My current reading list

[PoolMan]

I was offered the chance to spend a few dollars of my wife's credit at the local used bookstore a couple weeks back, and my eye happened to land on The Stand. This is, of course, the one book that Justin has urged me to read as long as I've known him, so off I went!

But this is no ordinary The Stand! This is the complete and uncut version that was published in the mid-90's... roughly 500 pages longer than the original, weighing in at a frightening 1200 pages of post-apocalyptic action. I have no way of knowing how this compares to the original (if anyone wants to comment without spoiling anything, please go ahead) except that it's apparently much longer, and delves into the characters more deeply.

Also, it has pictures. Which, I'll tell you, is really embarassing on a plane.

I'm really enjoying it so far, and am about 40% of the way through.

[Magill]

The first thing I noticed was that King changed a lot of pop culture references to bring the action into the nineties instead of the seventies (as it was in the original). This means that the birth dates for all the characters are brought forward 20 years. It doesn't work so well with Mother Abigail if you really think about her history.

The opening chapter and the closing chapter are entirely new. The original book opened with Stu and his friends sitting outside Hap's gas station.

Since you're 40% of the way through, the chapter that occurs right after the plague (the one showing how a bunch of people who survived the plague died) is not in the original.

I think you should've met Dayna and Sue by that point in the book. The way those characters are introduced is completely different than the original.

Have you met Trashcan Man yet? His story is expanded on considerably more in the revised edition.

[PoolMan]

Thanks for the feedback, Magill!

I DID notice the whole birthdates thing, and how it sometimes seems a bit clunky how dates in general are integrated into the story. But what the hey, it doesn't bother me that much.

The opening chapter (Campion fleeing the base) and the secondary death chapter are great additions, in my opinion. Campion's story does a lot to explain exactly how the whole thing starts without being insulting, and I really appreciated the emotional touches the second round of deaths brings.

Haven't met Dayna or Sue yet, but Trashcan has made his appearance, finally. Also, I love Tom Cullen's character, I've actually laughed out loud several times reading his passages.

[sarahbot]

Hmmm, curious . . . now I don't know whether I've read the old or new version. To Chapters I shall go.

[PoolMan]

If you put it down on your desk and heard a cracking noise, it's the new version.

[Head Mutant]

Yeah, I've only read the updated version (as I got it after I saw the miniseries in 1994... which I tried to get my wife to watch the other night, but she got a bit too freaked out by hour one).

My friend Bob swears by the older version, mostly because he liked the mystery of not knowing where the plague came from. I love the new version even so, as I cannot get enough of this book.

[sarahbot]

Ahhh . . . I know where the plague came from, so I guess I've read the new one. Though it would have been nice to not know - I'm a sucker for ambiguity. So King left it as a mystery, then went back and put the army guy in? Sheesh, that kinda sucks!

[Head Mutant]

Well, I think the way it happened is that the uncut version was his original draft... "uncut" and all. His editors had him trim it down for some reason or another, for print purposes.

[Magill]

I had read the older version a couple times (my dad had a copy) before I read the new. The first time I read the new version, every minor change (even a small phrase or two) caught my attention. Now that I haven't read the original in probably at least 8 years, my memory is a bit fuzzy.

In the original version, you pretty much know where the plague came from. Campion still crashes into the gas station, and later chapters deal with the government agents trying to cover things up and wonder how Campion ever managed to get off base.

Some other character changes I remember:

-In the original, Fran and her father never have the big confrontation with her mother. Fran tells her father and they have that conversation, but if I remember correctly, the next time we see Fran after that is her cutting a slice of pie in her kitchen. I also think the whole thing with the crazy military sacrifice on TV is also cut.

-I think some of Larry's troubles in California and his actions when he gets back to New York are trimmed a bit in the original. For some reason, I'm thinking the part where Larry's mom reflects that he has it in him to be a good person, but that it won't happen unless some tremendous event takes place, is not in the original. I could be mistaken.

-Mother Abigail's history is expanded quite a bit in the newer version

-Nick's escape from Shoyo is a bit less dangerous in the original. The reason Nick has an infection and needs antibiotics also changes between the versions.

I'm sure there must be a website that details all of the changes, but my Google-fu is weak.

edited to add--after wasting considerable time, I've found a couple sites. This one gives a broad overview and then analyzes the themes found in the changes. If you hated that stuff in English class, you probably won't like the link. I also found a link to a newsgroup posting that attempts to go through each chapter to account for the changes. It's long.

[sarahbot]

Magill, thanks for the link to that article! I found it fascinating. I guess I know what's on my summer reading list.

[Head Mutant]

Let's see...

I'm sometimes an agonizingly slow reader, not because I read slow, but because I only allot small amounts of time per book, and thus it takes forever to get through them.

At home I'm plowing through the 1632 series (by Eric Flint and others). A fun alternate history series where a modern-day West Virginia town is somehow transported back in time to the 30 Years War and struggles with reforming the United States in the middle of Europe. The first book is a fun breeze, the second so far is a bit more ponderous -- probably because it's co-authored by David Weber, of the Hunter Harrington books and other. I used to really like Weber, but like Robert Jordan, the more I read of this guy, the more I get bored with his highly repetitive plots and dense paragraphs of details and explanations dividing up the action and dialogue.

In the car I'm listening to the uncut version of Anasi Boys, which is a really fun read, particularly because the reader is terrific with all the voices and has that wacky Brit accent.

At work I'm still chewing through Gilead and A Walk With Jesus, both of which are best taken a bite at a time and digested fully.

[PoolMan]

admin said:

In the car I'm listening to the uncut version of Anasi Boys, which is a really fun read, particularly because the reader is terrific with all the voices and has that wacky Brit accent.

I'm glad you're enjoying Anansi Boys, J. I loved that book. So very Doug Adams, while retaining all the dark charms I tend to like about Gaiman. When PoolGirl and I heard him speak, he said he would have voiced the audio book, except that there was no way he could voice three distinct old Jamaican women.

I finished The Stand, and I was ultimately pleased, although still a bit miffed that for all his leadup, King once again kind of delivers a bit of a soft ending. I was much more disappointed with the end of The Dark Tower (well, more with how Roland gets IN the Tower than with the VERY end, I loved that bit), but still. Are all his books like this? Or just the epics?

I'm currently reading (albeit rather slowly) To Kill a Mockingbird for the first time. I gave the copy to my wife for Christmas a few years ago because it's one of her favourites, but neglected to read it myself. She (rightly) pointed out that I've read almost nothing but sci fi and fantasy for the past two years, and suggested something a little more literary. I'm finding myself slowly liking it more and more, even though it suffers from the fact that as a genre definer, it feels cliched as a result of the books and films that followed it (and not of its own accord).

Did that make sense?

[Head Mutant]

The Stand's ending is a bit softer, but it's a pretty hard story to wrap up in that regard. I think he should've just ended everything, but oh well.

Most of his books have extremely bittersweet endings, or just plain sour ones. Kind of, "We won against evil, but lost a lot of good people and sanity out there" finales. I think It's ending was spot on in that regard.

Many of his latest books, particularly From A Buick 8 (which was pretty darned good) and Colorado Kid fool around with ambiguous, potentially frustrating endings that don't offer all the answers. He wrote Book 7 of Dark Tower in this time period, so perhaps this is his phase -- he goes into the Why of it with Colorado Kid's story afterwards (or maybe it was an online explanation). I've stuttered and stalled halfway through Cell, which is a more cynical version of The Stand, in my opinion. Sad as it is to say, I think I'm slowly but surely moving past my long love affair with King's works.

The guy doing the voice for Anansi Boys does great accents, even for a Brit. I've been meaning to read this for a while, and it was very fortuitous to find it in the library the other day.

As for classics... well, like any books, they're personal hits and misses depending on your tastes. From my English major classes, I came to loathe many books that were forced upon me as so-called "classics", but then again I found myself strangely enjoying some works I never imagined I would. Les Miserables, for instance, is a terrific read (if very, very long). Russian literature of yore sucks.

When it comes to literary classics, I'd almost always prefer short stories and novellas to their bigger brothers. Partially because if you don't like them, they're over soon, but also because the short story format forces an author to pack more into a shorter space, and therefore picks up the plot and makes it exciting quicker. Going through dense chapters of Tolstoy's soap opera figures cannot compare. I actually kept my Anthology of American Literature/European Literature, which is in my office begging for a re-read some day.

[Al]

I just reread TKAMB recently, too, and was reminded how much I love that book. It so totally nails what it's like to be a kid. By the end I was jonesing so bad to watch a Gregory Peck movie I went out and bought both that film and The Guns of the Navarone.

Currently, I'm just wrapping up an audiobook of Terms of Endearment, which knocked me toes over teakettle. It's total 10, easily one of the best books I've ever read.

On good ol' fashioned ink and paper, I've been attempting to slog through All the King's Men, which, in addition to being a really excellent-looking upcoming film, is supposed to be the definitive American novel about politics. It's been interesting, but, with chapters ranging between seventy and nintey pages, I've officially given up. It's due back at the library tomorrow and I haven't hit chapter 4 yet.

I'm also drifting slowly through King's new novel Cell, which has disappointingly failedto grab me. And, since Justin mentioned it, I'd like to assert how I loved The Colorado Kid. It made lots of people really upset, but how angry can you get when they tell you in the opening pages that there's not going to be a resolution. It was fun and interesting, and, as glacial as the pacing was, I loved that the whole story was told in conversation. It felt like it must have been a fantastic challenge and I think he pulled it off wonderfully.

I've also picked up the trades paperbacks 1-3 of The Age of Apocolypse, which was a big deal X-Men story that happened in-between my first foray into comics and my current one. A cool, if exhaustingly epic, what if story.

[famousmortimer]

Andy Warhol's "a: a novel". It's a bit hard work, even if some of the exchanges between the characters are hilarious. It was 24 hours of conversations between the people at Warhol's "Factory", transcribed by four women and with all the mistakes in transcribing left in. Warhol then altered the names of the people, changed a few phrases and passages and released it as a novel. And it works.