Book 30: The Gunslinger by Stephen King

Summary: This is the story of Roland the last Gunslinger of his world and his quest for the Dark Tower. It starts with Roland chasing the man in black across the desert. He encounters Jake a young boy apparently from our contemporary earth and he joins Roland on the quest. It's interspersed with some of the things that have happened in the gunslinger's life before this: his destruction of the town of Tull, his trial to become a gunslinger, things like that.

My Thoughts: This is the start of Stephen King's grand epic 7 book Dark Tower series. It's by far the hardest to get into of all the books. If more readers could get past this one and into the second, The Drawing of the Tree, they would be hooked. It's just too disconnected. It's hard to feel much for Roland because you don't know his history. You don't really know why he's chasing the man or why he wants to get to the Tower so badly. It is made up of several shorter works that were published in various magazines back in the 70s. The edition I read was the one King updated in 2003 when he was publishing the last few books in the series. He tried to make it more coherent and to clean up some errors or confusing points, and he did accomplish some of that. There is some interesting foreshadowing that you can see if you know what is going to happen in the end. But it's hard to clean up the overall tone of the book. I recommend it only because it's short and you need to get past it to read the other 6 books which are great.

Links:
Amazon
The Gunslinger at Wikipedia
Review at sfsite.com

Book 17: Pay It Down! by Jean Chatzky

Summary:
Jean Chatzky lays out how to get out of debt by finding $10 a day. She goes into details on how to find that much money and what exactly to do with it in order to pay off your debts.

My Thoughts:
Interesting premise, but to me, if you can scrounge up ten bucks a day you're probably not in as much trouble as you might think. I'm a big reader of online blogs about debt reduction, but the problem is it's all common sense. Make more than you spend and pay off all your credit cards. Pretty simple, right? If you're motivated enough to get your spending under control and start getting out of debt, this book might have some tips for you. But honestly, you already know how to do it.


Links:
Amazon
Jean Chatzky at Wikipedia
Review at The Simple Dollar (this is one of those sites I mentioned above)

Book 27: Just After Sunset by Stephen King

Typical Stephen King short stories. One of them is the grossest thing he's ever written - "A Very Tight Place" - about a man trapped in a port-a-potty and left to die.

Book 29: 20th Century Ghosts by Joe Hill

Really good. There are some creepy stories in here.

Book 28: Mighty Queens of Freeville by Amy Dickinson

Not my usual thing. It's an autobiography of sorts about the woman who took over the Ann Landers advice column. It talks about her life as a single mother and all the women who helped guide her through life from her hometown of Freeville. Definitely a girl book, but it was interesting and an easy read.

Book 24: Harbingers by F. Paul Wilson

Repairman Jack. I would recommend starting at the beginning. It's getting complicated and if you haven't been following these, you might be a little lost at this point. I'm tempted to try and find Nightworld, which is apparently the final book of the Adversary Cycle that wraps up Jack's story, but I'm going to wait and see if he updates it after he finishes these other Jack books.

Book 23: The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon by Stephen King

This was a very short Stephen King book. But it's good. Better than I remembered anyways.