Just wanted to let you know about a few that I thought were pretty great.

Of course, Stephen King is a gimme.  He has several collections of short stories and the short story is something that he’s kind of passionate about.  A lot of times when people say that they haven’t read Stephen King because they’re just not sure about him, I recommend a short story collection so that they can get a taste of his writing without a commitment to a 1000 page book.  Some of my favorites collections by him are Nightmares and Dreamscapes, Night Shift, Everything’s Eventual, and Four Past Midnight.  All of his are good stuff though and if you are new to him or to short stories, this would probably be a good place to start.

Another classic is Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger.  I read this several years ago and thought it was good but didn’t really realize how much it impacted me.  There are stories here that come back to me over and over and over.  They are kind of these perfect, model short stories.  They give you a glimpse of a life while blurring some edges and telling a full story.  The first one, Perfect Day for Banafish, really is one of the best short stories I’ve ever read.  So, so good.

I was first introduced to Elliot Perlman though Seven Types of Ambiguity and it was pretty much love at first sight.  I thought that mammoth of a book was great and when I found out that he also had a short story collection, I was totally sold.  The Reasons I Won’t Be Coming is a collection of stories that from the descriptions just sound totally quirky, but end up having real heart behind them.  They are normal people in semi-normal situations and he just takes these ordinary lives and writes about them in a beautiful, poignant way.  For some of the stories, that really really works.  Some of them, not so much.  Worth reading the full collection though, mostly because I like what he’s trying to say.

I started The Whole Story and Other Stories by Ali Smith in the bookstore, and in a very uncharacteristic move, walked straight to the check-out and bought it.  I liked it that much.  It’s a skinny little book but it is kind of beautiful and I really loved the stories.  The first one, The Universal Story, will stop you in your tracks. So frigging good.  All of them are good, but for me, this one was worth buying the collection for.  So, so good.

I thought that The Memory Keeper’s Daughter was only so-so, but I thought that The Secrets of a Fire King by Kim Edwards was pretty great.  What struck me about this collection and what I remember most is how each story was its own deal, but that similar themes kept popping up in one story after the other.  There was a little spark every time there was this feeling of “recognition” and I think that it made the collection so much more powerful as a whole.  That flow took some mediocre stories and bumped them up a notch.  There were a few great stories here, but not all of them.  I still enjoyed it enough to include it on this little list, so that should say something, right? Right.

I just sat here and tried to brainstorm a couple more but came up with some stuff that’s good but not great, and I don’t want you to start off on the wrong foot if short stories are something new for you.  Give one of these collections a go and let me know what you think.  Anyone have any amazing recommendations that I’ve missed here?  Let me know!

The Book: The Running Man, by Richard Bachman/Stephen King

The Story: The year is 2025 and everything is kind of in shambles.  Ben Richards’ young daughter has come down with the flu and because they can’t afford to take her to the doctor, it is just getting worse and worse.  America is pretty much obsessed with reality TV that is taken up a notch- people can get severely hurt or die, but also have the chance to win money for their families at a time when jobs and money are scarce.  Ben decides that this is the way to go for his family so he goes and applies to be part of the Games.

The Game he is chosen for is called Running Man.  It is the most popular show and has the highest payout, however no one has ever survived.  The object is this:  the player is let loose in America. He gets a 12 hour head start, then he is fair game.  There are a group of men looking for him and Americans are encouraged to call in any spotting of the player.  Any confirmed spotting wins 100 dollars and any spotting that leads to a kill is worth 1,000.  The player wins 100 dollars an hour that he stays alive and if he makes it 30 days, he gets a billion dollars.  He can go anywhere in the world but has to send in two tapes every day that the Network can show on TV and can potentially give out clues to where the player is.

Ben is just this cocky, kinda smart guy and he goes into this with his goal being to get enough money for his wife and daughter to be comfortable and for his daughter to be able to go to the hospital.  He is given advice early on not to just hole up, but to run, run, run.  This is advice that he takes to heart and makes the suspense and adventure happening here totally crazy.

What I Thought: I don’t know what took me so long to read this.  I have this book that has four of Stephen King’s stories that were originally published as Richard Bachman.  The other stories I’ve read a handful of times, but I’d always just avoided Running Man.  In an attempt to clear out my basket of books I haven’t read, I decided to read this one last night. I’m glad I finally gave it a go.

What I’ve always thought was funny about The Long Walk and what I thought was funny about this one too is how ahead-of-his-time Stephen King was on calling the rise of reality TV.  Shows like Survivor and Biggest Loser and all that stuff didn’t exist at all when these stories were written, but Stephen King seemed to know that they were coming.  Weird.

Anyway, I thought that this was just alright.  Not Stephen King’s finest hour, and not his worst.  Just somewhere in the middle.  I remember reading that he wrote this full story in 72 hours though.  That in and of itself is pretty impressive.

The part I liked the most was just the bleak look at the future that was presented.  It’s funny, as we’re getting closer to 2025 to see how far off he was about some things (flying cars?  Probably  not going to happen in the next 15 years) and how close he was on others (severe, horrible pollution).  I also really got into Ben Richards’ character and although I felt like everything was stacked against him, I wanted him so badly to beat the system.  All of the stuff I liked a lot was in the first half.

The second half, for me, was where everything got kind of messy and sub-par.  It turned into a full tilt action movie pretty much and I just wasn’t impressed.  It wasn’t awful, but it just didn’t pack a punch like the first half did.  After a few pages of car chases and shooting and yadda yadda, I found myself zoning out… and then it went on for 50 more pages.  I wasn’t impressed.  I did like how it ended and thought that it was fitting, but getting there was just kind of shaky.

Conclusion: Here is really what I wanted to say my whole review: If you liked The Hunger Games, check this out.  It’s only a couple hundred pages and I know you can fit it in before Mockingjay comes out in August.  It’s such a similar story and setting that it is kind of shocking.  It is just the more “grown up” version.

The Book: The Eyes of the Dragon, by Stephen King

The Story: Let me start off by saying that this book has nothing to do with dragons.  I’ve had this in my pile of books to read for over a year and just haven’t touched it because I can’t get into dragon-y stuff.  It was written by Stephen King when his daughter was 13 because she was scared to read his other books, so he wrote her a book that reads almost like a bedtime story that you’d read to a kid, only a little bit more “grown up.”

In the story,  Roland is the king and he has two sons, Peter is the eldest and is mild mannered and good at everything. Thomas is younger and kind of quieter and takes the background a lot.  The Queen died while giving birth to Thomas, so it is just them.  Roland’s magician and advisor is a crooked, mysterious man named Flagg. I know you Dark Tower fans are squealing your little brains out.

Anyway,  Flagg is crazy and manipulative and he manages to kill Roland and get Peter blamed for it so t hat easy-to-sway Thomas becomes the king.  Peter is locked at the top of a tall tower and Flagg pretty  much takes over control of the country through Thomas.  Stuff gets bleak.  Peter is hatching a plan and has friends in the country that are still rooting for him.

Like almost all Stephen King books, this turns into a good vs. evil deal and sways back and forth until you really can’t tell who is going to prevail in the end.

What I Thought: Another one of those books where I’m not really sure why I liked it so much, but I really, really did.  When I read it, I wanted to read something lighter that didn’t make me cry. I’ve been crying about books way too much lately.   This was light without being total brain candy and it really kept me engaged.

I think what really made me like this one was how it was written.  It had a story-telling type of narration.  ”You’ll have to make up your mind,” “I’m sorry to say,” and other stuff like that reminded you that this was basically a bedtime story.  I love nothing more than a good bedtime story and this just did it for me.

If you are Stephen King fan, you’ll see several tie-ins with other books, particularly The Stand and the Dark Tower series.  It’s that kind of stuff that makes Stephen King compulsively readable for me and I was thrilled beyond words that Flagg was the bad guy.  Spooky dude, that Flagg.  Good stuff.

Conclusion: So fun. Read this to your kids.  Maybe not your little, little kids but probably 10 and up could handle what’s happening here.  If you don’t have kids to read it to, read it anyway. A good fantasy type book without getting too crazy.  More of a kings-and-queens-and-knights type of deal.  Love it.

The Wise Man’s Fear finally has a release date. FINALLY.

The Good News: Patrick Rothfuss finally announced the release date for The Wise Man’s Fear, the book that comes after The Name of the Wind.  The Name of the Wind is one of the best books I’ve read in the last few years and immediatly after I read it, I heard that number two would be out in a couple of months.  Since then I’ve heard these kind of rumors periodically.  He’s been kind of hemming and hawing about letting fans know when this was actually coming.  Until now, we had just seen a giant stack of papers that was the size of a baby.  He said that it was a draft, but not to get excited because it wasn’t a final draft, just the latest in a long string.

The Bad News:  The release date is March 1st, 2011.  No, seriously.  March.  I know it takes a long time for these things to come together, but geeeez.  What a wait.

Item #2

Dark Tower movie talks are in the works again. AGAIN.

The Good News:  I guess that it is good news that this is still on the table.  I’ve been crossing my fingers and toes that something would come of this soon because I love me some Dark Tower. Also, I can’t wait to see Oy on screen.

The Bad News:  The writers of LOST held the rights to the series for quite some time.  They had said that after LOST was over, they were going to do the Dark Tower series as a TV mini-series or something.  Just last month, they decided to let go of the rights.  Who snatches them up but Ron Howard.  Ron Howard, really?! Not that he doesn’t make good movies.  He sometimes does.  Apollo 13? Beautiful Mind? Great movies.  But epic, fantasy movies that are almost entirely character driven?  Not at all.  This made me roll my eyes until I had a headache.

The Book: The Regulators, by Stephen King, writing as Richard Bachman

The Story: Hmmm.  This one is a little bizarre.  Not completely sure where to start.

It’s a normal day on a normal street in a normal town in Ohio.  All of a sudden, a van pulls on to the street, rolls down the window and mows down people just going about their business.  In normal, Stephen King style, a merry band of survivors get together and try to figure out what happened, why and how to stop it.

Meanwhile, one of the houses on the street is going through something totally sinister and creepy.  There’s this autistic kid who has this evil little bug, Tak, inside of him and is torturing his aunt, who took him in after his family was killed.

This book is kind of a hodge-podge of letters, diary entries, newspaper articles, and straight narrative.  Through all of this, a real picture of what is going on starts to come together.  The story revolves around the survivors trying to piece it together too and overcome this evil before it gets all of them.

What I Thought: Let me start by saying any book set in Ohio gets me all excited.  I loved all the little “Ohio” details that were thrown in.  It never gets old for me.

So. Did I like this?  Meh. I don’t know.  It was a page turner, I’ll say that much.  It is a pretty fat book and I just ripped through it.  Even though I wasn’t head-over-heels sold on what was going on, I just had to see what happened next.  And that’s a positive.

One thing that I’ve said several times as I’ve reviewed other Stephen King books is that I just love how he makes these characters that jump off the page.  Usually, for me, his characters make the book.  Maybe that is why I came out of this book not really in love.  There is this pretty sprawling cast of characters and with only a few exceptions, it was hard to remember who was who.  There were very few backstories and I never really felt devastated when a character died.  Even a couple hundred pages in, I couldn’t really tell one character from the other.  They all were just kind of a face-less blob. For me, this kind of took away from the story only because I never found myself emotionally attached.

The most compelling part of the story, for me, was how it was told.  I loved the diary entries, the newspaper clippings and the letters.  This made it so much more interesting to me than just a straight linear novel.  I thought that it made reading the story more fun and I thought that it was pulled off well.

I know that this has a companion book, Desperation, which was written under Stephen King’s real name instead of using Richard Bachman.  I haven’t read that one yet, but I’m sure next time I need another dark piece of brain candy, I’ll try to get my hands on that one.  I’d love to see where he went with that.

Conclusion: I was tired of reading serious, non-fiction books so I grabbed this.  It was alright.  If you haven’t read Richard Bachman/Stephen King, please promise me that you won’t start on this one.  It probably doesn’t even make my top ten.  For a quick, fun read though, this will get the job done.

The Book: Hearts in Atlantis, by Stephen King

The Story: While this book isn’t exactly short stories or even a collection of novellas really, it certainly is not a traditional, linear novel.  The book is broken into four sections, all taking place in different decades, from the 60’s to the 90’s.  While there are similar themes and similar characters in some of the stories, all four of these could absolutely stand alone.

The first story, “Low Men in Yellow Coats” is about a young boy named Bobby and his interactions with his new, strange neighbor.  The next story one snatches a couple of Bobby’s childhood friends and moves them forward 15 or so years.  They are in college and addicted to playing Hearts. During this time, there is total political upheaval involving Vietnam.  The third story “Blind Willie” uses one of the bullies from Bobby’s childhood as the main character.  He is a Vietnam vet and getting by the best he can.  The third and fourth stories also involve Bobby’s childhood friends and the town he grew up in.  They have gathered because of a death of a friend and we get to see them as adults.

There are a few big themes going on here.  The one that really stuck out the most was the idea that these few events that were talked about in the first story effected not just Bobby’s life, but so many lives.  These events didn’t just change their summer, but really the course of their lives.  That’s powerful stuff.

What I Thought: It’s taken me forever to write this review.  I finished this book last month sometime but it kept getting pushed to the bottom of my review pile for whatever reason.  Usually you guys get my first, most gut reactions to a book, but honestly I can’t remember how I felt when I finished this one.  So we’ll have to go with what I’m left with now, a month later.

This is one of those Stephen King books that defies the idea that all he can write is horror and scary stuff.  The first story was really the only one that even involved anything supernatural.  The rest of the stories really were just stories about America during kind of a volatile time.

I think that what makes me keep coming back to Stephen King are his characters.  I read very few novels that have characters as real or as fleshed out as his, and I love me a good character.  This book as no exception.  I felt like an extra “character” in this one, though, was America during Vietnam.  The town that Bobby grew up in, the college in “Hearts in Atlantis,” the street that Blind Willie begged on… these settings were all as real as any character and added so much to the story.

I have to add, too, for anyone who has read the Dark Tower series… serious tie-ins here.  Mostly in “Low Men in  Yellow Coats.”  That made this even more fun for me.

This review has kind of been all over the place.  That’s exactly how I feel about this book. I don’t know how to describe the stories or how I felt about them.  I think that’s why I put off writing this review.  So if this was totally un-readable I apologize.  If you made it this far, thanks for sticking with me.

Conclusion: Totally different than most of the stuff that Stephen King puts out there, but worth the read.

” ‘There are books full of great writing that don’t have very good stories. Read sometimes for the story, Bobby.  Don’t be like the book-snobs who won’t do that.  Read sometimes for the words- the language.  Don’t be like the play-it-safers that won’t do that. But when you find a book that has both a good story and a good words, treasure that book.’

‘Are there many of those, do you think?’ Bobby asked.

‘More than the book-snobs and play-it-safers think. Many more.’ ”

Good stuff, huh?

I was trying to think of, for me, books that have had both. Tough question.

Off the top of my head I thought of The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss, Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell, Little Women by Louisa May Alcott, The Stand by Stephen King, and (of course) To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee.  Maybe there are more, but these are the ones that immediately came to mind.

What books, for you, have both?

The Book: The Colorado Kid, by Stephen King

The Story: Like a lot of Stephen King books, this one takes place in Maine.  There are these two older guys who work for the local paper and they have a young female intern.  They are really kind of impressed with her, you can tell from the get go. She asks them if they have ever had a truly unsolved mystery on the island.  The story that they answer with is the story of The Colorado Kid.

Every town has these local legends, these stories that people tell each other with a little glimmer in their eye.  The men explain to the intern that this isn’t really one of those stories.  There are too many unknowns for it to be  ”glimmer in the eye” kind of story. It’s hard to even speculate as to what happened.

Here is the gist: A man is found dead on a beach.  He has no jacket and it is early April. He has steak stuck in his throat, and he has also suffered some kind of stroke.  His identity remains a mystery for over a year until a small clue leads them to Colorado.  From there, the list of unknowns more than doubles.

As they are telling this story, the two newspaper men are making the intern ask the hard questions and try to get to the bottom of this.  They are really feeling her out and seeing how well she would do working on the newspaper full-time.

And that’s as much as I’m telling you.  As with Into the Woods, I don’t want to give away too much. This is a mystery. It wouldn’t be fun if you knew all the twists and turns.

What I Thought: I found this on the dollar rack at Dollar General and remember having heard a great review of it from someone who is not a Stephen King fan.  She doesn’t like his scary stuff, but really liked this.  I hadn’t read it yet, so of course I picked it up.  And then, of course, I read it all in one sitting.

Good stuff.  I loved the old men who were kind of training this young girl.  They were good guys overall and just how they played off of each other and finished each others’ sentences was totally endearing to me. I wanted to meet them and have dinner with them.

The mystery itself was pretty basic.  For me, it felt like the mystery story took a backseat to the “present” story.  I’m not sure if he intended it that way but that is how I read it.

Did I mention that the intern was from Ohio? I love Ohio and I love when it is mentioned in books.

I guess that’s it.  This is a short little book. There’s really not much to say. This one wasn’t life changing but I do think it was worth the couple of hours that I put into reading it.  I loved the idea that it was this Hard Case Crime novel with the seductress on the front.  I also liked reading what seemed to be an experiment by Stephen King. Fun stuff.

Conclusion: If you like Stephen King or mystery novels, I’d say pick this one up.  It really won’t take too much time to read it and I think that you’ll be glad that you did.

The Book: Lisey’s Story, by Stephen King

The Story: This is the story of the marriage of Scott Landon, a world famous author, and his wife of 25 years Lisey.  When the story begins, Scott has been dead for two years and Lisey is just starting to clean out his study and get stuff in some sort of order.  She’s pretty proud of herself that she can finally handle it, but when she starts looking through old stuff, memories start coming at her fast and she kind of flips out.  The more memories she unsurfaces, the more gritty back-story we get about her marriage to Scott and Scott’s insane childhood.

There are a few little side stories going on at the same time: Lisey’s sister Amanda has been a little bit unstable their whole life and she starts to really lose control.  She chops her hands up then goes catatonic. Also, there’s a guy who calls himself “Zach McCool” who is trying to get his hands on Scott’s papers so he can sell them to some bigwig at a college somewhere.  He’s seriously crazy and comes after Lisey in one of the creepiest ways possible.

The guts of this story, though, is the relationship between Scott and Lisey.  They are a lot like most married couples in that they have so many connected memories and have a little “secret language.” However, because Scott had this super messed up childhood that he let Lisey in on, they seem to have this extra level, if that makes sense.  Reading the story of their marriage through flashbacks that Lisey showed real sacrifice and understanding and really the idea of being a helpmate.  They were just a team and they were good together. Knowing that, then seeing the grief of not being together anymore is what gives this book its ‘umph.’

What I Thought: This was actually a re-read for me.  I had read it when it first came out and remember kind of enjoying it, but I realized that I couldn’t really remember what it was about.  I have a friend who is a big Stephen King fan and this is her least favorite of his.  She said she could barely finish it.

While I don’t think it is his best, I really don’t think it is his worst.  There were parts (any part, actually that took place in Boo’ya Moon) that I kind of felt went on too long, but overall I enjoyed it.  Maybe part of it was that I could just read this as Stephen King thinking about what would have happened if, instead of just messing up his legs, that van would have killed him.  He wrote this not long after his accident, and I could just feel him thinking through what it would mean for his wife.  There’s just, for me, something beautiful about that.

For me, this rode a fine line.  It could have tipped into Saw territory or Nicholas Sparks territory pretty quickly, but I thought that Stephen King found a good balance and stayed there.  There was enough “spooky” to remind you that this is Stephen King you’re dealing with and enough “lovey” to actually touch you a little.

I remember when I read this book the first time around all the made-up words annoyed me.  As a general rule, that is something that I hate in books.  This time through it bothered me less, and I think that it is just because I knew that it was coming.

Conclusion: Good, heartfelt stuff, but maybe not typical Stephen King.  If you’ve never read him before, I wouldn’t start here, but this is definitely worth the read.

The Book: The Haunted Heart: The Life and Times of Stephen King, by Lisa Rogak

The Story: This is an unauthorized biography of Stephen King.  She said within the book that while Stephen King didn’t do interviews with her, he didn’t object to her writing the biography and told his friends and family members to go ahead and talk to her.

What resulted was the story of Stephen King’s life from the time he was born up until late 2008.  She covered the stuff that is common knowledge: him pitching Carrie and his wife fishing it out of the trash, his drug addiction and his car accident in 1999.  She also included little antidotes about his private life including stuff about his house and about his wife and kids.

What I Thought: I know the fact that I read a giant Stephen King book and his biography in one week looks a little “fangirl”, but to be honest, I kind of am.  I’ve liked Stephen King since I was young and when Under the Dome came out the same week that this became available at the library, I was perfectly fine with that. So. Go ahead and call me a fangirl. I’m fine with that.

I thought this book was a waste of time.  Even in the introduction the author sort of implied that her research didn’t include reading Stephen King’s books.  And it shows.  She didn’t even seem to have a base knowledge there, but was pretty up-to-date on the movies.  What?! I thought that was a little bizarre.  Seems like that would be step one in research, I don’t know.

One thing that got under my skin was how there were entire sections that showed up in more than one chapter, almost verbatim. I thought I was having deja vu or that I had skimmed through and seen this before, but then I flipped back and, no, there were repeated sections. The first time it kind of made me laugh, but after that I was questioning why I was continuing to read.

But what made me really dislike this book is that there was nothing new.  It was all regurgitated stuff.  Most of it right from Stephen King’s own book On Writing, which was wonderful. I feel like she was just trying to cash in on Stephen King’s name.

Conclusion: Skip this.  The life of Stephen King really is interesting, especially if you are interested in writing popular fiction. Read On Writing. It’s amazing and not a waste of time like this.