Jason

Name dropping does not make a good book

I'm a child of the 80's. I loved the 80's. I want to go back there.
So like every other tragic fan of that era I thought this book was tailor made for me.
Unfortunately this was the closest I've ever come to a DNF. 80% of this was not a story. It was name dropping for the sake of it. For the first half of this book I felt like I was sitting in a room with someone simply reading through a list of 80's movies, TV shows, songs and fictional characters. That's it. That's all it was. It was 20% story, and 80% filler. And the 20% story was filled with overly convenient and simplistic plot devices.
“Oh let's pull this thing out of my inventory that was never mentioned anywhere else in the the book which just happens to be the exact thing I need to progress further!”
Sorry, but I'm angry. Because so many people love this book. So many people I respect. But I can't help but think they all got so caught up in the reminiscing that they didn't notice that this is a terrible story.
I look forward to seeing what Spielberg does with the movie, because if anyone can make something good out of this, he can. And he's the perfect person to turn this into what it should have been.

I chose to wait until I finished the entire series before writing a review.
And this is a series review, mor than a book review.

I took on the task in March of last year to get through the entire series, and I only took a break here and there with a few other books as a breather.
This is a strange one to review as I am a huge King fan, but found this series extremely uneven. I'd even venture to say that I think he was stoned when he wrote some of this.
That's not to say I didn't enjoy it. And I became VERY connected to the characters. I just thought some of the ideas were a little too cutesy (Blaine and the riddles for example - which took up WAAAY too much of an entire book).
Also, I love that King is able to essentially come up with new languages and weave them into the story, but I feel he tried to get too clever sometimes, losing the flow of the words and therefore losing my interest and focus in places.

I definitely found the earlier books much stronger than the later books. With Songs of Susannah being by far my least favourite.
What makes this hard is that through the entirety of this, I discovered some of King's best and also worst writing. So this leaves me conflicted.

I thought the ending was actually perfect. I honestly couldn't see anything different for it, and it brilliantly played into Roland's self indulgent need to find the tower at all costs.

But I find myself fondly looking back on the earlier books, more so than enjoying the more recent ones.
Who knows. Maybe that's nostalgia playing a part in it. Which in itself is a beautiful thing.

Only the second book I've not been able to finish. I can't stay awake. It's a textbook disguised as a collection of stories. No humour. No character development. No heart.
Interesting ideas written by someone that fails to capture my imagination.
I enjoyed Babylon, but everything else felt pretentious.
Sorry. Highly rated, but for reasons I don't understand

Quite frankly one of the best books I've read for some time. I was expecting this to be more sci fi than what it was. This was much more along the lines of historical fiction - which I really have absolutely NO interest in.
Says so much then that I struggled to put this book down. Not once was I disappointed hat this wasn't what I was expecting.
I don't think I've read a book where the characters have been so masterfully developed.
I felt physical sensations with the the characters that I have never felt before because they were written so descriptively - yet without ever looking like the author is trying to get me to understand something I couldn't possibly understand.

The beauty of the writing demonstrated wonderfully with the following quote:

The light of the rocket reflected off her bright eyes as if the fire of her soul were coming out to push the rocket into the sky.

Never have I hated a story that I loved so much.
This was wonderful, frustrating, confusing and a pain in my butt to get through.

It took me a while to figure out why I could not get my head around this book. Then it hit me; too many characters.
Let me clarify, not just too many characters, but that fact that the author did not stick to the same naming convention for each character essentially created 3 times as many names to keep track of.
The fact that there's a cast of character at the very beginning of the book should have been a warning sign, but when you also decide to start calling the characters by their nick names, last names, first names, house position names and descriptive names means that I gave up trying to understand who was talking to who half the time - no, virtually all the time.
This completely ruined any sense of understanding of the intricacies of what I wanted to be a wonderful world.

By half way through this just became an exercise in refusing to not give up. However I was just going through the motions because I refuse to not complete a book.

This saddened me, because when this book was good, it was exceptional. I loved the two main characters. The relationship between them and the witty dialogue was top notch. But I just could not be bothered keeping up with anyone else. I didn't care who died because I couldn't actually place who it was.

The fact that this was a hard slog for me is reflected by the fact that it took me TWO MONHTHS to get through.
That is not a sign of a book that I enjoyed reading.

A shame, because I really should have.