People, people, please! While I use the library extensively for certain types of books, mostly business subjects, everyone is overlooking two great sources, especially for fiction. The next Saturday that you are up early and bored hit all the garage sales listed in the classifieds. My father-in-law does this once a month and has a collection of books that would amaze most people, all bought for one quarter each.
A friends of the library sale also comes in handy when you can find one. I have stacks of engineering texts all bought for 50 cents.
I certainly buy less books than I used to, but it’s not for lack of interest…I just can’t blow 100 bucks on 3 or 4 hardcovers like I used to do. Now I cruise the discount bins a lot, and take a look on Ebay to see if anyone’s selling a particular title, before I cough up the 25-35 bucks for a new hardcover.
I also haunt the used-bookstores and the “irregular” shops (bookstores that sell brand-new but slightly defective books at a fraction of their retail price) and manage to pick up some real bargains.
The prices on books nowadays are ludicrous. 8 bucks for a paperback, 15-20 for a trade paperback? Is paper really that expensive, or are publishers just trying to re-coup the money they’re losing from declining sales by putting the arm on bookbuyers?
I thought I was the only one who watched the NBA’s on C-SPAN2!
I loved it when Shirley Hazzard took a shot at King when accepting the Fiction award for encouraging people to read more John Grisham (among other authors King mentioned) by saying that she didn’t think it was a good idea to encourage people to read more books by authors who already sell so many of them.
King made me sick during his online serial novel fiasco. He threatened to stop writing and posting the novel if sales didn’t pick up and when they didn’t, he did exactly that. What a fucking hack.
Wow, I had totally forgotten that embarrassing tantrum he was throwing while trying to get people to buy his boring online book! Guess he’s been whining for a while.
But see, that’s the point! People are reading books. But he refuses to take any responsibility at all for his flagging sales. It’s all the fault of the Baby Boomers that are watching TV. Book sales are down because there are so many other ways to buy them, and like CDs, there are cheaper ways to get the books, be it Half.com, garage sales and library sales, and there are a lot of things available to read for free on the web.
I would not “change my tune” if I ever tried to sell my book - I don’t have a tune to change. I would accept the market as it exists, not chastise the very people I hoped would buy it and tell them they were tired, lazy old farts that won’t put down the remote.
and FilmGeek, he was talking to me. He was talking to all the people in his generation that are tired. No thought was given to the fact that people often can’t afford to drop that much money every time he cranks out another formulaic tome (like Buick 8, which was awful - and I own it in hardback!). It was his smug, sef-seving attitude in the article that really pissed me off. It’s pretty presumptuous to assume that just because we are of a certain age, we’ve all got a lot of spare time and money. This strikes me as purely elitist and out of touch with his audience.
That’s all so funny, considering he hated Kill Bill, one of the most interesting, adventurous and chancy movies released in the last 10 years (since, oh, well, Pulp Fiction, anyway). I would have thought King would LOVE Kill Bill, but no, he puts it down and touts up the staid, solid but Academy-safe Mystic River instead. Sounds like HE’S getting old and boring.
The Stand remains my favorite book ever, by anybody, but boy is King getting creaky and cranky.
Sounds like you didn’t read this article fully either.
King didn’t “hate” Kill Bill, he just thought it was sort of pointless. His point, in that particular column, was that in ten or twenty years, Kill Bill wouldn’t be a movie the “mattered,” while Mystic River would be. Frankly, I agree with King. Kill Bill is stylish, but ultimately meaningless fluff. Mystic River was actually moving and emotional.
I can’t imagine anyone who would say that Mystic River was “boring.” I found it completely enthralling.
I’ve read every Stephen King book. His most recent forays: Black House, Dreamcatcher, From a Buick 8 certainly didn’t measure up to his incredible earlier work.
It’s true, the reason why less people are buying his books is because he started to lack that touch of magic, that i used to believe he had.
I didn’t get or read his Buick book because i believe it would be like his Christine book…which was a torture to get through.
I am a huge fan of the Dark Tower series, but since he was talking such a long time to continue, my fondness of his books dwindled.
And honestly I don’t find his behavior shocking. Cause anyone who is used to something for so long would whine like a mule when it’s not there as much.
Let’s face it, he’s a hose of creativeness that is drying & cracking up…
Glory: I completely agree regarding Black House and Dreamcatcher. I actually thought From a Buick 8 was a pretty good book, though very different for King. I know I’m in a minority there.
However, the most recent Dark Tower book, Wolves of the Calla is still some of the best work he’s ever done, and Hearts in Atlantis was good, I thought the short story collection Everything’s Eventual had some great stories in it, and The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon was a pretty cool little book. His recent work hasn’t all been dreck, though Dreamcatcher was probably his worst book (either that or The Tommyknockers).
My point is, to say that King “hasn’t written a decent novel in twenty years” is ignoring some pretty great books. YMMV.
Where is anybody, Stephen King included, getting the idea that people are buying fewer books? Maybe they’re buying fewer King books, but book sales in the U.S. are increasing. According to the American Booksellers Association, Adult Book Purchases [Were] Up Two Percent in 2002
Sounds like baby boomers to me, Stephen. Before he blames the boring, lazy boomers, he ought to check out what they are buying. Maybe he could pick up a few pointers.
I absolutely loved Hearts in Atlantis (although the movie managed to be bad even with Anthony Hopkins playing Ted). Dreamcatcher, however, is a steaming pile of crap.
In general, I think King is a great writer of characters. He creates these people who feel very real, with whom we can identify, and whom we want to see make it out OK. Then he chases them around with a big scary thing for a few hundred pages and that’s the book. Damn fine entertainment reading, a lot of the time, but there’s nothing to be learned from his books, no worthwhile questions raised. Basically he writes the novel version of the endless “realist” horror movies made after The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
That said, he has some great short stories (Strawberry Summer is tied with Roald Dahl’s Pig for the most intensely disturbing short story I’ve ever read) and there are a bunch of his books that I absolutely love. They’re just mainly good for entertainment value.
I didn’t say Mystic River was boring. It wasn’t. I said King was getting old and boring. Yes Kill Bill is “meaningless fluff” but so is 90% of what King writes. That’s coming from someone who’s been with King since the day “Carrie” was released (I got it from the library the day it came in, anyway) and who owns all but 2 of his books. In hardback! I even belong to the King Book Club. King is usually only NOT writing meaningless fluff when he writes about writing itself. So who is he to dismiss something like Kill Bill? I just thought that he, if anyone, would appreciate the sheer love of edgy and obscure pop culture, movies and moviemaking that Tarantino poured on the screen. If “influential” = “mattered” then Kill Bill will most certainly matter to an up and coming generation of moviemakers. Its influence will be felt (for good or bad) the way Pulp Fiction’s influence is still being felt (for good and bad).
Mystic River will not “matter” a year from now, let alone 10. It will hopefully get Sean Penn and Tim Robbins the Oscars they’ve long deserved, but what else is it going to do? Will it change people’s lives? Will it change perceptions and attitudes about anything? It certainly was moving and emotional, and I was enthralled too (at least when I wasn’t being annoyed by the red anti-piracy dots), but I’m not going to be watching it for fun over and over again the way I re-read The Stand once a year, or will be watching Kill Bill a few times a year until I’m old and gray. (oh wait, I am old and gray. Well, older and grayer)
If Mr. King is going to write about pop culture, you’d think he’d know what to look for and appreciate. That was my main point.
I don’t have any beef with what King writes, which is basically, when all is said and done, an opinion column about the pop culture he likes.
I don’t think Mystic River is nearly the masterpiece he does, but it doesn’t surprise me that he prefers it to Kill Bill. King has never been much of a fan for metafiction – while he’s certainly soaked up the influences of his forbears, he’s never particularly wink-winky in the way he incorporates them into his own work. For example, you can read 'Salem’s Lot without having read Dracula. If you do know the earlier book, its influence is clear, but SL is a fun read in its own right.
Kill Bill, on the other hand, owes a fair amount of its pleasure to audience familiarity with the movies (or at least the genres) that Tarantino is name- (and frame-) checking. You can enjoy the movie without them, but a lot of the pleasure involved is how it plays around with earlier movies.
King doesn’t do that much in his own fiction, and he’s never seemed to care for it much in others’. (It’s probably one of the things he dislikes about “literary” fiction.) Mystic River is flat-out storytelling with strong characters and obvious thematic entry points, much more King’s style.
(I’m not knocking it – I like both approaches myself. But maybe it’s not surprising that Misery, King’s most self-reflexive book, is handily my favorite.)
I’ve been really enjoying King’s nonfiction writing of late (including his ET column), so I tried reading IT, a book that has always seemed kind of interesting to me.
I hadn’t read any of his novels since I was in my teens. Reading (or reading half of) IT reminded me why.
One of my professors hates King. Says it’s absolute garbage and dreck. I’m not surprised…he’s our resident Shakespeare scholar and something of a snob…so I wrote off his criticism. Said “no, no, it’s good story telling” and he called me crazy. And then I bought Wolves of Calla and I can’t get past page 168. I’ve owned it since the day it came out…and it’s just as bad as my professor keeps insisting.
Now I doubt anybody remembers, but I’m usually one of King’s greatest supporters. I have read all of his books, more than once, and I have enjoyed all of them a great deal. This recent discovery that my prof isn’t full of shit is making me sad.
Um, your Shakespeare professor is aware that Shakespeare wrote his plays to appeal to the masses, right?
God knows, King has published dreck. He has also published some of the finest contemporary fiction ever written. (Standard disclaimers apply: In my opinion, I am not a doctor, Do not type this at home, etc.)
I believe that King’s sense of self-importance has grown over the years, and that may cause him to be insufferable in some of his opinions. But to quote Richard Nixon (who was speaking of P.J. O’Rourke, but it also applies here): “Whether you agree with him or not, he writes a helluva piece.”
Mr. King has brought me lots of joy. He’s also wasted lots of my time. I think the joy wins out. I don’t have to like everything he says or does.
Steve, you’re my man, and I forgive you for Dreamcatcher, From a Buick 8, The Dark Half, etc!
I discovered my parents’ copy of Carrie on the shelf when I was in high school (I remember them and their friends ooh-ing and aah-ing over “Salem’s Lot” and “The Shining” when I was a kid). I became an avid fan of his from then on, buying all his new books in hardcover.
Funny thing about devotion. You come up with justification after justification that the object of your steadfastness deserves it, and after a while, you have to wonder if you’re not just trying to justify your own expenditure of energy and time.
Like I said, I bought every new King novel in hardcover. Until “Insomnia”. I didn’t get it when it was released, because I couldn’t afford it. Didn’t get it in paperback, because that was for casual fans. I bought a remaindered hardcover months after the fact, and “Desperation” and its companion Bachman novel were already on the shelves by then. Boy, I would have some catching up to do.
That is, if “Insomnia” hadn’t been one of the worst pieces of shit I have ever regretted endeavoring to finish. His work leading up to it had not been nearly as satisfying as his best, but that book was the absolute nadir for me. I haven’t cracked a new book of his since.
There’s a great essay in “Hooking Up” by Tom Wolfe about what’s wrong with contemporary fiction. Steve should follow his own advice and buy it.
