Biting on tinfoil

"There's something in you that's like biting on tinfoil." I love that line.

Stephen King's The Stand is very long. Too long.

This is the first time I've read anything by Stephen King (except for his essay on taxes and a page or so that was excerpted from On Writing and referenced in an editing workshop I attended).

Its treatment of characters is unbalanced, in a seemingly random way. We get little backstory for some characters that are major endplayers, and too much of others. I'd've preferred them to be threaded together more evenly, symmetrically.

As it is, King risked losing me a few times. Lucky for him I'm not a book abandoner, and it's the only book I brought with me on vacation.

Taken on their own, several of the vignettes that make up these backstories are deeply affecting.

The summary on the back cover mentions Mother Abagail. She first appears on page 455. Another 130 pages go by before she enters the story proper.

It drove me nuts that Mother Abagail's name was spelled that way, and not "Abigail." Nuts! Every time I read that name was like biting on tinfoil.

The ending was disappointing. After all the build up to armageddon, I wanted something more biblical than it was. The nuclear explosion is too neat, too '80s.

It made me seriously flinchy to be reading this on vacation — people coughed on the plane, sneezed in the dining room. I mean this in a good way, a sign that the book got under my skin.

As far as post-apocalyptic dystopian novels go, I liked it way better than Cormac McCarthy's The Road, but not nearly as much as Doris Lessing's Mara and Dann, the point of comparison being that they are stories of struggle for survival after "natural" disaster and involve epic journeys.

I know I sound down on this book, but I really enjoyed it. I love the premises on which this story is built.

There's the story of the world dying from the flu, and the story of surviving after the world has died. And the fate-and-prophecies armageddon story. All separate stories really.

I think my daughter would like this story, and while the novel is still far too advanced for her reading level and I judge some elements on the sex and gore front as too graphic, we have started watching the TV miniseries together.

I am realizing: I loved the story, it's the novel I had trouble with.

I love how Fran ends her journal entries with a list of "Things to Remember." I should list more things to remember.

I will consider reading more Stephen King in the future, but I feel no sense of urgency to do so, certainly not before I get around to The Brothers Karamazov.

Reviews
A.V. Club: "Post-plague, the characters of The Stand live in a world where they can know evil when they see it."
The Guardian: "The sickness was a flu that killed 99.4% of the world's population, and it's terrifying, because we all get the flu."
New York Times: "The characters and situations are virtually all reproductions of American cultural icons."

Being stuck inside an egg

"I am not a religious person, but if I was I would call what has happened a judgment of God. In a hundred years, maybe two hundred, it will be ours again."

"Those trucks won't be gone in two hundred years."

"No, but the road will be. The trucks will be standing in the middle of a field or a forest, and there will be lousewort and ladies' slipper growing where their tires used to be. They won't really be trucks anymore. They will be artifacts."

"I think you're wrong."

"How can I be wrong?"

"Because we're looking for other people," Larry said. "Now why do you thing we're doing that?"

She gazed at him, troubled. "Well . . . because it's the right thing to do," she said. "People need other people. Didn't you feel that? When you were alone?"

"Yes," Larry said. "If we don't have each other, we go crazy with loneliness. When we do, we go crazy with togetherness. When we get together we build miles of summer cottages and kill each other in the bars on Saturday night." He laughed. It was a cold and unhappy sound with ho humor in it at all. It hung on the deserted air for a long time. "There's no answer. It's like being stuck inside an egg."

— from The Stand, by Stephen King.

Came back from Cuba yesterday, and this brick of a book only half read. My first Stephen King. It's good and all, and I'm interested to see how it all unfolds, but really, I would've cut a few hundred pages. Still, all-round good and thoughtful storytelling, some nice literary allusions, too much dialogue for my taste. We'll see how the next 700 pages go.

"Being stuck inside an egg." A quick Google search proves that it's not an expression original to this novel, but not exactly common. I'd never heard it before, and still can't quite pin down its meaning. Any interpretations on offer?

Beach reading

Seven days, one beach, 2261 pages. Packed, and ready to go.

I suspect I'm being overly optimistic. It is a family vacation after all.

The page breakdown is as follows:
1439 pages, The Stand, by Stephen King
822 pages, Where Tigers Are at Home, by Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès

I had decided weeks ago that it was time to read The Stand. So I bought it, and I've been meaning to take it for a test drive, make sure it feels right, but I haven't really had time.

On the other hand, I have started reading Where Tigers Are at Home, but as much as it intrigues me, it's an e-ARC in image PDF, so not easily zoomable and causing me some eye strain. (At this very moment, I'm leaning toward not taking it, but...)

I only hope everyone's right about how good The Stand is, or I may be sitting there, on the beach, with 2261 pages and nothing to read.

From there to here

I'm having a hard time carving out some time to write in any reflective kind of way. I've been back from away for days, but tired, stressed, and busy.

In particular there are two books I finished reading before leaving and want to write about. You Lost Me There, by Rosecrans Baldwin, which was wonderful in ways I didn't expect it to be, and Remainder, by Tom McCarthy, which is mindfuckingly amazing. (Stay tuned for more!)

And I finished reading The Passage (all 800+ pages!). The pacing is good, and the characters are (mostly) believable, and ohmygod postapocalyptic biofreak vampires! so it's a good summer read, or long train ride read, or stormy night read, or snowbound winter cabin read (I'm guessing). I'll definitely be reading whatever books follow this one in the series, and I'll probably even see the movie.

I saw some clip of an interview with author Justin Cronin in which he discusses the book's genesis and the tradition he sees it following, being somewhat epic adventure, like, for example, Jules Verne (or am I confusing this with the China Miéville interview I saw? or was that element common to both?), but it's got me wondering, what kind of book is this really?, it's not exactly literary, but it's a far cry "better" than many a blockbuster à la Dan Brown (but how? by what objective criteria?), and I'd like to think this book will be read and enjoyed 100 years from now, maybe not as the cream of the literary crop, and not as some obscure gem, but as something people, real people, read and enjoyed, and it's pretty good dammit, and I wonder is this, say, Dumas-calibre? I mean: an adventure story! with heroes and villains and moral ambivalence and romance!

The vampires, I'll point out, are wholly original vampires, and I shouldn't even call them that — they're referred to as "virals." They are the result of biogenetic manipulation gone wrong, and have no relation to Vlad the Impaler and myths of that ilk, barring a few superficial similarities (but virals love garlic — you can set traps with it). I think Cronin owes a lot to Anne Rice (will people read Anne Rice 100 years from now?), actually, in terms of the vampire/viral sense of "family" and their manner of connection/communication.

(Note to self, apropos of nothing: Read Stephen King's The Stand someday before I die. No, I haven't read any Stephen King.)

There was only one expedition to a bookstore while we were away (I shouldn't call it that. Really, it was an expedition to get mommy an espresso-based beverage, the site of which caffeine-proffering establishment is on the premises of a bookstore, so I had to take a gander...), and I picked up only something for the kid, In a Dark, Dark Room and Other Scary Stories, by Alvin Schwartz, which was a big hit, in particular the story of "The Green Ribbon." Helena's reading skills are better in French than in English, so it's a coup for me, a huge relief, to find something that both involves and challenges her in a language I can more easily relate to her in.

My sister was lovely enough to bring me The Dud Avocado, by Elaine Dundy, which I've been wanting for ages, but then my daughter was careless enough (but no, it's not her fault, it's an accident of circumstance) to set a sopping wet paper towel beside it on the table on which it was resting, so the back third of it now is pretty severely warped, and this made me sad and angry, but I'm past it, it's still the same book I want to read, with all the same words, all still legible, a beautiful book, it's what's on the inside that counts.

The week (that is, the week since I've been home already) being what it was, I thought I deserved to treat myself to a book, and I specifically had in mind Beside the Sea, by Véronique Olmi, the reviews of which are overwhelmingly good (see for example, 1, 2, 3), but a little internet legwork showed I wouldn't find a copy within a reasonable radius of here, and not wanting to wait for one to be delivered, I decided, I'm smart enough to handle this in its original language (hah!), so today I got off the metro a station early to check out the French bookstore, and now I have for my very own a slim volume containing 2 novellas: Bord de mer / Numéro six. I've read a couple pages, I get the gist, but I know I'm missing out on nuances. We'll see how it goes...