Book 35: Ender in Exile by Orson Scott Card

Ender in Exile is the story of Ender right after the events of Ender's Game. It deals with why he can't go back to Earth and where he does go. It also ties up some loose ends from the Shadow series about Bean. I have a hard time with the Ender series in general. I love Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow. Those two are awesome. I've read Speaker for the Dead once or twice and also the Shadow of the Hegemon. But, I can never get any further. I've owned Xenocide and Children of the Mind for years and years, but every time I try to start in on Xenocide, I give up after 50 pages. It just doesn't grab me the way the first book does. Anyways, Ender in Exile was good. Ender is a hard character to relate to. He's so inhumanly smart that it seems like he can accomplish anything. He manipulates people all over the place in this one. On the other hand, he's an emotional mess and it gets a little old. I got through it fast and there are a lot of interesting points to it. The handling of Quincy Morgan and Achilles II were very well done.

Book 34: The Revelation by Bentley Little

A good little horror book. It doesn't try to do too much and it's pretty freaky in some parts. In this small town in Arizona, every few generations weird stuff starts happening and a travelling preacher appears and guides a few town folks to stop the evil from coming in. The preacher is an odd character. It's hard to tell if he's a protagonist or not. The plot revolves around miscarriages, abortions, and deformed babies, which was a little unsettling to read with my wife being currently pregnant. I really should read more Bentley Little. I've only read 2 or 3 books of his, but I've never been disappointed. You generally know you're going to get a straight forward, well told scary story.

Book 33: Wizard and Glass by Stephen King

Continuing the Dark Tower. I only remembered the long flashback to Roland's youth from this book. I completely forgot about the return of the Tick Tock man and the end of the Blaine ride. Honestly, I skipped the flashback and only read the other parts. I've recently read the Marvel Comics version of the time in Mejis and didn't feel like rhashing the story again. A lot of interesting stuff in here like the mentions of Captain Trips, the Takuro Spirit, and Nozz-a-la cola.

I did it!

So my goal was to get in 30 books in a year, and I got 32. That makes me feel pretty good even though I felt like a couple were cheats (The Girl Who Met Tom Gordon and the Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - those were pretty small books.) I'll probably continue on with this just to keep a record of what I've read.

Book 32: The Waste Lands by Stephen King

Part 3 of the Dark Tower. This is probably the one I remember the least. The temporal paradox and the saving of Jake. The introduction of Oy. Lud and the Tick-Tock Man and Blaine. Great stuff.

Book 31: The Drawing of the Three by Stephen King

I decided to keep on going with the Dark Tower Series. I don't think I've read this since I was in high school so it's good to go back and reread it. I totally forgot who the third person being drawn was. I my head it was always the final part of the ka-tet, but it wasn't him at all.

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