Pretty much anything by Cherie Priest, the Clockwork Century books are great!
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Cake day: July 30th, 2023
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Everyone Poops!
Not really a thriller, more of a mystery + a love story. It’s a fantastic read. Especially considering it was translated from Spanish.
Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon.
First in a series called the Cemetery of Forgotten Books.
A young boy named Daniel is taken by his bookstore-owning father to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books.
By tradition, first time visitors are allowed to select one book for which they will become a lifetime guardian.
Daniel chooses “Shadow of the Wind” by Julian Carax and quickly becomes enthralled by it. As he tries to find out more about the book and the author, he finds that someone is systematically collecting all of Carax’s works and burning them.
Some of his books just aren’t very good. I loved the concept of Under the Dome, but the villains were so cartoonish I just couldn’t take them seriously and I skipped whole chapters to get back to the protagonists.
Cell was a great concept, an alien signal spread via cell towers turns people into zombies, but it literally has no ending. It’s like King went “Oh, shit, deadline is today? Eh, fuck it, ship it. Good enough!”
But man, when he’s on point with stuff like It, the Stand, Insomnia, the Dark Tower? Hard to touch.
See, for me, I still think the first one is the best of all of them. :) But the 2nd book introduces more regular characters.
Did you at least get to the bit with young Roland and his falcon? Such a brilliant story.
The one thing I noticed about 5-7, there are no flashbacks to young Roland and Gilead. I kind of missed that.
The 3rd Dark Tower book by Stephen King. The Waste Lands. Came out in 1991 and ends with the main characters trapped on a psychotic AI monorail who challenges them to a riddle contest for their lives.
The fourth book, Wizard and Glass, wouldn’t come out until 1997. SIX YEARS LATER.
Now, with any other author, it wouldn’t be a big deal, but this is Stephen King we’re talking about.
Between book 3 and book 4 he published 8 OTHER books.
Needful Things
Gerald’s Game
Dolores Claiborne
Insomnia
Rose Madder
The Green Mile
Desperation
The RegulatorsOf those, Insomnia, Rose Madder, Desperation and the Regulators touched on the Dark Tower universe, so it’s like he was fucking with us. ;)
Book 4 finally comes out, he promises to write books 5, 6 and 7 “without getting up to go to the bathroom”, and he gets hit by an idiot in a van and is damn near killed.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_King
The 5th book wouldn’t appear until 2003, naturally after King wrote five other books, but at least 4 didn’t have a cliffhanger.
Not really. Dramatic irony exists for a reason.
https://www.britannica.com/art/dramatic-irony
So, for example, Titanic. We all KNOW what’s going to happen. The question then becomes how the characters deal with it.
Picked up The Book of Elsewhere by China Miéville and Keanu Reeves. It’s part of the BRZRKR universe from comic books.
I gotta be honest though, the BRZRKR story is so incredibly visual, it doesn’t translate well to a novel.
2·2 months agoYeah, I saw the first movie, then dove into the books. Caught the 2nd movie and was like “Well, that was shitty…”
It would benefit from a long form adaptation on HBO or something.
I guess it depends on how you define “literature”, but the Night Watch books from Sergei Lukyanenko were pretty popular and even spawned two film adaptations. The first of which was very good and the 2nd was really, really not. ;)
I say “literature” because it’s basically Twilight in Russian. :) That’s unfair, it’s far, far better than Twilight, but you get the idea. ;)
The first book was in 1998, the 6th in 2014.
Lukyanenko is problematic now due to his Ukranian heritage and his unwavering support for Russia in the war in Ukraine. :(
Picked up a wonderful illustrated edition of The King in Yellow. Yeah, I’m not sure that’s a good idea either. ;)
The footnotes alone are almost a book unto themselves(!)
Just picked up “Eruption” - the final Michael Crichton novel. His wife found the unfinished manuscript in his papers, sent it to James Patterson who really enjoyed it and agreed to finish it.
It’s… well… it’s not very good. Stock characters, disaster premise (monster Hawaiian volcano!), etc. etc. But it moves VERY fast. 419 pages and 109 chapters. On average under 4 pages a chapter.
“In a hole in the ground there lived a Hobbit.”
There’s a really nice edition of all the Earthsea books with illustrations by Charles Vess:
Anything with a full cast audio… oh, and the hardcore pornography written by Anne Rice but the audio version read by Elizabeth Montgomery (Bewitched).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sleeping_Beauty_Quartet
Screwtape Letters read by John Cleese:
Moon Rise, Moon Set, and Moon Phase are three different things.
https://earthsky.org/moon-phases/understandingmoonphases/
"The moon rises in the east and sets in the west, every day.
It has to. The rising and setting of all celestial objects is due to Earth’s continuous daily spin beneath the sky.
So, when you see a thin crescent moon in the west after sunset, it’s not a rising moon. Instead, it’s a setting moon. In fact, it rose earlier in the morning soon after the sun rose."
So, locally, for me today:
https://www.timeanddate.com/moon/usa/portland-or
Moon Rise - 1:34 am
Moon Set - 5:20 pm
Meridian Passing - 9:34 am @ 246,883 miles.