So I read the new Stephen King

[cleolinda]

...because the two or three weeks after Christmas are my traditional Book Wallow. And I really like Stephen King's short stories, which tend to be more high-concept and less tangential than his novels. That is to say, you get a handful of really interesting ideas, rather than one idea that goes on for three hundred pages longer than it should. Full

Comments

[papagai]

I read hunger games and it was a pretty decent book, but I hated the ending so much that I didn't even want to read book two. my friends love two and three though... but I won't be going back. I'm done with "team" books, unless it's a lot more subtle or even just better written! (grammar check?)

long time reader, first time poster! <3

[beckyh2112]

Have you ever read "The Demon's Lexicon"? /curious I know the author is pretty much "teams? sounds fun! I am Team Everybody! :DDD"

[glyphs]

I actually thought the Hunger Games was the best book out of the trilogy. Catching Fire and Mockingbird were fine (for me) up until the last couple chapters in each one where all of a sudden everything was concluded. I was just sitting there thinking, "Wait, what?! But what about...?...and then?" It felt to me almost like Collins just got tired of writing us through the action and just went, "Oh, whatever. I'm sick of this. I'll just knock my protagonist out in the height of the action and then I can just give a past-tense blow-by-blow of what happened rather than actually figure out those logistics." I thought there was a lot of potential just thrown away.

[sunset_glow]

Love the books, but yeah, I agree. Catching Fire didn't really bother me, since the knock out/summary was so close to the end, but Katniss seems to spend the vast majority of Mockingjay out of commission, physically or emotionally, in some form or another. And I get that that's pretty much the whole point of the series - horrors of war, PTSD, etc - but it doesn't make for the most gripping reading.

Hunger Games is the best because Katniss is directly involved in all the action. It's realistic that she'd be on the fringes of the rebellion, but it's not satisfying from a story perspective, and Mockingjay really suffers for it.

please?

[motherami]

I vote for girl with the dragon tattoo because I'm also planning on reading it and then we could discuss?

[glinda_w]

I just finished The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (yay library!) and found it excellent. Want to read the sequels now.

[flamingo_bandit]

I just finished the second one literally today. Really love this series. (Though this one should also have a massive "HEY RAPE TRIGGER YO" warning on the front. I read spoilers before reading the first one, but I still wasn't prepared for how graphic/intense it was. However, I might be a wuss.)

[calimazan]

Seconded! The rape is described in depth and it's awful.

I'd like to give a warning of a different kind: the last book seems to have no editor and reads like a draft. For obvious reasons, but omg, it went on forever on pointless things.

[ofstarstuff]

Glimpses of the weird? Horror? High Octane Nightmare Fuel? Cleo, you should read Dan Simmons's Hyperion. The first story in particular still makes me uncomfortable, looking back on it.He just keeps ladling on the psychological horror.

And House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski, too. That's more than a glimpse of the weird, it's a full-on dive into insane architecture, typesetting and mind-screwing.

Edited for grammar. Hello English language, have we met before?

About time I broke out this icon.

[ofstarstuff]

Some of the stories are, and the arch--"villain"? Wouldn't call it that, hmm... let's go with "superior life form"--is pretty much the stuff nightmares are made of. Without wanting to give away plot points, the back-stories of the characters make the whole novel function like The Canterbury Tales... in space. I still have to read the rest of the Cantos. But for straight-out psych-horror Carrion Comfort and Song of Kali are perhaps a better fit.

Regarding HoL: The footnotes! The footnotes, omg. I read it in e-book form, and have been pining for a paper version, because that is the kind of book I'd annotate to hell and back.

[evewithanapple]

On the other hand, the original title of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was Men Who Hate Women. But at least I know that going in.

Ohhh . . . you don't. You really, really don't.

[la_donna_pietra]

Tip of the iceberg, man.

[cleolinda]

Well, someone told me something really horrific that happens to Lisbeth. If the whole book's like that, I'm more prepared than one might think.

[evewithanapple]

If it's the really terrible thing that I'm thinking of (and I'm betting it is) then yeah, you're prepared. On the bright side, it's mostly uphill from there in terms of the graphicness. On the downside . . . it just keeps going.