got the notion to read the dark tower books last month. read up to 3 (waste lands) 20 years ago. remember liking that one.
first book bored me.
second one (drawing of the three) is just starting to entertain a bit 40% in. ganbatte, book.
hoping the long-term investment is worthwhile.
this is a pretty common thing for me, i hear people rave about something and try it for myself, only to completely fail to feel engaged.
major example, i thought the silo / wool series was awful. it's known that the author paid for many of his amazon reviews, but i even had a friend recommend the series.
i wonder if my taste is just different from most. seems very choosy.
@Stoori i hear ya. and me, i'm not the voracious reader i was as a kid, so i might read 5 books a year (i know, sad) so it takes a lot longer to get through those 50!
@alyx The beauty of books is that there is a story or series for everyone.
I liked The Dark Tower series. The books also tie in to other books by Stephen King. Almost all of his books are connected in some small way.
@ThatDamnCat yeah. as a pre-teen/early teen i was quite the king fan. loved the stand (long version), IT, waste lands, short stories (the sun dog!) etc. (needful things was ok. hated tommyknockers).
i stopped being so into him around 1992's dolores claiborne, which was decent, but after that i drifted away. i felt his quality decreased but perhaps it was my tastes changing. or maybe that he quit drugs.
i still think i should read the two peter straub books, talisman and black house. hear they're cool.
I read Talisman when it came out and liked it. I haven't read Black House but I can say I liked The Talisman, and really I'd like to read it again as that was so long ago.
I read the other books you mentioned. Tommyknockers did have a kinda WTF ending.
If you were a teen, I'd bet it was tastes changing. I know mine changed a lot around that time, too.
Ever read Imajica by Clive Barker? Can recommend.
@ThatDamnCat no, i always wrote off barker as a lesser talent, probably not the most informed opinion. i will google that!
i have one barker book on my computer that's bound for my kindle, the thief of always
I can't recall if I read TToA or not. Seems familiar.
I had another book of his, Damnation Game, that I also liked but it was kinda bloody and bothered my mom when I let her try and read it.
Imajica was by far my favorite of his works that I read.
@ThatDamnCat yeah the imajica wikipedia (skimmed, i am wary of their spoilers) made it sound pretty rad. definitely checkin' it out. thanks for the rec!
@alyx Dark Tower is... weird. It's kind of brilliant and stupid at the same time. The first 4 books are mostly good. The last few were mostly weird with some okay parts but also some dumb parts.
also agreed the first is kinda boring
@tcql hehe, if i make it very far i suspect my take will be closer to yours than to the average super-fan's
@alyx I have similar problems myself. I seem to be an extremely picky reader nowadays. Perhaps one in fifty books I read gives me awe, and the rest are all more or less boring.
That's a terrible waste of time. I'd like to read amazing books, but I don't know how to find them. Almost all the recommendations seem to fail me (mostly friends, in this case), and only randomly picked books seem to have any chance to be awesome.
I've tried hard to find new ways to get recommendations and pick books, with little success.