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Metonymy posted:Haha. Fair enough. But that doesn't change the fact that his forced folksiness and neologisms feel awkward. Aw, I liked "thankee-sai."  And I liked most of the background flavor of the DT series up until Wolves of the Calla, which went into far too much detail about it "commala" and "oriza" and poo poo. quote:"One would reference '(sexual) orgasm,' as in 'Did'ee come commala'? (The hoped-for reply being 'Aye, say thankya, commala big-big.') To wet the commala is to irrigate the rice in a dry time; it is also to masturbate. Commala is the commencement of some big and joyful meal, like a family feast (not the meal itself, do ya, but the moment of beginning to eat). A man who is losing his hair is coming commala. Putting animals out to stud is damp commala. Gelded animals are dry commala, although no one could tell you why. A virgin is green commala, a menstruating woman is red commala, an old man who can no longer make iron before the forge is - say sorry - sof' commala. To stand commala is to stand belly-to-belly, a slang term meaning "to share secrets." (For that matter, why is a fork sometimes a commala, but never a spoon or a knife?) The Commala is also a dance to the goddess Oriza, to bless the rice." I mean, really? Did he think that's what the readers cared about? A lot of the made-up dialog worked because King didn't have a character sit down and give you the etymological roots of the word (or if he did it was crucial to the climax of the story, like charyou tree). Instead, you get the interesting sense that you've heard the term somewhere but you can't quite place it. So you get to draw your own conclusions instead of King sitting you down and telling you everything in the most boring manner possible.
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May 15, 2009 16:58
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Fallon posted:The Dark Tower language wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't reduced to a small stockpile of phrases spread over 7 usually huge novels. No kidding. Remember when it was just "ka"? Then it became: * ka-babbies: young ka-tet members. * ka-tel: a class of apprentice gunslingers. * ka-mai: ka's fool. * ka-me: ka's wiseman; the opposite of ka-mai. * kas-ka: a prophet * ka-shume: a unique feeling that a ka-tet is destined to break soon. * te-ka: ka's friend. * Can'-Ka No Rey: the red fields of none, where the Dark Tower lies. * tet-ka can Gan: the navel (specifically, the navel of Gan). * kas-ka Gan: singer of Gan's song/ prophet of Gan. * ves-ka Gan: Song of the Turtle The only remotely clever one out of the bunch was "ka-tel" because it sounded a little bit like "cartel" the first time I read it. But by the time we get to "tet-ka can Gan" (Gan's navel, really?) I was pretty sick of it.
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May 17, 2009 17:08
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Mister Kingdom posted:You think maybe King did this to show us he had put a lot of effort into creating a fake language? I take your point, but come on. We've all read some REAL fake languages, like Tolkien's or Burgess's or dozens of others. Those are languages where authors skilled with linguistics created dialects that adhere to real-world grammatical, phonetic and syntactic conventions. Like I've said before, I enjoyed the Dark Tower series, but the language gets really grating after a while just because it feels so forced. It started out interesting and vaguely mysterious, but then turned pretty hokey and comical. Metonymy posted:There's a distinction between "opting not to" and "refusing to". "Refusing to" implies some closed-mindedness and final judgment. What a useless, pedantic distinction.
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May 18, 2009 19:52
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Zimadori Zinger posted:King himself steps in at one point and tells you not to finish it. Take that for what its worth. Yeah, but by that point any sane person would have considered stopping a dozen times already, and probably did. Although I eventually came to love the series, Wizard and Glass took me several tries to get through because of the flashback. When King tells you to stop it's what...twenty pages from the end? I was actually a little pissed off at that bit. I mean, the reader at that point has presumably invested a large amount of time reading the novels and waiting for them to be released (well, the first 4, before he started crapping out one every 6 months), and to have made it that far means they stuck through the thick and thin. So for King to waltz out and glibly tell the reader that they should put the book down lest they be struck dumb by how painful the ending is (  ) is pretty frustrating. The ending had better be painful, because you've only been building up to it for about 20 years. But instead, after all his hamfisted attempts to induce drama, he pulls all the teeth from his story by having Susannah go live in New York with Faux-Eddie and Faux-Jake.What an emotionally satisfying ending. Not.
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Jul 7, 2009 20:40
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I really enjoyed Hearts in Atlantis, which (except for the first story) really downplayed a lot of the supernatural in favour of some interesting personal stories written about students growing up in college during the Vietnam War. Was made into a movie with Anthony Hopkins, David Morse and a nice cameo by Alan Tudyk.
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Jul 14, 2009 18:14
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Little_Yellow_Duck posted:The only King I've tried to read has been Cell. Looks like I picked the wrong King introduction, which I read half of then gave up on, and maybe I can try something else and forgive him. Despite the fact that I'm sure almost every King book has been recommended to a new reader at some point in this thread: - 'Salem's Lot - a short classic, very much in contrast to any vampire fiction nowadays - The Long Walk - short-ish creepy story that doesn't stray too much into the supernatural, or sci-fi territory. If you haven't heard of it, "One hundred teenage boys (picked at random from a large pool of applicants) are chosen to participate in an annual walking contest called "The Long Walk". Each walker must maintain a constant speed of no less than four miles an hour or risk being shot by soldiers monitoring the event. " - It - extremely long but epic story which I think is better than The Stand. Stays scary throughout and just tells a great story. In my opinion, one of the most technically accomplished stories King ever wrote. I don't really know much of his new stuff after Dreamcatcher, but that list is what I'd recommend to someone trying to get into him. His short fiction works too, but that's been endlessly recommended in this thread.
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Jul 29, 2009 16:58
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oddspelling posted:He literally put himself in as a character in two of the Dark Tower books. (#5 & 6 I think). He doesn't appear as a character in 5, but he is mentioned by name. He actually shows up in 7 (not sure about 6 because it was terrible and I've forgotten most of it), and say's that he's basically a conduit or prophet for God. Seriously.
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Sep 24, 2009 17:22
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Malaleb posted:are there there any other King novels that will help me get the most out of the series? Rose Madder also touches on the DT universe. As does IT, in a very roundabout fashion. If you read IT, read it before Insomnia.
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Oct 4, 2009 19:43
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They felt pretty tricksy to me!
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Oct 7, 2009 20:34
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I've never really understood all the Regulators/Desperation hate. I like both novels, and I think they're fairly unique in terms of concept and execution. Granted, Regulators is the weaker of the two, but they're both better than a lot of other books King wrote.
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Oct 28, 2009 21:37
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Hedrigall posted:I really should read book 4-7 and the comic series. Or maybe start again from book 1, it's been 5 years since I finished book 3. Comic series isn't bad, and you can read it between 4 and 5 if you're looking to postpone the precipitous drop-off in quality of the last three installments. I recommend re-reading the first three not because you need to but just because they're pretty awesome (  the wastelands)
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Oct 29, 2009 18:53
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...of SCIENCE! posted:If Stephen King wrote a book about mid-life crises/divorce/disfigurement/growing old that didn't have a horror or supernatural element I would buy it in an instant. You could just read the first 200 pages of Insomnia, and assume anything Ralph sees is an age-induced hallucination. Conversely, if King wrote a book about mid-life crises/divorce/disfigurement/growing old that didn't have a horror or supernatural element I would probably never buy it, because I was bored to tears by the first 200 pages of Insomnia. Wiggles Von Huggins posted:So is The Tommyknockers worth a read or is it drivel? It has a modest story with some decently engaging characters but out of all his books, the Tommyknockers is the one that most strikes me as "in need of an editor." There's a lot of digressions that interrupt the flow of the narrative and don't contribute all that much to the progression of the plot, and just feel like King is indulging himself. If they'd cut about a quarter or a third of the book, I think I'd like it a lot more. Astfgl fucked around with this message at 01:01 on Nov 10, 2009 |
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Nov 10, 2009 00:59
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Ninja Bob posted:Seriously? I thought the actual literal insomnia aspect of Insomnia was the scariest part of it. I liked the book in general, but the creeping inevitability of Ralph's lack of sleep was way worse to me than the invisible midget doctors who cut balloon strings. Personal opinion. I'm not a fan of elderly protagonists (Stone Angel  ) and generally get pretty bored by their geri-antics. And I didn't feel as though King did anything strikingly different or provocative with Ralph. He was really just portrayed as your average, run-of-the-mill old dude who gets up super early, leads a boring life, copes with incontinence (ok, maybe I'm still projecting some residual Hagar-Shipley-hate here) and mopes around. I am, however, a huge Dark Tower fan so as soon as the book started to get into that poo poo, it really took off for me.
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Nov 10, 2009 22:16
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Wasn't there already a huge chunk of 5 (or 6?) devoted to the background explanation of what happened between 4 and 5? I'm referring to how Callahan wound up in Mid-World and I thought that was really the only plot point that needed to be fleshed out. What supporting characters are going to get the focus?
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Nov 12, 2009 16:41
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Junkenstein posted:What supporting characters ARE there, especially at that period? The Breakers? The Whole thing seems a bit odd to me. I can only think of the Breakers and Callahan. Mordred hasn't been born at that point and Mia hasn't manifested. So I guess they could do more with Calla (god I hope not), or more with our world and people like Calvin Tower? I really don't know what characters he's going to tap for this thing, especially if he said that Oy would be included somewhere. Also, unrelated DT question: can someone remind me which DT book has the revelation of the "mind-traps" like Insomnia and stuff? I'm trying to explain it to a friend but I can't pinpoint when it happened.
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Nov 12, 2009 17:44
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And yet the one they used, Insomnia, wound up actually being true (in that Patrick DID wind up saving Roland, albeit in a totally retarded fashion).
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Nov 12, 2009 18:16
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RagingHematoma posted:I am still not understanding the whole '19' thing. Can anyone explain? Didn't see this answered yet: Stephen King's accident happened on June 19, 1999. As a result, the number 19 (and, to a lesser degree, the number 99) featured prominently in the remaining DT novels (so, #5 and onward). And they pretty much came out of nowhere, too. All of a sudden the ka-tet is obsessed with the numbers and they start cropping up EVERYWHERE. Junkenstein posted:That quote about it being set between DT 4 and 5 is obviously wrong, seeing as it has Roland teaming up with Cuthbert and all. Not really. Roland spends most of book 4 in storytelling mode, relating his adventures with Cuthbert and Alain. It wouldn't be much of a stretch for King to insert the story into that time period, and have it be Roland telling Eddie/Jake/Susannah about an adventure that he and Cuthbert had.
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Dec 10, 2009 20:09
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Synopsis for people too lazy to click links:Joe Hill posted:Ignatius Perrish spent the night drunk and doing terrible things. He woke up the next morning with a thunderous hangover, a raging headache . . . and a pair of horns growing from his temples. Why do book synopses always need some terrible pun right at the end?
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Feb 18, 2010 20:46
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oldpainless posted:The sixth is, in a word, ahugefuckingwasteoftime. I really didn't like it reading it and now can barely remember lots of the book. In fact, I don't know a single person who professes to liking the book. I think this is where self-insertion came into play heavily. A friend of mine just finished Song of Susannah and so I kept pestering him with questions like "Did X happen yet?" "Did this person say _________?" "Did they meet A, B and C?" "Did Stephen King ___________ yet?" and he keeps saying "Nope, not yet I guess!" and it made me remember what a horrible loving waste of time Song of Susannah was. Nothing happens in that novel except Mia whining about her chap. Malaleb posted:The opening chapters of book 5 bugged the hell out of me with the whole "19" thing. I didn't have a problem with the idea but with the way it was presented. Rather than introduce the concept of this reoccurring number subtly, King just spends the first chapters of the book having the main characters go, "Oh! Holy poo poo! The address on that house was #19! These pants cost me $19! The number of moles on our bodies adds up to 19! WHAT A COINCIDENCE! Roland, don't you think 19 is important?!" More than that, it takes Jake about 20 pages before he starts calling them the ka-tet of 19 and declares "Oh, by the way 99 is an important number, too!"
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Apr 19, 2010 20:19
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