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Tag Archives: stephen king

Top Ten Tuesday | Most Intimidating Books

02 Tuesday Jul 2013

Posted by mywordlyobsessions in Authors, Book Challenges, BookTalk, Meme

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

Ayn Rand, books, Dark Tower, don quixote by miguel de cervantes, james joyce, JD Salinger, literature, Miguel de Cervantes, roberto bolano, salman rushdie, satanic verses by salman rushdie, stephen king, Thomas Pynchon, Top Ten Tuesday, ulysses by james joyce, virginia woolf


This meme is brought to you by The Broke and the Bookish. Today’s topic is the top ten most intimidating books that we all dread to read for one reason or another. Here is my list of titles:

  1. Ulysses by James Joyce – I will feel like a complete failure/idiot if I cannot get through this book in one sitting. Especially since it is THE most important book in modern literature. EVER. *shudders*
  2. The Waves by Virginia Woolf – Sometimes Woolf can be completely incomprehensible to me. Her writing is like a strange melody with a hidden beat. I have to hunt for the damn thing in all the dense foliage of her prose. ‘The Waves’ completely baffled me and I wound up running to the nearest exit to this weird labyrinth of fiction.
  3. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes – The sheer size of it puts me off. It lives on the shelf next to Milton’s Paradise Lost.
  4. Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger – I really don’t know why people call this a great novel. Never really saw it myself. Intimidating when you can’t see what millions of others can.
  5.  Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon – He is so awesome. ‘The Crying of Lot 49‘ changed my taste in books drastically. It was also one of the hardest damn books I’d ever read. What if I don’t get this one?
  6. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand – The books scares me (sheer size), Ayn Rand scares me (have you seen her?) OMIGOD.
  7. 2666 by Roberto Bolano – I have a love/hate relationship with Bolano. I keep expecting the same kind of pleasure I get when I read Borges but get confused when I don’t. Confused and angry. Not quite the same as intimidated, but…
  8. The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie – So much controversy around this novel. What if I end up hating it? Will it cost me a well-respected author?
  9. House of Leaves by M.Z. Danielewski – I read this once before. I don’t think I’ll read it again anytime soon. I have never been so scared of words and the things they can unravel both within and without. Danielewski is king. I grovel at his feet.
  10. The Dark Tower series by Stephen King – A mammoth seven book series that I have only briefly dipped into. I don’t know if I can last the distance…

That’s my list of intimidating books guys. How about yours? Are there any above that scare the bejesus out of you? Would you add to the list?

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Book Review | ‘The Running Man’ by Stephen King

28 Thursday Mar 2013

Posted by mywordlyobsessions in Book Review

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Arnold Schwarzenegger, Ben Richards, book review, Clint Eastwood, dystopian, Hunger Games, Running Man, stephen king


The Running ManThe Running Man by Stephen King

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

“He understood well enough how a man with a choice between pride and responsibility will almost always choose pride–if responsibility robs him of his manhood.”

I was only looking for an entertaining read, something I would’t have to take too seriously and one that I knew would take me away from the copious amounts of marking and grading I had to do at the time.

Let’s put it this way; I got more than I bargained for! This book is all the above and then some. I first met with ‘The Running Man’ in the 1980’s film starring Arnold Schwarzenegger  At the time it felt very much like an ultra-futuristic, distant, dystopian nightmare that thrilled a lot of people with its American take on Orwellian themes.

I am not a big Stephen King fan; at the best of times I have lukewarm respect for his innovative imagery and ability to keep his audience entertained and slightly crapping themselves in certain creepy scenarios. However, I think I have become something of a convert with ‘The Running Man’. Nowadays I feel like I’m a more mature reader, and I can definitely appreciate his scary powers of second-guessing what the near future holds for mankind; which this piece of work definitely showcases.

For anyone who like me, was sitting on a fence in regards to King’s quality as a novelist is at an advantage. If you have never watched the film, or heard about the book then you are in luck, reading ‘The Running Man’ will give you a very clear answer.

Personally, I read this from a post 9/11 perspective. The novel depicts a corrupted America, whose political and social infrastructure rests on rotten foundations. More sinister tones of ‘The Hunger Games‘ prevail across the continent, where the poor are nothing but forgettable pawns that can be used to entertain the rich.

“In the year 2025, the best men don’t run for president, they run for their
lives. . .”

As I said before, the novel contains many parallels to that dark period in American history. It reflects the current culture of the corrupted ‘American Dream’, which Chuck Palahnuik very aptly describes as being able to “make your life into something you can sell.” And what is ‘The Running Man’ if not the reality show turned nightmare? King takes the capitalist, materialistic, consumerist attitude of America and shows us what it can turn into.

The writing is addictive and the pace is wonderfully set. King shows off all his skills as the reader is roped into following Ben Richards; who reads like a ‘last of his kind’ type of Clint Eastwood character fighting to save his baby girl who is slowly wasting away in front of his eyes. As a last resort, he enters the ‘Games’; as this is the only way he will ever find the money to save his family from poverty. What ensues is a true roller-coaster account of his fight to survive the ‘Games’ and save his family.

Even though this sounds like a plot that has been done to death; I recommend everybody give it a try. You will be surprised how fresh and original King’s version of events will be.

View all my reviews

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Ghost-Writers | Artists or Posers?

29 Monday Nov 2010

Posted by mywordlyobsessions in Authors, Writing

≈ 9 Comments

Tags

charles dickens, f. scott fitzgerald, family saga, ghostwriting, Jorge Luis Borges, nora roberts, plagiarism, stephen king, virginia andrews


Daughter of Darkness

Cashing in on the vampire trend: behold the offending book that’s by Virginia Andrews… and not. The word ‘ghost-writer’ never felt so ironic.  

As a serious reader hoping to make the leap into ‘serious writing’, I am constantly on the look-out for different kinds of writers. This week my thoughts turned to the subject of author, the legacy they leave behind and the how that is preserved for future readers. Many state that writing is really a form of immortality, and as a semi-serious, sometime diarist I agree. The thought of death doesn’t frighten people half as much as the possibility of being forgotten. But words have a special kind of power; they can represent a small part of the soul, and can live on long after its’ author has passed on. From cave paintings to stone tablets, from papyrus to paper; people have always found ways to justify their existence and make themselves known. So it seems that our knowledge of history always passes irrevocably through the lens of some other person’s perspective. Personally, I have always found much comfort from reading the works of deceased authors. If we take it one step further; reading is really nothing but a way to contact the dead; a method by which we can access our ever-receding past, a way to rewind time and reach the impossible. Settling down with a copy of ‘Lolita’ is akin to having a conversation with Nabokov himself. Don’t believe me? Click here and just listen to the man speak! 

Yet this week I was pretty much stumped when I came across a book that seemed to almost mock these notions. The book in question was the newly published ‘Daughter of Darkness’ by Virginia Andrews. Now, as you know I’m not the Romantic / Family Saga type, but I will admit to having read the Dollanganger series and found it to be surprisingly and even addictively
enjoyable. However, the beef I have had with her novels up till now is that she’s not the one writing them! Unfortunately Andrews died in 1986 from breast cancer having wrote only eight novels. Yet due to her massive readership and the success as a writer, her family decided to hire ghost-writer Andrew Niederman to write more stories bearing her name. Well, since then the name Virginia Andrews has continued to grace bookshelves fooling the less informed reader into thinking that she left behind a vast amount of unpublished material.  

Granted, ghost-writing is a very big industry, what with more celebrities
now publishing their biographies through these services. But I can’t seem to agree with the notion of someone else taking all the credit; whether this be the person doing all the writing, or the one whose name is being bandied around for said work. From an ethical stand-point, it raises many questions that skirt along issues like plagiarism. In fact, here’s a very interesting and informative article on the pros and cons of ghost-writing for those involved with it. Looking around the internet a bit makes it clear that business-related subjects are a more acceptable field for ghost-writing, but not so much for fiction where a writer is trying to make a name for themselves.

In the case of Virginia Andrews, ghost-writing hasn’t harmed her sales figures at all, which makes her an anomaly and a success story at the same time. Her reputation as a writer is anchored to her name, which has become a commodity over the years. Ghost-writing in this instance has managed to turn an author into a ‘brand’, much like Kelloggs or Wrigley’s chewing gum. Readers still flock to buy the ghost-written material, even though they are obviously not her own work. However the latest addition to the Andrews books seems to be the final break away from the essence of Virginia Andrews the ‘author’. Having become famous for her sprawling family sagas; it feels like a desperate and wholly tasteless move to turn to the current
trend of vampire fiction. I’m not sure how that would sit with die-hard Andrews fans; but I don’t think it’s necessarily a good thing to tamper with a writers’ legacy in this way. 

Authors today rarely jump genres, and if they do, they use a pseudonym to avoid any negative responses affecting their established identities. Stephen King, who initially went by the name Richard Bachman and Nora Roberts who sometimes writes as J.D. Robb are both well-known for doing this. For King and Roberts, the use of a pen name was a choice they made not because of any great leap in genre. Roberts is a writer of romantic fiction, and erotic thriller was practically next-door to that. Same with King; the idea for the name Richard Bachman came simply because his publishers didn’t think readers would buy more than one story a year from an author. C. S. Lewis used two different names, one for a collection of poems and another for a narrative to avoid harming his reputation as a don at Oxford University.   

So, taking the above into consideration, I see Virginia Andrews’ now ghost-written material of paranormal/ YA fiction to be the mother of all gambles as far as the world of publishing goes.

Andrews aside, I don’t know of any other author whose name has been used in quite the same way, and whose reputation has still remained in tact. Consider Jorge Luis Borges who, as much as he deserved it, was never awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature (a grave injustice if you ask me). There are many like me who mourn the fact that he never wrote a novel. What would it be like if his estate hired a ghost-writer to fulfill this universal desire for all Borges fans around the world? I shudder at the thought! 

Novels like ‘The Mystery of Edwin Drood’ and ‘The Last Tycoon’ are famous for being the last unfinished works of Dickens and Fitzgerald. To literary enthusiasts they are just as precious as their completed works, even more so. So how would it feel if someone was suddenly hired to complete these works?

I suppose what I’m really trying to get at is the idea that an author’s  mind, their pattern of writing can be mimicked for the sake of making money up to a certain point. And while I find this assumption offensive, I do also acknowledge the fact that it can be terribly enticing too. Yet the mind of a person is like a fingerprint. No two are ever alike. The act of creating is fuelled by a whole slew of mental and psychological ingredients beginning with the first impressions of childhood and the influences of growing up with a particular ‘cocktail’ of people and ideologies.       

There is much to be said about the issue. What do you think? Is ghost-writing ‘fair’? Does it cheapen literature? If you are a Virginia Andrews fan who has read her ghost-written work, what do you think of the quality of it? Does it really matter? Are we conscious readers?

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Quick Review | ‘The Rapture’ by Liz Jensen

12 Monday Jul 2010

Posted by mywordlyobsessions in 50 Books A Year, Audiobooks, Book Review

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

50 books a year, audiobook, book review, Carrie, gabrielle fox, Hannibal Lecter, liz jensen, silence of the lambs, stephen king, the rapture, Thomas Harris


The RaptureThe Rapture by Liz Jensen
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Challenges: 50 Books A Year (no. 35)

“But I do have the mark of the beast, look…”
She plants a forefinger on each temple.
“Invisible in my case. That’s where the electrode’s go.” 

Welcome to planet Earth in its final death-throes. They say ‘hell hath no fury’, and Mother nature has never been so furious. In ‘The Rapture’ Jensen envisions a world of hell-fire in the not too-distant future; a world where supertornadoes rip through several countries overnight, and earthquakes and volcanoes trigger each other off like firecrackers.

This is a world committing suicide. And if that wasn’t enough, interest in organised religion has taken a delirious upturn. It is the decade of the ‘Faith-wave’ and belief in ‘The Rapture’ (biblical Armageddon) is gathering momentum. In this chaos we are introduced to Gabrielle Fox, an art therapist who is about to start work at Oxsmith Psychiatric Institute (a maximum security facility for criminally insane and dangerous youths).

Little does she know that she has been assigned the infamous Bethany Krall, one of the most violent inmates in the compound, and in Britain for that matter. Fox knows nothing of Krall, except that she killed her mother with a screwdriver when she was 14. Her official reports reveal a young girl damaged beyond repair. But this is not what disturbs Fox. The silence of her work colleagues regarding the dismissal of Krall’s former therapist is what begins to get to her. But it’s not long before Fox begins to experience the ‘Bethany’ treatment, and everything she has ever learned about the human mind becomes suspect. There is something very wrong with Bethany, and Fox begins to wonder whether this troubled, dark child, is the anti-christ or a misunderstood messenger from god.

“Jensen’s work is a prophecy written in a disturbing, Orwellian vein using Stephen King’s pen with ink belonging to Thomas Harris.”

‘The Rapture’ transcends genres and is a good example of post-modern intertextuality. Jensen seems to link several varying Armageddon theories that range from religious fanaticism and eco-calamities like Stephen King’s Carrie and William Peter Blatty The Exorcist to psychological thrillers like Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs. Jensen does borrow and channel certain narrative aspects of these books. For instance I found Bethany Krall to be a younger, uncouth version of Hannibal Lecter, but with reams of deadly feminine intuition. Violence-wise she is not a cannibal, but I got a feeling that if left to it, she would at least give it a try. Fox on the other hand is a paraplegic copy of Clarice, reminiscent of the same probing intelligence.

Overall, I am highly impressed by the depth of research that must have gone into this novel, especially with the wide issues that it covers. The environmental dangers outlined are realistic threats that shouldn’t be taken lightly. Ultimately, Jensen has woven a wonderful tapestry of a dystopian future.

I give this 3/5 stars.

View all my reviews >>

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Book Review | ‘Lunar Park’ by Brett Easton Ellis

26 Saturday Jun 2010

Posted by mywordlyobsessions in Authors, Book Review

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

7th March, american psycho, Benicio Del Toro, Brett Easton Ellis, frankenstein, Lunar Park, Patrick Bateman, stephen king


Lunar Park
Word is Benicio Del Toro has been talking with Brett Easton Ellis about getting this on the silver screen. I’m quite excited about that, considering that Del Toro and Ellis are both big risk-takers in their respective professional fields. It would be quite a strange but spectacular piece of cinema. As usual, Ellis uses his signature style of incorporating his previous creations at various intervals within the novel. More than once, the ice-cold, manicured visage of Ellises most gruesome anti-hero Patrick Bateman appears like a doppelganger. Just as the monster haunts his creator in Shelley’s Frankenstein, so Bateman stalks his creator, reminding him that he is his ‘hideous progeny’, and there is no escape from the infamy of it. Ellis revisits old subjects like love, loss, hysteria, meaningless horror, addictions and obsessions, but with a bit more sensibility. I couldn’t see any traces of the Ellis that wrote ‘American Psycho‘ (thank god), but this also somehow disappointed me.Considering the above, I honestly believe that Lunar Park was a bit tame for me. Having read American Psycho, I was expecting something a little more graphic… but Ellis seems to have matured over the years. His writing has taken on the flavour of Stephen King, where it’s not the ‘horror’ that gets to you, but rather the ‘terror’ of possibilities that the novel brings to the reader.

There is however one very cool thing I have to mention about this novel that I especially got kick out of. Now, not many people would be proud that they share the same birthday as Ellis (they’d be afraid and very, very concerned) but I am. nd for this novel, he makes a very cool motif of it. It gave me the feeling that I was reading something very personal, something almost written for me, which is very rare. If you are lucky enough to be born March 7th, and like gothic/ horror novels, treat yourself to this one. Oh, and Bateman popping-up in obscure places will be the least of your worries; it’s the dog and the crow that you should watch out for… that was disturbing.

Ellis explores the broken paths of family relationships and psychic degeneration and the negative effects this has on the various fictional members of his family. He especially touches on the father-son connection (which, some of you might know, reflects Ellis’ own personal problems with his father). The conflicts are subtle, the changes that occur are like the passing phases of the moon, edging the characters into a lunacy that they have felt creeping up on them for some time.

Although it’s not as GRAPHIC as I hoped it would be, it is nonetheless a powerful novel. I certainly felt that Ellis was doing what he is best known for, going to a place deep inside himself that the majority of writers would rather avoid. Part autobiography, part fiction, Ellis ventures the darkness of his own psyche, and invites us along for the ride. I give this 3/5 stars.

Note: if anyone knows just WHAT Lunar Park stands for, give me a buzz… I still haven’t worked it out yet.
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