Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson (audio), trans. by Anne Born

Posted on March 26, 2014 by pagesofjulia

out stealing horsesYou may recall that Pops read and reviewed this book some time ago, and recommended it. I’m glad I finally got around to it.

Out Stealing Horses is just a short book, but in the end, it is bigger than it looks. I would like to commend my Pops for his spare review, leaving the plot mostly untouched and teasing us with rather coy praise; he convinced me to read this book (although it took me a while), and now that I have, I can see where his leaving the plot alone was the right move. I absolutely agree that

a summary may in itself sound spare and unremarkable – and spoil the real value here. What’s special is the way the story is told and how it is revealed, the author’s voice and the narrative structure he uses.

So, no summary for you, only setting: our elderly protagonist lives alone and isolated in a remote patch of Norwegian forest, as the twentieth century comes to a close. We alternate between his quiet dog walks and simple meals, and his memories of a brief time when he was a young boy-becoming-man. There are perhaps more questions raised than answers supplied; but we don’t mind, because of the lovely evocative moody writing and what we know of our protagonist by the end – which is far from everything.

Again, echoing my father, I was impressed by the translation; enough linguistic oddities remain to indicate translation, only slightly and very pleasantly, as with “very many thanks” (a sweet phrase but not one you hear often in English). I also appreciate Pops’s note about pacing, that it varies, ratcheting up and then calming back down. For all its thought-provoking and occasionally stressful subject matter, Out Stealing Horses is ultimately a rather soothing book. It should go without saying, then, that Richard Poe’s narration is also excellent, matching the tone, mood, atmosphere, pacing, and lyricism that I understand is present in print.

Quiet, contemplative, and understated, I think this is a fine work of art. I get the feeling that this is a book with many layers, and that multiple readings would yield returns, and to the extent that it is about aging, I confess I wonder if I got it all. This is also true of the war bits – I have questions – but I suspect we’re supposed to have questions.

I don’t think my review has done this book justice, but I do think my father’s did beautifully, so let me refer you back to it (again, here), and simply add my additional praise. Good book. Check it out.

Rating: 8 stolen horses.

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The Drunken Botanist: The Plants That Create the World’s Great Drinks by Amy Stewart (audio)

Posted on March 17, 2014 by pagesofjulia

drunken botanistI’m sure I don’t have to explain to you my interest in a book called The Drunken Botanist. I didn’t even look any further than the title; I requested it from my local library on that alone.

Amy Stewart opens with an anecdote: she was at a convention for “garden writers” when a colleague confessed he didn’t know what to do with a bottle of gin he’d received as a gift. She scolds him for being unaware that a botanist, of all people, should know all about booze: alcohol comes from plants to begin with, after all! I confess I hadn’t thought of it that way, of course, but I continued to be hooked.

The book is organized by: how we make alcohol (fermentation and distillation); what we make it from (alphabetically, agave through wheat); what we flavor it with (herb & spices, flowers, trees, fruit, nuts & seeds); and flavorings and garnishes (herbs, flowers, trees, berries & vines, fruits & vegetables). Throughout are dispersed cocktail recipes, instructions for syrups, infusions and garnishes, and gardening or growing tips. She stops short of homebrew advice, although the practice is alluded to many times. There are also several “bugs in booze” subsections: noble rot, yeast carriers, and the worm in the mezcal.

Stewart seems to have a fondness for hard alcohol: beer and wine get rather cursory treatment by comparison, at least to my eyes. Possibly that’s my bias showing through, and to be fair, beer or wine individually could fill its own book (or many of them – and they’re already out there). I find that she did a much finer job of sampling the wide world of distilled spirits than she did of sampling the wide world of beer or wine; but maybe if I knew more about the distilled spirits I wouldn’t feel that way. Certainly, as a beer lover first and foremost, I was sadly disappointed in her treatment of that category of booze. However, this didn’t badly hurt my feelings about the book as a whole, because there are plenty of good books on beer. That’s not what this book was all about.

I really enjoyed Stewart’s passion, and her drink recipes and tips are much appreciated. In fact, don’t tell him, but I’ve already ordered a print copy of this book for my main bartender, and he will receive this gift with my requests carefully marked within. I also enjoyed the broad education of all the things we make booze from, and some of the wild trivia I learned. I made several notes and/or paused to tell Husband: “did you know there’s a thing called pechuga mezcal? They hang a piece of raw chicken in the air above the still!” “There’s such a thing as a ‘burpless’ celery!” What fun. By no means comprehensive, of course, The Drunken Botanist is still an enjoyable, useful, entertaining introduction to “the plants that create the world’s great drinks” (and the less-than-great ones, too).

I heartily enjoyed Stewart’s book, with the exception of just a few frustrating moments when I wished she’d gone further into the beer bits. (Forgiven, as I said above. But noted: just a few frustrating moments.) However, I would advise against the audio version. For one thing, listening to recipes is not the right way to do it. With the kind of information being related, I think reading is far preferable to listening. And, I got a little lost within her organization of information, too. I think being able to see headings and subheadings would have helped a lot. Finally, while I liked reader Coleen Marlo’s voice and the personality she gave to the reading, I felt that she talked way too fast – quite possibly for any audiobook, but particularly for this one, again, considering its reference-style informational offerings and recipes.

The gardening tips were a little over my head, but your mileage may vary. I wouldn’t say that I have a black thumb, exactly, but the whole program baffles me. I appreciated the introduction I got from A Garden of Marvels, although that one, too, seemed to consider “basic” or “easy” some concepts that lost me. I definitely dig Stewart’s advice, just don’t know if I’ll be growing my own any time soon.

Verdict? Don’t miss this one if you love booze & plants! But get the print copy!

Rating: 8 garden cocktails.

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did not finish: Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn (audio)

Posted on March 5, 2014 by pagesofjulia

gone girlI couldn’t do it, friends. This is a very well-known and much-loved novel of the last few years, and the word on the street is DON’T READ ANYTHING ABOUT IT before you read it! So I will say very little. Repeat: this is a spoiler-free, very short review.

There is a mystery. I did not read far enough to solve it. I am not very bothered by this. The reason I put it down so easily was: I didn’t like the characters. Possibly this is part of the trickiness of the book somehow; this book is famously tricky (I believe there is something about an unreliable narrator? but there are two narrators? I don’t know). But for me, the big failure was that I didn’t like these people so I couldn’t care about them enough to keep reading (listening) through the fact that they annoyed me very much. That’s all.

My audio version read by Julia Whelan and Kirby Heyborne was fine. They read the characters as obnoxious people, which seems to have been right on point, so I guess they did their jobs.

No rating; I only made it about 1/5 of the way through, so I’ll leave it at that.

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Song of Susannah by Stephen King (audio)

Posted on February 27, 2014 by pagesofjulia

Just to review the Dark Tower series:

The Gunslinger (I)

The Drawing of the Three (II)

The Waste Lands (III)

Wizard and Glass (IV)

The Wind Through the Keyhole, written last but fitting between books IV and V

Wolves of the Calla (V)

and here we are with book VI, Song of Susannah.

susannah

I’m sorry to say I have to agree with what Jeff Coleman said (in a comment, here), about the series beginning to fray in this book. Our beloved ka-tet, in which we, the readers, have invested so much care and worry, is beginning to come apart. The characters are now separated and working independently or in pairs, and I think both the storyline, and the emotional investment King can ask of us, suffer. In fact, I am going to compare this problem to a recent television event: I think watchers of The Walking Dead are frustrated by how everyone is split up. We still care enough to watch week to week (at least my household does!) but we’re a little unhappy with the producers for keeping us so much in the dark as to where everyone is. We don’t mind a little conflict, a little suspense and fear – in the case of the Dark Tower series and the zombie tv series, both, I think we’re here for the suspense and the fear; and no story is anything without conflict – but it’s getting a little harder to invest as we’re spread around so thinly.

Susannah/Mia is battling, basically, herself; she is by herself; and her survival is not assured. Eddie and Roland are off on their own worrying about the rose, and they have a bizarre adventure in which they meet Stephen King himself, on which more in a moment. Jake and Pere Callahan, and thank goodness Oy, are… still around, but I’m not sure what they contribute to this novel other than to still pull my dog-loving heartstrings (Stephen King KNOWS I won’t stop reading as long as Oy is around). I am sorry to say that this may be the first book in this series in which nothing happens.

Stephen King writing about people who are in a book that Stephen King wrote, and who then go off to find & meet Stephen King, so as to convince him to write about them – this is interesting. It’s mind-bending, intriguing, very meta, and perhaps a little silly; I’m not sure how egomaniacal he’s being here, but I think I dig it. I like a good mind-bender. Again, though, I’m not sure what it contributes to the arc of the plot of this series; I am impatient for our characters to get together again; I’m worried about them, but not in a plot-progress kind of way. Hurry up and give us more action, King.

There is also a quick reference – so quick you could almost miss it, except that it is SHOCKING and I gasped on the train and people looked at me – that distressed me. I’ll write it here in white text, and you can highlight to read it if you’re unafraid of spoilers. There is a line that says something like “Eddie never got a chance to, because by then he and Roland would be separated by death.” What a heck of a thing to foreshadow, Stephen King. I am upset.

This penultimate book in the series leaves me anxious for the next one – I’m anxious for our splintered ka-tet, and also anxious that the last book will be a good one. It’s certainly a fat one; I couldn’t find it on audio, so I’ll have to wait until I find the print-reading time to slot in these 1,000 pages. Dear, dear.

Rating: 5 turtles.

(but only because it’s part of this series.)

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Wolves of the Calla by Stephen King (audio)

Posted on February 17, 2014 by pagesofjulia

Just to review the Dark Tower series:

The Gunslinger (I)

The Drawing of the Three (II)

The Waste Lands (III)

Wizard and Glass (IV)

The Wind Through the Keyhole, written last but fitting between books IV and V.

and here we are with V: Wolves of the Calla.

wolvesThis is a very long one. My library copy of the audio came on 22 CD’s. Off the top of my head, I can only remember Anna Karenina being longer; but where that was a painful experience for me (sorry, Tolstoy fans), this was pleasurable.

The action of Roland’s ka-tet of 5 – Roland, Eddie, Susannah, Jake and Oy – takes up very little geographical space, unlike most of the previous volumes. They leave Topeka and the Wizard of Oz world, and encounter an envoy from a local town, Calla Bryn Sturgis. The locals are tormented by the Wolves from Thunderclap, the neighboring badlands: these “wolves” come about once a generation to the Calla, where a single-born child (or “singleton”) is a rarity. Most children are born in twins, and the wolves come to take own of each set away with them; when they are sent back to their families shortly after, they grow into severely mentally handicapped giants who live short, painful lives. The folken of the Calla have heard that there are gunslingers in the area, and they are struggling to decide whether to ask the gunslingers’ aid in defending their town against the coming wolves – or letting them take half the town’s children, as always.

Among them, to the great surprise of Eddie, Susannah and Jake – all originally from New York City, although of three different whens – is Father Callahan, also transplant from their world, and with terrible stories to tell about the vampires he had hunted in his former life, before coming to the Calla and settling among the people of Roland’s world. He will be an important player, among other reasons, because he is in possession of another piece of the wizard’s glass: the big bad one, Black 13. As he tells his strange life story, and the gunslingers interview the townspeople in preparation to fight against the wolves, Roland worries about this delay of their greater mission, the quest for the Dark Tower. He has a bad feeling about what will befall them here; but a gunslinger asked for his aid cannot demur.

To complicate things further, each of the ka-tet becomes aware on his or her own schedule of another terrifying fact: Susannah is pregnant, or at least one of the women living inside her body is – a result of the fighting-sex she had with a demon in the second drawing of Jake, in The Waste Lands. We recall that when we first met the woman who is now Susannah Dean, wife of Eddie, she was Odetta Holmes – and also Detta Walker. This schizophrenic (or possessed?) double became one, healthier, stronger woman in Susannah; but now she has a new inhabitant, the one called Mia, who is mother to a demon child that threatens Susannah’s life. (Whew. Got that straight?) It is a weakening of the ka-tet that each of them learns this fact separately and is reluctant to share it with the others. Also, Detta appears to be making a comeback within the split body of Susannah Dean. We still haven’t entirely categorized her as being mentally ill, or a victim of black magic… but considering the setting for this fantasy series, I think it’s the latter.

And in a final plotline and complication: the rose in the vacant lot in New York is confirmed as being an important part of the quest as well, being firmly linked to the Dark Tower itself. The ka-tet is now concerned with getting back and forth to New York to buy the lot and protect the rose as well.

As this lengthy (but not wearying) epic plays out, Roland and the reader begin to understand that beating the wolves, seeing Susannah safely through Mia’s pregnancy, protecting the rose, and handling the awful power of Black 13 are all related to the great mission of this series: achieving the Dark Tower. At the end of the story, the wolves are vanquished (at least for now), but Susannah/Mia is off on her own; Eddie is distraught, the ka-tet is splintering, and its efforts are divided between multiple aims.

My praise of the series continues; the strengths of one are the strengths of all. I’m still deeply invested in our ka-tet (and OH, when Oy made his little speech and bow! he still might be my favorite) and in their eventual fate; and I continue to find the shorter-lived characters of each book – in this case, the Calla-folken – worthwhile investments, too. I marvel at the mind of Stephen King that can create such large and involved worlds with all their interconnections. And what a tricky one he is! For Father Callahan comes from another of his novels, Salem’s Lot – one I’ve not read, so I had to have the joke spelled out for me, but it tickled me nonetheless; I can only imagine for the folks who had read it, what a great joke and mindbender this was.

I am now heading into book VI, Song of Susannah. I was on a road trip when the one ended, and just started right up into the next without pause. As we begin this next installment, the integrity of our little group is highly questionable, and I’m anxious for them. Stay tuned!

Rating: 7 sharpened dishes.

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Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill (audio)

Posted on January 24, 2014 by pagesofjulia

heart-shaped boxWell, NOS4A2 is a hard act to follow. Although of course, Joe Hill wrote that one second; I’m out of order.

Heart-Shaped Box is about an aging rock star. Judas Coyne is mid-fifties when we meet him; he’s a little melancholy, a little rough around the edges, a little broody over his ex-wife and two dead bandmates. His collection of the obscurely macabre makes him an easy mark for an online auction offering a ghost for sale; but when he buys the dead man’s suit – which is supposed to come with the dead man’s spirit – he gets more than he paid for. The ghost turns out to be no stranger to Jude, but the step-father of an ex-girlfriend he called Florida. She was just one in a string of much younger women who he calls by the states they hail from; his current live-in is Georgia, and it turns out that by buying the ghost, Jude has gotten her into a pickle, as well.

Judas (real name Justin) and Georgia (real name Marybeth) will battle the dead man together, and in so doing, they’ll have to confront some metaphorical ghosts as well: her youthful traumas, his lifelong ones, and his dying father he hasn’t seen in 30 years. Jude’s two dogs, big beautiful German shepherds named Angus and Bon, play a role as well. They travel from a New York farm to the southern homes of Florida, Georgia – and Jude himself, who has been trying to outrun Louisiana all his life. It’s no coincidence, I think, that all his state-named conquests come from south of the Mason-Dixon line.

There are many strengths in this book, and I can’t help but think of them in terms of Hill’s outstanding second novel and the work of his larger-than-life father (ahem), for better or worse. Like King, Hill excels at creating believable worlds: Jude’s heavy metal rock stardom, the goth chicks he dates, and the world of the dead. As in NOS4A2, the creepiness of the supernatural, the other, is both deliciously excruciating, and entirely real – fully wrought, finely detailed, rooted in our true greatest fears, and with a sense of style. I really liked his characters, too: complex and ambiguous but ultimately people we want to root for.

I did have a few concerns here and there. I worried that Hill might struggle to keep up the tension. When I’d already had my heart raised by several repeated near-deaths and checked to see that I was about 1/3 of the way through, I wondered. But it turned out I should never have doubted! Because not long after that came the moment – I was walking home from the train and stopped in my tracks in an “oh shit” moment where he racheted things up and oh, good, we’re back in the world of the man who wrote NOS4A2. And in hindsight I like the time we spent prior to that moment, too; it was all necessary to build up the background that paid off in the end, so my bad, Mr. Hill. Hats off.

Later I had a few moments of doubt when Georgia and Florida began to be conflated… I wondered if it wasn’t a little misogynistic to have these two young women (who each have a lot of personality and personal history to build them out) begin to merge into one. It was a plot point, and not an accident born of Hill’s inherent prejudice, which helps some. I’m a little ambivalent on that point.

But really, that’s searching for criticisms. This supernatural, psychological thriller rattled my bones and kept me rapt; and I loved the cultural references (there’s Stephen King again) and strong sense of place(s), which is another of my favorite things in novels. I’ve left the plot purposefully pretty blank here because I want you to enjoy it for yourself: if you love being frightened by a truly well-put-together feat of storytelling with great characters, you’ll love Heart-Shaped Box. Um, you should be okay with blood, too.

Rating: 8 swings of the razor blade.

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Teaser Tuesdays: Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill

Posted on January 21, 2014 by pagesofjulia

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading.

heart-shaped box

I am enjoying Joe Hill’s first novel, as read by Stephen Lang. And today I wanted to share with you a much longer teaser than usual, because I liked this passage so much. I wonder if I’m the only reader who cringed a little.

Jude was aware that he belonged to an increasingly small segment of the society, those who could not quite fathom the allure of the digital age. Jude did not want to be wired. He had spent four years wired on coke, a period of time in which everything seemed hyperaccelerated, as in one of those time-lapse movies, where a whole day and night pass in just a few seconds. Traffic reduced to lurid streaks of light. People transformed into blurred manikins, rushing jerkily here and there. Those four years now felt more like four bad crazy sleepless days to him, days that had begun with a New Year’s Eve hangover and ended at crowded smoky Christmas parties where he found himself surrounded by strangers trying to touch him and shrieking with inhuman laughter. He did not ever want to be wired again. He had tried to explain the way he felt to Danny once, about compulsive behavior and time rushing too fast and the internet and drugs. Danny had only lifted one of his slender, mobile eyebrows and stared at him in smirking confusion. Danny did not think coke and computers were anything alike. But Jude had seen the way people hunched over their screens, clicking the refresh button again and again, waiting for some crucial if meaningless hit of information, and he thought it was almost exactly the same.

Sound like anyone you know?

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book beginnings on Friday: Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill

Posted on January 17, 2014 by pagesofjulia

Thanks to Rose City Reader for hosting this meme. To participate, share the first line or two of the book you are currently reading and, if you feel so moved, let us know what your first impressions were based on that first line.

heart-shaped box

I’m sure you will recall that I was entranced by Joe Hill’s NOS4A2; so naturally I enter his debut novel with high hopes. It begins:

Jude had a private collection.

He had framed sketches of the Seven Dwarfs on the wall of his studio, in between his platinum records. John Wayne Gacy had drawn them while he was in jail and sent them to him. Gacy liked golden-age Disney almost as much as he liked molesting little kids; almost as much as he liked Jude’s albums.

I’d say that’s a fairly impactful few lines, considering 1) the mention of a well-known serial killer and 2) the implication that our man Jude is a famous musician of the creepy variety. As you might guess, the following paragraphs describe further items in his collection; and none are as benign as this first one, a series of Disney-themed sketches. I’m on board so far!

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did not finish: The Borrower by Rebecca Makkai (audio)

Posted on January 16, 2014 by pagesofjulia

borrowerI made it exactly 25 pages into this one (although via audio, which was about 30 minutes, give or take). I remember hearing about The Borrower ever since it came out in 2011, and it sounded real cute: children’s librarian befriends sweet little boy who might be gay and whose censorious, bigoted, ultra-religious parents are a drag; she ends up either liberating or kidnapping him, depending on your angle, and they have adventures together. Nice story, right? In fact, it opens with a story time reading of Roald Dahl’s Matilda, which drives home the fact that this plot has been done before. And that’s no complaint or criticism. As Makkai notes in the voice of her narrator, “you can always count on a librarian for a derivative prose style.” I can dig that little joke (and also fear it is too true).

But things went south quickly after that. Faced with the censorious mother, Lucy (the librarian/narrator) rails that she would never “defy the Constitution” by refusing to check out certain books to a ten-year-old boy at his mother’s request. Now, I sympathize with Lucy’s gut reaction and not with the nasty mother; but I think it’s only respectful to be clear on what the Constitution actually says. The First Amendment protects the right to speech, press and assembly; it most certainly does not protect the right to read anything one likes (unfortunately), and the rights of minors have been curtailed in our courts in favor of their parents’ right to decide for them, with abundant clarity. This use of the “defy the Constitution” argument was outrageous and left me reeling. From a librarian, no less!

Next Lucy notes that

I wasn’t at all concerned about (the boss) enforcing this, or even remembering it a month later. And if she tried to fire me because I’d checked out a book to a patron of the public library, I’d have so much free legal representation within ten minutes that her gin-soaked head would spin.

Well, that’s bold – and naive. If this librarian were fired for checking out a book to a ten-year-old that the child’s mother had expressing forbidden her to check out to him, I think her legal case would be in some doubt; and while it’s conceivable that the ACLU or a similar organization would take the case on, I wouldn’t bet my job on it. I’d put the chances pretty low, in fact. To think that every unjustly-fired, underpaid city employee gets “so much free legal representation within ten minutes” to make heads spin is… idealistic, at best.

And then Lucy snobs out on her profession of librarianship, except oops, it might not be fair to call her a professional because she’s non-degreed and thus in most work environments ineligible to be called a “librarian” at all (this is a subject on which there is some controversy within the field and I don’t want to enter into that now, but I think it does bear on the credibility of this novel): in reference to the cardigan she’s wearing,

I hated that I’d started to look like a librarian. This wasn’t right. In college, I’d smoked things. My first car had angry bumper stickers. I came from a long line of revolutionaries.

Now this made my head spin. Librarians are about as diverse as any other demographic group you’d care to examine, and certainly there are those cardigan-clad shh-ing grannies with buns; but there is also no dearth of tattooed, funny-looking, hipster, punk, revolutionary-as-hell librarians. And you know what? Some of us wear cardigans, too. Despite the disappointingly cartoonish view of librarians represented by these lines, they also made me wonder if Makkai realizes who her audience is for this book: I am assuming that at least in part those attracted by her basic plot would be librarians (I am one), and she just alienated us with her snobby narrator.

So. This review threatens to be as long as the tiny piece of this book that I read; I should stop. I think I’ve effectively communicated that I was disgusted by the 25 pages’ worth that I listened to, and very comfortable turning away towards greener pastures. In fact, I’m now starting a novel by Joe Hill, whose librarian character in NOS4A2 was possibly a little bit of a cariciature in the other direction – with her purple hair and all – but also closer to the librarians I know. So there.

I am not assigning this a number rating after such a brief read but clearly if I did, it would be a low number of my grumbles.

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Wizard and Glass by Stephen King (audio)

Posted on January 15, 2014 by pagesofjulia

wizard and glassHow to continue to describe the outrageously imaginative, engrossing masterpiece that is Stephen King’s Dark Tower series? Oh my word.

Wizard and Glass is book 4 and, I think, my favorite so far. We met the gunslinger in book 1; met his three compatriots in book 2; and were reunited with the boy Jake in book 3. As this next installment opens, the ka-tet of Roland, Eddie, Susannah, Jake and Oy find themselves in Kansas; but it is a strange, other-worldly Kansas, perhaps parallel to the one we recognize. Along the road, the group stops for the night and Roland tells a story. This telling will fill the vast bulk of the book, so that as in The Wind Through the Keyhole, it’s a story within a story, with the inner one taking top billing.

Roland’s tale is that of his first love, his first adventure and battles as a gunslinger, and the genesis of his quest for the Dark Tower, which is by this point a quest willingly shared by his companions. It’s a great story, what King does best.

Roland begins by referring to the way he won his guns, and his right to be a gunslinger, in a fight against his teacher, Cort. Roland was 14, and his father was angry, and also worried, and sent Roland away along with his two best friends, Cuthbert and Alain. They travel to the back-country town of Hambry, in the barony of Mejis, where they are given a deceptively simple task that immediately complicates. Roland encounters a young woman named Susan and falls in love; their love is (naturally) thwarted by her unwilling role in the intrigue in which Mejis is entwined. Roland, Cuthbert and Alain, assisted by Susan and a deeply likeable local named Sheemie, will end up doing battle with the forces of “the good man” (who is of course bad) in this outer barony; and Roland’s love is doomed.

This story is endlessly moving, and engrossingly suspenseful. There is something sweepingly large and yet entirely believable about the teenage love story of Roland and Susan; and Cuthbert and Alain, who until now have been referred to only obliquely, become fully-developed great friends to the reader as well as to Roland. The reader is every bit as enthralled as Roland’s contemporary ka-tet (Eddie, Susannah, Jake and Oy) are; and I loved the slight jolt King inserts when Eddie breaks in to ask how Roland could know the story from all angles: what Susan thought, what the witch did when she was alone… this reminds us just when we’re starting to lose ourselves in Roland’s tale, that we’re actually still on the side of the road in Kansas with the new ka-tet, at the same time.

When Roland finishes talking, the five companions continue on the road towards… the emerald city. Genres, and worlds, mash up again when they come to the emerald castle and encounter the Wizard (of Oz?) – he of the book’s title, and we’ll also see the glass for the first time (which played such a role in Roland’s story). At the finish of the book, relatively little has happened to our main characters; they return to following the path of the Beam in search of the Dark Tower. But the wizard does entreat them to abandon their quest, and each in turn gets to articulate that he or she is by Roland’s side by choice now and from now on. The saga continues.

I am reeling; I never wanted this book to end; I reveled in it and rather tore at my hair when I realized I’m still wait-listed at my local library for the next in the series. (The horror!) My former policy of reading series willy-nilly with no respect for their order is gone; I am a purist. Stephen King has reformed me.

Rating: 9 pulses of pink.

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