Let me start off by saying that I didn't rate this five stars because of its stand alone content. I rated it five stars because of the level it elevated the series too. I wasn't very interested in the Dark Tower series after Gunslinger, but I kept going. After Drawing of the Three, I was more intrigued, I liked it a lot better than Gunslinger, but I still could have not continued and not really cared. But now, after Waste Lands, I'm hooked. I can't wait to continue, and learn more of the story. I want to devour the remaining books now now now! But alas, I'm reading this as part of a group read, so I'm sticking to one per month.

Now as for the story itself... It started out weird for me. The plot kind of just meandered around, not really going anywhere that I could see. I worried that it was just going to fizzle out... But the ending definitely redeemed the beginning! I couldn't put the book down for the last 200 pages, I loved it. It ended it a total cliffhanger, which is making it even harder for me not to pick up the next book right away, but that's ok... I'll live. At least the next book is released and waiting for me whenever I want it!

On it's own, for the story in this book alone, I'd probably rate is 3.5 stars, rounded to 4. But for the level it took the entire series to, for me personally at least, I'm bumping it to 5. I can't wait to continue!

Wow what can I say about this book? There is so much of it to love. I was instantly sucked in and savored every word. As I told a friend of mine “enjoying it” does not even come close to describing how I felt about this story. But to simplify things let’s say “It was AMAZING!” And the intensity levels were phenominal.

One thing I really liked was how each one’s world was running parallel to the others. I found that fascinating! And what can I say about the ‘anticipation’! King leads his readers along so very well in this book. I had to keep myself from trying to read too fast to see what happens. There is such a wide array of characters in this book. And a few of those characters are the ones you love to hate! King did very well making you feel so much towards the characters.

I also found that the way Roland told Eddie and Susannah about what was and what wasn't in his life, truly fascinating! He had them so glued to his ear, and I almost felt like I was sitting among them! Listening and hanging onto every word of Roland's story. That was one of my favorite parts of the book. It was all so vivid and believable.

Roland really did have the weight of the world on his shoulders trying to figure out what was real and what wasn’t. So much he knows and can't express. I could not imagine 'knowing things' that can't be shown or proven to have existed. And then not to know yourself, weather or not something was real. It would have driven me crazy. I also love the 'drive' of this kat-tet. They all belong together. And you feel that as you read.

At this point in the series you can see Eddie is really becoming in tune with Roland’s quest for the dark tower. He begins to see where Roland is coming from and he begins a journey of his own. He is quickly becoming a favorite for me in this story. I am actually loving all of them.

There are a few trust issues they all have to deal with, but overall they are a huge family. And I am loving taking this journey with all of them, and seeing what they are all seeing. It really does make you feel like you are right along with them for one fantastic ride.

n  "See you later Alligator, after awhile Crocodile, dont forget to write!"n

Popsugar Challenge 2021 - A book from the 1990's

'I do not kill with my gun; he who kills with his gun has forgotten the face of his father.
I kill with my heart'.

This series and especially this book is such a mixed bag. Book three in the Dark Tower series, I struggled through book one, loved book two and this one was a combination of struggles and joy.

I really enjoyed the character developments in this book, I feel like Roland especially has gotten under my skin now and I see why he's such a big deal with SK fans. I love his vulnerability with Jake, his world view,  his leadership, his growing relationship with Eddie and Susannah. I'm enjoying spending time with Roland and just adore his catchphrases.

The introduction of Jake and Oy gave the sense of family to the tribe. Watching the interactions between Eddie / Jake, and Roland / Oy was cuteness off the scale.

And Susannah is really coming into her own now, the multiple personalities in book two didn't work for me so I'm glad that's settled down and I really love her and am invested in everything between her and Eddie.

And Blaine! I feel our journey has just begun and I'm really looking forward to the next book as I hear the series really settled into itself now.

Thank you to the Stephen King Book Club on Facebook as I without their encouragement I'm not sure I could have got through this one as half way a slump was threatening but we made it and the pay off was worth it.

Fantasy isn't my to go genre but as a SK fan I really wanted to tackle this series and while parts are a bit confusing I am find it pretty accessible and would encourage those SK fans who aren't big of fantasy to give it a whirl.

Well, i finally got some time to finish this. Held up obviously due to the Christmas craziness.

Oh and i just completed my Goodreads goal!!

2024 read:
Outstanding. It reads like an 80's Spielberg movie. I loved the crap out of it. I appreciate the depth of King's characters, his focus on characterization. I recently read about the MICE quotient in Orson Scott Card'd book on Character and Viewpoint. MICE is: Milieu (world-building, description of the world), Idea (plot focus), Character, Event (end-of the-world, e.g.). It surprised me for some reason that King's books are Character-focused more than anything else. I think that makes them different. When I first read him in 2014, I thought, this is different, not close to what I thought it would be. He does that in everything he writes, always unique.

I started reading this because I watched Stranger Things twice and am finishing my third time in a row. I'm freaking nuts about the show. I think the characters make it so great for me, the theme of friendship, and the originality (and probably the 80's nostalgia since I grew up as a child then). I searched for books like the series and remembered these. I'm going to keep reading his stuff. His books have a profound impact on my mind. They give me peace in the midst of a lifelong struggle with anxiety. He also teaches about literature in his books, and I catch his passion and inspiration. He is a great influence, although I don't like horror anymore, at all. I want to buy all his fantasy, sci-fi, and literary works, and maybe try out his detective stuff too.

I learned a couple more things about writing. To be this good, you have to read and write your whole life. It's evident in his writing. I felt like a trainee magician watching a master do tricks. I can see what he is doing, but holy crap, the way he does it, fuses them together as natural as breathing. Also, his simplistic writing is a style choice. He focuses on his audience. I'm embarrassed to admit I also realized for the first time that description isn't used to sound pretty and airy and to impress people, but to form a strong image in the readers mind so they can understand the story in a clear way.

Also, Stephen King has an abnormal amount of creative intelligence. He has a natural gift, He's a prodigy. You can see that in his sons too, and his grandson posted something uber-original about dinosaurs on his twitch site I think (or FB? not sure). It's in the genes.

______________________________________________
2014
I started reading this to the Lord of the Rings soundtrack but started losing interest in the book. When I turned off the music I discovered the book has its own music. I mean that almost literally because it seemed so real to me. This book is like the first time you saw Star Wars or Return of the Jedi when Luke was flipping around fighting his Dad. It’s like some epic story that covers the primary elements of the Greats; the deeper, more intimate, secret, unknown elements of these stories. They are the elements you can’t quite put your finger on but you can feel them. You can feel them in The Lord of the Rings when your heart burns like a fire inside of you or in The Silmarillion when your spirit and soul are awed by the greatness of this wonder and your heart rips and breaks and you weep inside when the Light of Valinor is destroyed. Something invisible, powerful. Something eternal.
So here is my attempt to cover what this book is about according to the music I heard in it. Here is an attempt at a book trailer. I’ll try to refrain from spoilers:

There is darkness, and in the darkness you hear creaking of metal and wood. A small boy is breathing heavy, in fear. He speaks these words: “Go then, there are other worlds than these.” That’s all you hear, then a picture surfaces. You realize you have seen this before. It’s from the first book in the series. Jake is hanging over a pit. The Gunslinger is holding him over sudden death. The grip releases. The boy falls into darkness.
Roland awakes, startled, lying next to a campfire. He speaks in the background while he places his head in hands. His face looks perplexed, tormented. His voice says, “There was a boy.”
You see Jake. He is walking down the street in New York City.
“He died and I met him.”
You see Jake walking into class and looking down at a piece of paper.
“Then he lived because I saved him.”
The paper scrolls down and you see it is a poem. A picture of a train is on it.
The next caption is Jake close up. He is walking again down the sidewalk in New York City. His voice is in the background while he walks. “I know there was a man.”
He has a backpack on and he is approaching a high fence protecting an abandoned lot. He pulls the back pack off and throws it over, then begins to climb.
“He was a powerful man. A Gunslinger.”
Jake looks around in wonder, fear, amazement. His face looks as if something is speaking to him.
“He had those eyes. Those blue bombardier eyes.”
Then you hear a choir, a choir of a thousand voices. Jake approaches a rose. In the rose a sun shines brightly and you draw closer and closer to it until a sun blares into your eyes.
Jake’s voice again: “I have to find him. I have to get back to him.”
Drums and sudden beats set in along with dramatic music. Pictures flash across the screen with the music.
You see these flash across your eyes:
A giant bear shaking a tree and roaring. Eddie flinging back and forth, clinging for his life.
A giant monster head pushing out of a wall. Teeth forming. Jake running and screaming.
Eddie molding a key out of wood. Jake dropping a key with a look of nightmarish terror in his face.
A cute looking dog looking animal jumping into Jakes arms and licking his face.
Jake leveling a gun and pulling the trigger, looking like a real badass.
Eddie and Susannah shooting a bunch of deformed looking people who are attacking them.
Jakes dog-like animal falling from a bridge and latching on to Jakes hand with its teeth.
Jake, Roland and Eddie clinging to broken bridge wires thousands of feet over a drop, with the animal hanging from Jakes hand.
The music stops.
The five of them (including the animal) are standing in front of a smooth looking train that looks like a smooth, gigantic bullet.
A mechanical and maniacal voice says, “I’M LOOKING FORWARD TO THIS VERY MUCH. MAY I SUGGEST YOU CLIMB ON BOARD QUICKLY? IN FACT, YOU MAY WISH TO RUN. I AM ABOUT TO RELEASE THE GAS THAT WILL KILL EVERYONE IN THIS CITY.”
The mechanical voice erupts in lunatic laughter, high pitched and psychotic.
A train shoots like a bullet beneath a beam of light.
The laughter continues.
One last shot shows Jake sitting next to Roland. He whispers, “That’s Blaine. He’s a pain.”
The last thing you see is the train again. You are following with it full speed and peering down into the Wastelands, a deformed, rocky terrain with monsters and flying predatory birds and flaming lava pulsating between cracks of doom.
More crazy and insane laughter.
Fade out. Stephen King’s…
THE WASTE LANDS

A not-so-quick, but so-very-important, spoiler-free word before I begin.
I’m likely the only Blaine you know. It is not a common name. And in my review for  Ready Player Two, which you can find here, I publicly unveiled the Blaine Hall of Fame, which originally had only four members:

1. Blane from the movie Pretty in Pink;
2. Blaine from the tv show Glee;
3. Blain from the movie Predator (the self-described “goddamn sexual tyrannosaurus” who “ain’t got time to bleed,” two lines I promise you I used a lot in my teens), and
4. Blaine the Australian surfer who was Barbie’s boyfriend for about two years after she and Ken broke up in 2004–who was tragically omitted from the Barbie movie (though at least they didn’t use him like Alan).

At the time, I had a number of people nominate Blaine the Mono from The Waste Lands for inclusion in the Hall. I demurred as I hadn’t read this book. But now? Do I want to induct a literally insane, homicidal, riddle-loving train into the Hall? HELL YES!! So please allow me to introduce our newest inductee …

5. Blaine the Mono from The Waste Lands!

Sure, Blaine’s World is so small that all five of our heroes are fictional, two don’t spell their names correctly, one is made of plastic, and one even isn’t human. Still, I can dream the next inductee will be … a real person. And spell his name correctly.

And now, the actual book review.

Colour me fully impressed, The Waste Lands is one incredibly wild ride from start to finish filled with fascinating scenarios, intriguing characters that you grow to care for and nail biting tension, not to mention some of that Stephen King horror stuff too. And THEN he ends on a cliffhanger the likes of which nobody should be allowed to get away with! I can feel why Kemper has gone a little crazy and yet I'm not jumping in to book 4 through choice. What about those old people who wrote to King begging him to finish or that guy on death row? Stephen King really does have a heart in a jar on his desk, cos to do that to people must mean that he doesn't have one in his chest. To end this book the way he did then not write the sequel for 6 years King deserved to lose his entire fan base and yet this book is so good how could you hold it against him really?

Roland, Eddie, Susannah, Jake and now Oy, a motley group of disparate souls drawn together to save the world or so it would seem. A quest across thousands of miles and many, many years, in a world that is at once unfamiliar and identifiable as our own, unique and fantastical, a blend of science fiction, western and dystopia. Delightful townships live in the shadows of evil cities, inanimate objects with malevolent souls and oodles and oodles of peril combine to create The Waste Lands, complete with hints of origin stories, a fleshing out of histories and it leaves the reader with ever more questions, some of which will surely never be answered.

I can't understand why nobody ever told me to read this series of books, it's already a heart pumping read and takes its place as the best piece of fantasy writing I've ever experienced and there's still five books to go!

Actual Rating: 3.5/5

Mini reading slump over

Took me about 2 weeks to finish this. I usually have a reading slump at the start of the summer and this year was no exception.

I really enjoyed this the second time around. Most people seem to prefer the second half of the book but I much preferred the first half with Roland trying to get Jake

Now onto "Wizard and Glass" (which I absolutely loved the first time around)

(B) 74% | More than Satisfactory
Notes: Skirting back-story and mythology, it focuses too much on cliché genre retreads to be thought of as a serious fantasy.

I enjoyed this book as the third installment of the Dark Tower series. There were times where the story seemed to be dragging along, unlike The Drawing of the Three which I enjoyed more due to its quicker pace. I understand this whole story is a massive, epic journey and this book definitely does the job in moving along the story of Roland of Gilead in his quest for the Dark Tower. I also felt we get to see Roland in a more personal light in this book, more so than the prior two books! I look forward to starting the fourth book next week!!

5⭐️s

The highest stakes riddle battle with a sentient train of all-time? I think so. This is a dreamlike, whimsical, ethereal journey, which had me hanging on every word with desperate intrigue.

This has become my favorite book of the series on my second journey to the Tower. I love everything about it, from the breakneck pace of the action, to the character work to bring the ka-tet together for the first time, to the indelible cast of new villains that were introduced (as well as some old favorites)

n   Themes…n
Find your ka-tet and then do anything to save them. There’s also a redemption arc, the deepening of romantic bonds and the irresistible pull of finding one’s purpose.

n   Character Work…n
The ka-tet is finally all together, and I love every single one of them. But, a special shout out to Eddie and Oy.

n   Prose…n
This is King fully formed. The prose is gorgeous.

n   Pace…n
For a chunky novel, this one flies. There’s really only one part that lulls a bit for me while they are in River Crossing, but other than that, this had a propulsive pace.