That's the one part of the King corpus that I haven't delved into at all. The Dark Tower stuff is just too much fantasy to work for me. I might try it someday after he's dead and everything is published but for now it's just too much.
Speaking of King, my wife (a runner) and I listened to The Gingerbread Girl on audiobook on the way to the beach this weekend. I told her it was a story about a woman runner who moves to a beach house and lives happily ever after. The opening line kind of betrayed me, though. Decent novella.
LOL! I really liked that story. A bit different from his usual stuff.
If you like King's other works you would probably like Dark Tower considering it encompasses all of his works.
I just got "What if? Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions" by Randall Munroe (xkcd person). I'm excited to read through it.
First glance, I saw 'what if' and thought this was a counterfactual book that I have called What If?: The World's Foremost Military Historians Imagine What Might Have Been. When I searched the full title, I was rewarded by cover art that appears to depict a T. rex being lowered into a sarlacc pit.
I have a decent book on my shelf about obsolete science. A factoid type book that explains what we "knew" at certain points in history and how horribly wrong it was through the lens of time.
heh. Just searched "obsolete science book" on Amazon and got a fully topless 1976 Penthouse magazine as the fifth hit. Interesting.
Finished A Prayer for Owen Meany last week. Aside from the repetitive political rants from the narrator in the present time, it was one of the best stories I've read.
There was something about the scenes he chose to capture in that book that seemed so true to life. Not so much his childhood, but towards the end of the book when they were in College.
Just finished "god and the folly of faith" by victor stenger. I say finished because I couldn't take anymore. The guy has zero original thoughts, its just a long collection of quotes and essays cited from other people. What a waste of money.
Read the first volume of Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time. Suggested by a friend during a Proust discussion. I had to quit Proust, this was much easier to get into. Would suggest to anyone looking for something....long.
Just finished "god and the folly of faith" by victor stenger. I say finished because I couldn't take anymore. The guy has zero original thoughts, its just a long collection of quotes and essays cited from other people. What a waste of money.
A buddy of mine worshipped Thomas Sowell, in large part because of the staggering amount of citations Mr. Sowell uses. I think that's okay if you view his work as an guided index of sorts rather than original work. It allowed him to find other like minded books to read fairly easily.
Read the first volume of Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time. Suggested by a friend during a Proust discussion. I had to quit Proust, this was much easier to get into. Would suggest to anyone looking for something....long.
I might have to check that out. I did make it through all of Proust's In Search of Lost Time and found it to be totally worth it by the end. But there are definitely parts (long parts) that are tough slogs in between the brilliant parts.
I'm about 3/4 of the way done with this book on the Peloponnesian War (called The Peloponnesian War by Donald Kagan). I only knew the basics about the conflict (i.e. Athens and Sparta were fighting back and forth for a while), but it's absolutely riveting. There's all sorts of twists and turns, double-crossing, personal drama, and bigger questions about the best form of government. I really hope someone is prepping a proposal to make some portion of this into a Rome-type HBO series.
