In Which We Discuss Sleep Tight

I listened to this as an audiobook, so one issue became apparent immediately.  Two main characters are sisters, performing similar jobs.  The author does not often refer to them by their first names during scenes, or at least, not throughout.  The reader does not differentiate between them vocally.  So I end up listening to a few scenes with only the faintest idea of who was talking.  I actually listened to the first three hours, got hopelessly confused, and then started it again from the beginning so I could understand what was happening.

Once I got over that issue I quite enjoyed the book, as you can tell from my rating.  It focuses on a murder investigation, with some callbacks to an earlier event in the character's lives.  I did wonder if this book was a sequel to one which described the events of that book, but it doesn't appear to be - they really are just internal callbacks.

The murderer is an unusual one.  He reminded me a little of The Collector, although we spend much less time in this killer's head.  Nor is the book as memorable as The Collector; I finished it two weeks ago and I would now struggle to summarise the denouement.   This does mean I'll get to read it and enjoy the mystery again - possibly following it slightly better - so that's not altogether a downside.

I do quite enjoy mystery and crime stories, as you might be able to tell from my shelves.  This one didn't disappoint me; the mystery was quite intriguing and overall it was enjoyable journey of discovery.

I received an Audible code for this book from the author, hence why I stuck with it and made a point of writing a review of it.  I was not disappointed to have read it, and nor did I feel like I had to force myself to complete it.

In Which We Discuss Books I Read in my 27th Year, Week 34/52

Six books last week; that's 31st March to the 6th of April.  Four I'd read before; only two were new to me.

Caradoc's Quest was one of those.  It's part of the Six World's Saga, one of which I read and enjoyed in my early teens.  It's set in a future where humanity has gone to stars, populating six planets which circle two twinned stars.  All religion has been lost - no religion but Christianity appears to have ever existed - and the heros are general trying to bring Christanity back.  I'm an atheist, but I attended a Catholic school, and I'll tell you this for nothing; the Bible is pretty epic.  If you ignore any real life implications and just read it as a story it's a long, winding saga about one family and the shenanigans they get up to.  If the book was the one ring, this thing would be fun than Tolkien.  The Qu'ran and the Torah are the same; they're very broadly the same story, literally the same family.  The Torah disagrees on the point of Jesus, and the Qu'ran splits off on the point of whether it was Isaac or Ishmael that Abraham/Ibrahim tried to sacrifice before god called 'psych!'.  If you've read The Handmaid's Tale then allow me to point out that this is the story used to justify the handmaid's; Sarah, Abraham's wife believed she was too older to bear children, so she encouraged Abraham to have a child with a concubine.  Later, she was actually able to have a son.  The latter was Isaac, the former Ishmael.  So it does seem odd that the society of The Handmaid's Tale is based on Christianity, when this particular story would better suit their needs in the Islamic interpretation.  Though, on second thought, it's not that odd; they were using whatever they could to justify what they wanted to do, rather than letting conclusions come from information.  Reminds me of an argument I had with an ex-housemate; he insisted that being gay was wrong because "it's in the Bible"; when I asked him about adultery and shellfish he claimed those examples were irrelevant because "people don't care about those".  Totally incapable of recognising his own circular logic there.

American Gods is a book I first read a few years ago; it's set in a world where Gods work based on belief and many travellers brought their gods to America with them.  The old Gods are going to war with the new Gods, and there's a whole boatload of symbolism, as well as some lampshade-hanging on how similar many of the stories are.

Clare in the Community - season 6 and 7 this week - is a radio show, with the titular Clare voiced by Sally Phillips.  She's lovely.  I particularly like her work in Smack the Pony.

Neil Patrick Harris' Choose Your Own Autobiography is another book I've read before.  It have the audiobook, which loses something in the translation; I'm tempted to borrow the physical book from the library, especially after reading this lovely review by Emily Short.

Finally, Sleep Tight is the other book which was new to me; it's an audiobook I was given by the author, so I do need to write a specific post for it!

In Which We Discuss Dolores Claiborne

When I was younger - between the ages of nine and sixteen - I used to be off school a lot.  When that happened, my grandmother would take me to Bearwood with her, and we'd look in all the charity shops up and down the high street.  I'd come away with piles and piles of books, which I'd start on in the pub, over a coke while my nan had a lager and caught up with her friends.

Dolores Claiborne was one of these.  I remember reading it and getting through the first hundred pages before we left, and I think I finished it later that same evening.  It's told in the second person, in one long confession by Dolores herself, something Stephen King hadn't done in long fiction before.  It's a pretty short book, somewhere between 200 and 250 pages, and it gave me a real bad case of the gottas.

Dolores Claiborne is linked to Gerald's Game via the eclipse that both Dolores and Jessie witness, during which they receive odd glimpses of one another.  I'm not sure which of the books I read first - it really makes no difference - but I think it was this one.

James Smythe points out that this is only Stephen King's second novel with a single viewpoint, the first being The Body.  I hadn't realised that - though obviously I noticed the second person aspect as being unique.   I also hadn't really noticed the dialect the story was told in; I knew it was there but it didn't impinge on my experience.  Of course, one of my favourite books is Lorna Doone.

Stephen King is very good at keeping track of multiple characters in an overarching third person narrative, but, like Gerald's Game, it's where he limits himself that his skill really becomes apparent.  I also feel that Stephen King writes excellent women.  I've noticed that authors with daughters tend to be better at it, though I've not done any sort of formal survey so this observation might just be a coincidence.  I'm thinking of Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman when I make that sort of statement.  As well as having a daughter Stephen King was raised by a single mother, and is married to a woman with five or six sisters, so he's definitely had the opportunity to observe women in their natural habitat; he doesn't see them as being exotic beings or people very different from men, which we're not, in many ways.

I also like the discussion and use of the word 'bitch'.  It's used in a reclaiming way; sometimes being a bitch is all you've got to hold on to.  It's not a word I'd use on anyone else, who isn't fictitious, but I love bitches in fiction.  Strong women, who do what they need to do.

The book - which was the best-selling American novel of 1992 - was made into a movie in 1995, starring Kathy Bates who also appeared in Misery.

The next book Stephen King published was Nightmares and Dreamscapes, a collection of short stories that I've also read before.  After that it'll be Insomnia, followed by The Green Mile, both of which I've also read previously.  Then we'll be back on to a long string of books I've not read before, starting with Desperation.

In Which We Discuss Books I Read in my 27th Year, Week 33/52

Seven books last week!  That's the 24th to the 30th of March.

I found the first three Georgia Nicolson books in The Works for 50p each.  Actually, they had the other six or seven in the series as well, but I found they stop being fun after the first few.  That or I grew out of them.  I first read them when I was fifteen, so it may be that the first three snuck into my field of view just in time.

The Works sells books which couldn't be sold in bigger stores - that's why they're so much cheaper.  I think someone must have put in a order for all the books when Louise Rennison died, expecting them to sell.  Sad.

I also read the Artemis Fowl books as a teenager, but I'd not read the graphic novel before.  I feel like it loses something in the translation; the scene with Butler and the troll is less badass without Foaly's commentary, and the secret code from the bottom of the pages is missing.

I also read Dolores Claiborne as a teenager.  That's one I need to write a longer post on, since it's part of my Stephen King project.  You won't be seeing any more posts for a bit; the next one, Nightmares and Dreamscapes is over 900 pages.  I've also read that one before - again, as a teenager if I recall correctly.

I didn't read The Naughtiest Girl in the School as a teenager; I actually read it when I was seven.  It was the first book I ever read, in fact.  This was the abridged audiobook, with a full voice cast.  It was quite nice actually hearing the piano pieces - I'd totally forgotten about that.

The Darkest Minds was a new one to me; another audiobook, one that my partner recommended.  It picked up a lot near the end, but I'm not feeling a huge urge to listen to the sequels.

In Which We Discuss Books I Read in my 27th Year, Week 32/52

Only three books last week; 16th to 23rd March.  One I'd read before, but as an audiobook this time, for a bit of a change, one I've had on my kobo for a solid three years before finally getting around to it and a library book which I read for a bookclub.

Carol was the library book for the bookclub; originally published as The Price of Salt it was one of the first LGBT novels in which the hero/ines were not murdered, forced to commit suicide or sent back to their straight partners having learned a lesson.  I didn't enjoy it much because I didn't like the viewpoint character; I had no interest in what she was doing or what she thought of anything, which was a slight barrier to caring about the story.  It was a very nice meeting though.

Chimerascope is a book of short-stories, many of them award-winning or at least nominated.  The first one is strongly sci-fi and took me a while to get into, which is possibly why it took me over three years to read it.

Room is the one I've read before.  Twice as a paperback, and this time as an audiobook.  It's got one reader for Jack's voice and a few others voicing the adults.  I also watched the movie a few months ago; Jacob Tremblay is amazing in the role.  I'm sad they wrote the uncle out though; I liked his role in the story.

In Which We Discuss Books I Read in my 27th Year, Week 31/52

Six books lasy week; three more seasons of Clare in the Community, Needful Things and Gerald's Game, and Wuthering Heights.

Wuthering Heights was the only book was was new to me.  I got it as an audiobook on Audible's daily deal for £2.99, and it was listening to it as an audiobook that got me through it.  I found the opening quite slow and I didn't like a lot of the characters.  It seems to be that Cathy and Heathcliff deserved one another, and it would have saved everyone else a lot of trouble if they'd just fucked off together early on.

I liked Heathcliff more towards the end.  He began to remind me of Snape, if Snape were a sociopath.

I've written a longer post about the Stephen King books here.

Clare in the Community is a radio series starring Sally Phillips.  I love basically everything she's in.

In Which We Discuss Needful Things and Gerald's Game

Reading Needful Things took me a while.  It's a book I've read before and one that I enjoy, but it's also nearly a thousand pages long.

Needful Things is a story about the time the Dark Man took a holiday from bugging Roland and decided to open a little curio shop in Castle Rock.  Shenanigans ensue, in the forms of pranks played as payment for one's hearts desire.  There's an interesting commentary on the advertising industry, something King has said was intentional - he tried to distil the worst elements of the 80s into the plot.  I particularly like the way each person talks themselves into the sale, not on the merits of the item itself but based on the life they believe they will have once in possession of the item.  In at least one case this is heartbreaking; a man believes that once in possession of a fine fox tail to tie to his car's aerial he will drive that car over to a regular AA meeting every week.

The pranks people are asked to play seem innocent at first; they're on people whom the pranker is ambivalent about and don't seem too harmful.  But, in the mind of the prankee they increase paranoia and existing rivalries, until the town reaches a glorious implosion.

The trailer for the movie makes the whole thing seem comedic, and, on reflection, there is a line of dark comedy in there.  Very dark.

I enjoyed the book both when I first read it and now.  It's something of a sequel to The Dark Half and The Sun Dog and also includes characters from The Dead Zone and The Body.  The latter is Ace Merrill, the main bully, who is said to have spent some time in Shawshank between books.  I particularly liked Alan Pangborn and his relationship with Polly, who ends up spending some time thinking about Cujo when she's up on the old farm where that book took place.  At the end of the book, Gaunt moves on to the town where The Library Policeman took place.

A number of these characters also show up in Gerald's Game, or at least at the end.  Most of the book involves one woman, in a room, for three-hundred pages.  These restrictions really allow King's talent as a story-teller to shine.  There's nothing to hide behind; no distractions. Just one woman and her story, and King handles it masterfully.  The flashbacks are used to great effect; in this article, Gladstone points out whatever the chronology is doing the narrative is always moving forwards.  Flashbacks are part of that, no matter when they actually take place, and King handles that like a boss.

The novel also explores the limit of the human body and mind; what can we cope with?  What can we live through?  It really is a masterpiece; I don't think I ever read it in less than two days.

Jessie Burlingame is excellently written, as a fully realised female character.  King even manages some commentary on uniquely female experiences which rings true; possibly due to the women the novel is dedicated to, his wife and her sisters.

Jessie's also an expert at splitting her psyche, assigning different experiences to different segments.  This allows us to have some conversation during the three hundred pages in which she is alone, as she is forced to deal with these issues.  It's a similar technique to that used by Mark Vorkosigan in Mirror Dance, when dealing with being tortured, and it can also be a useful mental trick for making decisions about more mundane issues.

James Smythe's post on Needful Things points out that a huge theme of the novel is about how destructive needs can be if not overcome.  His post on Gerald's Game covers his own experience of first reading the novel at thirteen.  I think I was a little older; closer to seventeen or eighteen.

Stephen King's next published novel is Dolores Claiborne another book that I've read before and enjoyed.  I actually read it before Gerald's Game; the two are linked by an eclipse.