This meme is a carryover from Tumblr. I wanted to serve it up here so people could not only list their books, but also discuss them. Here’s the meme:
Not the best 15 books you’ve ever read, or even the ones you’d recommend to others. Just 15 books that have made their mark on you and will always be with you, for whatever reason. Supposed to be done in 15 minutes.
Here’s my fifteen:
(Slightly different than my Tumblr choices because this time I confined myself to fiction only.)
The Westing Game, by Ellen Raskin
Insomnia, Stephen King
All Quiet On the Western Front, by Erich Maria Remarque
Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, by Ken Kesey
The Great Brain Reforms, by John D. Fitzgerald
Small Gods, by Terry Pratchett
Shadowland, by Peter Straub
Last Call, by Tim Powers
Deathbird Stories, by Harlan Ellison
Little Scarlet, by Walter Mosley
Farhenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury
The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini
Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy
Carter Beats the Devil, by Glen David Gold
Hey, Doc, welcome to the Pub. I wanted to ask if you’d post your Tumblr comment about Insomnia over here. I’d like to discuss your comment about King’s “tin ear” for dialogue.
Hey Harry—sorry for the late reply. I’m busy as hell this week. :)
Yeah, gimme a minute and I’ll post the comments. :)
Reposted at Harry’s request:
I almost included The Stand on my list, but decided instead to go with Insomnia, which is one of King’s most underrated latter-day novels. A lot of people I know have written off the second half of King’s career (anything that came after either The Dark Half or Bag of Bones, depending on whom you ask) as unreadable and sloppy, and there’s some truth to that—Cell, Gerald’s Game, and Dreamcatcher are pretty awful, for instance. But there are hidden gems that, while they don’t match King’s populist heyday, show us his maturation as a writer and a storyteller. Insomnia is one of those for me. It’s not a perfect book—good Christ, he needed to edit that mother down by at least another 50,000 words—and its pacing is uneven. But it has many qualities that have become a hallmark of King’s best post-80s work.
First is an eerie, dreamlike atmosphere where things never feel quite real, even when they’re rooted quite firmly in the real world. Much of reading Insomnia—which I have read four times now—is spent (for me at least) in amazement at how nimbly King achieves this effect. You think you know where the rabbit hole is, and then you find out King led you into it well before. It’s a masterpiece of atmosphere.
The second is King’s unexpected discovery of how to write believable characters, which has grown by leaps and bounds. The old folks in Insomnia are very real, to the point of living and breathing on the page, even to the point of being able to overcome King’s tin ear for dialogue, which is one of the few things that still plague him, endlessly it seems, as a writer.
The third is King’s genius at being able to find moments of genuine human pathos in his work. If you have not read Insomnia I will not spoil it for you, but I will say that its ending is probably my favorite of any of King’s books. Up to that time it was the only King book that ever made me cry at the end. It’s that powerful.
… and I’m babbling. All I meant to say was that King’s not the writer he used to be. In some ways that’s bad: books like The Stand and The Dead Zone are well behind us, it seems, and that’s a shame, as those are incredible goddamn books. but at the same time, King has become a different, more poised, and in some ways a better writer. Insomnia is evidence to me of that (as is Lisey’s Story, but I should write about that at another time, as I’ve bent your ear way too long already). Because while the older King may not be able to write anything like The Stand again, there is also no way in hell a young King could have written the uplifting, beautifully heartbreaking ending of Insomnia.
So yeah—I guess you could say it left its mark on me. :)
I was a little surprised by the “tin ear for dialogue” comment, because I thought the dialogue in The Stand was some of the strongest I’d read in a while, short of John Irving’s work. Do you mind elaborating? This isn’t a flame. I’m genuinely interested in the rationale behind your assessment.
These are lifted directly from my Tumblr page:
Didn’t sound like a flame to me, no problem. :)
I’ll try to reply tonight, and I’ll pull some books down for examples.
Hi Harry—finally made it here.
My issue about King’s dialogue is that sometimes, he can write fairly natural sounding dialogue. And then there’s stuff like this, from Insomnia, where Ralph Roberts is being threatened with a knife by a crazy person in the library:
“Don’t speak his name,” the man in the Snoopy sweatshirt whispered. “Don’t you even speak his name! Stealer of infants! Cowardly murderer! Centurion!”
It just rings false for me. And there’s all the little throwaway speech frillips he tosses into dialogue, like “bite my bag, you cheap dime store hood” in “The Body,” or Sam Weizak’s “Hullo, I am very Polish, nuh? dialogue in The Dead Zone, or Bill’s absurdly overdone stutter in It … thnd then there’s the guys in Dreamcatcher, who are almost parodies of King characters in how they talk, especially Beaver, who spouts improbable sounding good ol’ boy talk the entire time he’s in the book.
I think King’s biggest sin is that he overdoes it a lot, and his editors can’t seem to rein him in like Bill Thompson at Doubleday used to be able to do. Salem’s Lot, The Shining, and The Stand are largely free of this stuff (though Tom Cullen’s cartoon-autism speak and Abbie Freemantle’s near-cliche black patois can be a bit much). Once Stephen King became STEPHEN KING, he started doing what he wanted and his editors have more or less let him.
That’s not to say non-naturalistic dialogue doesn’t have its uses: King makes brilliant use of phrases like “bad-gunky” and “blood bool” in Lisey’s Story, and it adds to that book’s otherworldly feel, because everything in that book is sort of out of this world anyway. :)
Point being, King is capable of writing good dialogue … but not always. And sometimes, his dialogue can be his biggest achilles heel.
I think you’ve made some valid points with great examples.
The place you’re dead on the money is in saying this is more a failure of editing rather than a failure on the part of King. No writer hears perfect dialogue in his head unless he’s Shakespeare. (And who knows how many times his plays were redacted before winding up in their present form?) King has excruciating lapses. The bit from “The Body” is maybe the most glaring, but as you’ve shown there are plenty of other examples. Christine was really awful, but such a great concept it was still worth reading.
I think some of the calls in The Stand were necessary, if only to readily distinguish characters. Mother Abigail was a bit over the top at times, but pretty accurate others. I passed some of that off as her being what others had imagined in their dreams, but that might be me justifying the book. I actually liked Tom Cullen a lot. M-O-O-N.
As far as straight-up writing, though, it’s hard to beat The Shining, and most of that book rings true. I’d be willing to bet it was one of his most heavily edited books. Though he says self-editing is important in things I’ve read, I’ve heard he’s lousy at it and has wife Tabitha do a lot of that for him.
Regardless, I’m pretty sure the company that views him as a piece of property lets him get away with murder. It’s a shame. I wonder what someone like Maxwell Perkins could do with his work.
Here’s my choice, for what it’s worth:
This is well worth a look - The London Times’s pick of ‘The best 60 books of the past 60 years’, complete with links to the original reviews:
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/artsandentertainment/books/article6735478.ece
I had to poke around to find the list (the link blew up in my face). I was surprised to find I had read nearly everything on it and agreed with most of it. What pleased me most was the inclusion of Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale, which is a really fine novel and the beginning of a whole genre. I’m just sorry no one has ever made a gritty, accurate version of the book on film.
Here’s the link for those who are lurking and don’t want to search it out: The best 60 books of the past 60 years. I agree with Steven. It’s well worth a look.