Books

Book 564: Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Harry Potter #2) – J.K. Rowling

I finally caved and bought digital copies for my kindle. It’s good because it’ll allow me to read them when I travel if I have nothing else to read. And it’s also good because it means I’ll get rid of my “reading” copies bringing my total number owned down by seven, which I know Tim will appreciate 🙂

I’ve read this countless times and have already posted one response to this back in July 2012. I don’t recall loving this one when I first read it, but I also didn’t have that strong of an antipathy for it either. It carries the story forward in a way that works and I appreciate that. What I do notice more and more the older I get and the more-often I read the books is I find so many hints that Rowling dropped for the later novels.

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Books

Book 562: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (Harry Potter #1) – J.K. Rowling

I think the strangest part about re-reading this is what I notice now as a 33-year-old. The things I notice now are vastly different from when I read it last in my twenties, almost exactly six years ago, and any time I read it prior to that.

I cannot tell you how many times I’ve read this book or this series. Low-balling it I know for a fact I’ve read this particular book at least 10 times. I read it each time a new book in the series was released and I’ve read it at least three times since I’ve lived in Boston. And one of those was in Spanish!

There were two things that really got me when I read the book this time. There was a third one that caught me off guard when I read it and may completely change my re-read of the series this time through the lens it brought into focus.

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Books

Book 556: Wizard and Glass (The Dark Tower #4) – Stephen King

I had to take a few days after finishing this book to process it before I wrote my response. It’s now been a week and three books later and I’m still trying to figure out this book.

During that time I happened to look on Goodreads (here we go again), not to read the reviews of this, but to see whether I should read The Wind Through the Keyhole. I wanted to know if I should read it in its rightful place between book four and book five or after I’d read the series and I was SHOCKED to find that people were sharply divided over this book.

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ARC, Books

Book 550: Quietus – Vivian Schilling

I was excited when the publicist reached out to me about this book, it sounded just creepy enough to not be terrifying and interesting enough because of its location.* Unfortunately, because of the problems with the location (see most of the next four paragraphs), it ultimately wasn’t an enjoyable read for me.

I will cut to the chase, the problem with reading books set where you live, no matter the time unless it’s so far in the past that it’s unrecognizable, is how much they get wrong or it feels like they get wrong. So many of these could have easily been fixed with a quick internet search of the MBTA map in Boston and just looking at a map in Boston. Boston is not a large city and its public transit is not that large or complex. I want to blame the copy editor, but really it’s the author’s fault.

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Books

Book 548: The Waste Lands (The Dark Tower #3) – Stephen King

I am now, with a lot of stretching of my imagination and film maker interpretation, starting to see where they may have gotten the screenplay for The Dark Tower.

Tentative doesn’t even begin to cover it. If you cut all of the books into paragraphs throw them in the air and then pick just enough to make a script you might get the same thing the directors and writers got for that adaptation? Even with that, I feel like they changed so much to “make it fit” (it doesn’t really) that I’m still not 100% sure where they pulled things.

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