Christine by Stephen King

Book: Christine

Author: Stephen King

Why I Read It: I was on a scary book binge.

First Line: "This is the story of a lover's triange, I suppose you'd say--Arnie Cunningham, Leigh Cabot, and, of course, Christine."
 

First Impression: Well, I like old cars. This might be okay.

Last Impression: Oh my. So long winded and boring.

 

Ratings

Overall – 3 Resting Heart Rate The first 276 pages bored me to tears. It was clear what was happening to the car, to Arnie, to their friendship, to all of Christine's victims. Everything was evident, though his prose implied he felt it was suspenseful.

Characters – 2 The human characters were flat and boring. Christine, however, was a strong character, and that's what really matters as she is our main character. Still, she was very outnumbered in the novel, and the rest of the cast isn't engaging.

Story – 3 The majority of the story felt overly long and had no suspense, but the end of the book had me on the edge of my seat. The wrap-up was poetic and realistic.

Narration – 3 King is truly a great writer, but sadly not as talented as an editor. If he had cut the book by about 300 pages, I would have been there 100%.

Read Again? Most definitely not. I didn't enjoy it the first time, and there are much better Stephen King books out there.

Tell Others to Read? The one thing about Stephen King is you don't tell others to read him, you ask what they've already read. This book is a classic, for many good reasons, and I'm sure it sits on may shelves, well-worn and well-loved.

Excerpt: She was a bad joke, and what Arnie saw in her that day I'll never know. The left side of her wind shield was a snarled spiderweb of cracks. The right rear deck was bashed in, and an ugly nest of rust had grown in the paint-scraped valley. The back bumper was askew, the trunk lid was ajar, and upholstery was bleeding out through several long tears in the seat cover, both front and back. It looked as i fsomeone had worked on the upholstery with a knife. One tire was flat. The others were bald enough to show the canvas cording. Worst of all, there was a dark puddle of oil under the engine block.

     Arnie had fallen in love with a 1958 Plymouth Fury, one of the long ones with the big fins. 

 

 

 

 

 

The Veldt by Ray Bradbury

     "George, I wish you'd look at the nursery."

     "What's wrong with it?"

     "I don't know."

     "Well, then."

     "I just want you to look at it, is all, or call a psychologist in to look at it."

     "What would a psychologist want with a nursery?"

     "You know very well what he'd want." His wife paused in the middle of the kitchen and watched the stove busy humming to itself, making supper for four.

"It's just that the nursery is different now than it was."

     "All right, let's have a look."

     They walked down the hall of their soundproofed Happylife Home, which had cost them thirty thousand dollars installed, this house which clothed and fed and rocked them to sleep and played and sang and was good to them.

     Their approach sensitized a switch somewhere and the nursery light flicked on when they came within ten feet of it. Similarly, behind them, in the halls, lights went on and off as they left them behind, with a soft automaticity.

     "Well," said George Hadley.

     They stood on the thatched floor of the nursery. It was forty feet across by forty feet long and thirty feet high; it had cost half again as much as the rest of the house. "But nothing's too good for our children," George had said.

     The nursery was silent. It was empty as a jungle glade at hot high noon. The walls were blank and two dimensional. Now, as George and Lydia Hadley stood in the center of the room, the walls began to purr and recede into crystalline distance, it seemed, and presently an African veldt appeared, in three dimensions, on all sides, in color reproduced to the final pebble and bit of straw. The ceiling above them became a deep sky with a hot yellow sun.

     George Hadley felt the perspiration start on his brow.

     "Let's get out of this sun," he said. "This is a little too real. But I don't see anything wrong."

     "Wait a moment, you'll see," said his wife.

     Now the hidden odorophonics were beginning to blow a wind of odor at the two people in the middle of the baked veldtland. The hot straw smell of lion grass, the cool green smell of the hidden water hole, the great rusty smell of animals, the smell of dust like a red paprika in the hot air. And now the sounds: the thump of distant antelope feet on grassy sod, the papery rustling of vultures. A shadow passed through the sky. The shadow flickered on George Hadley's upturned, sweating face.

     "Filthy creatures," he heard his wife say.

     "The vultures."

     "You see, there are the lions, far over, that way. Now they're on their way to the water hole. They've just been eating," said Lydia. "I don't know what."

     "Some animal." George Hadley put his hand up to shield off the burning light from his squinted eyes. "A zebra or a baby giraffe, maybe."

    "Are you sure?" His wife sounded peculiarly tense.

     "No, it's a little late to be sure," be said, amused. "Nothing over there I can see but cleaned bone, and the vultures dropping for what's left."

     "Did you hear that scream?" she asked.

The Professor and The Madman by Simon Winchester

Book: The Professor and the Madman

Author: Simon Winchester

 

Why I Read It: I was researching the origin of words for a class and I came across this story of how the Oxford English Dictionary was created.

First Line: In Victorian London, even in a place as louche and notoriously crime-ridden as Lambeth Marsh, the sound of gunshots was a rare event indeed.

 

First Impression: Murder, insanity and the making of the OED? I am definitely on board!

Last Impression: Wow. This was amazing. Much more story than history, which I was not expecting, but loved it from start to finish. Also, the dictionary entries at the beginning of each chapter were fun.

Ratings

Overall – 4 Heart Skipped A Beat

Characters – 4 The characterization of these two men is touching; figures from the past are usually brought alive from the pages of history with broad strokes, here they are detailed in their thoughts and actions, and tinted in a deferential light.

Story – 3 The story is equal parts history lesson and character study of the two men behind the first edition of the OED. The story is interesting, but it is not what drives the reader on.

Narration – 4 While most might find the subject a bit dull, Winchester clearly does not and his curiousity to discover the past is tangible on the pages. His description of dictionary history is tainted with wonder, and the reader can't help but share the awe at such a feat. His word choice, perhaps more noticable in a book about words, is careful and decisive. Each and every word used feels purposeful.

Read Again? I most certainly will read this book again. It was a fun piece of history that I have already had the craving to revisit.

Tell Others to Read? Depends upon the person. This book walks that line between creative nonfiction and historical fiction, so if the reader likes books in either of those genres, then yes.

Excerpt: And sometime in the early 1880s one copy, at least, left inside a book or slipped between the pages of a learned journal, found its way to one of two large cells on the top floor of Block 2 of the Broadmoor Asylum for the Criminally Insane in Crowthorne, Berkshire. It was read, voraciously, by William Minor, a man for whom books, with which one of his two cells was lined from floor to ceiling, had become a second life.
     Doctor Minor had been an inmate at Broadmoor for the previous eight years. He was deluded, true; but he was a sensitive and intelligent man, a graduate of Yale, and well read and curious. He was, understandably, preternaturally anxious to have something useful to do, something that might occupy the weeks and months and decades that stretched without limit -- "Until Her Majesty's Pleasure Be Known" -- before him.
     This invitation from a Dr. James Murray of Mill Hill, Middlesex, N.W., it seemed, promised an opportunity for intellectual stimulus -- and perhaps even a measure of personal redemption -- that was far better than any he could otherwise imagine. He would write, immediately.