he was always blatantly in it for the money, at least in part.  I don't think creating art for the money is a bad thing.  Nor do Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, or Terry Pratchett.  I like that Dickens responded to audience reactions as the novel went along, and that he set up his own magazines to self-publish.  Dickens was a pretty cool guy.

There's a reference to Dickens in Rose Madder.  I remember noticing it, but I can't recall what it is.  I remember it seemed interesting, in light of the Dickens-style publishing of The Green Mile.  I also hadn't realised that Dickens was a big deal in America, especially at the time he was publishing, not until I listened to the introduction.

I've started keeping a bullet journal, which I love, so I've added a Stephen King page (or three) to it.  It's taking me about a year and a half to read a decade of his writing, so I should be done by 2020 - apart from the books he'll write between now and then!

The next one is Desperation; I haven't read it before.

In Which We Discuss Books I Read in my 27th Year, Week 40/52

11 books last week; that's from the 12th to the 18th of May.

Only five were audiobooks; Shelter, The Great Unexpected, Girls in Love, Girls Under Pressure, and A Hopscotch Summer.

I'm quite glad I listened to The Great Unexpected again; the first time I was in a hurry to get through it and get it off my unread pile, so I didn't follow the story very well.  This time was much more enjoyable.

Two of these I read for bookclubs; Hot Feminist and A Dreadful Murder.  Hot Feminist was for the Birmingham Fems bookclub, which meets this Saturday.  It was interesting, though I did find it quite annoying the way the author kept repeating that she'd never tell anyone they were doing feminism wrong, but people who cared about certain things were stupid.

A Dreadful Murder was disappointing.  It claims to use modern detective skills to solve a hundred year old murder; instead, it just describes the murder.  At least it was a 'Quick Read'.  This was for a bookclub at my local library.  Each month they choose a theme, this one being 'crime'.  I've got a few others to get through.

The bookclub is held in the Children's Library, and while we were in there I spotted The Glass Bird Girl and Doll Bones.  Doll Bones was creepy, though unnecessarily so.  They were doing exactly what the doll wanted, so there was no need for her to go about being creepy all the time.  The Glass Bird Girl was repeatedly compared to Enid Blyton's boarding school stories, on the cover and in reviews, in a kind of desperate, pathetic way.  I wouldn't compare the series to those books any more than I'd compare Harry Potter to them.  So what if they're all set in a boarding school?  That's really not the important element.

NPCs and Insomnia are both books I've read before.  NPCs is fun, about a group of NPCs who end up taking over from the player characters, when the player characters die horribly.  There's a sequel I'd quite like to look into. 

I read Insomnia as part of my Stephen King project.  I was surprised to learn how much I'd forgotten, although considering the book is over 900 pages it wasn't really that surprising.  I'll write a longer post about it later.