Bubby-read with the ever-awesome  Kat  set to commence approximately November 17th...

Here's hoping we both love this one as much as The Drawing of the Three



Review... maybe...

Okay, so this one DIDN’T do it for me like The Drawing of the Three.

I have a reader belief that you may, or may not, share and it’s this: I LOVE brilliant writers! I love the spastic tug and weave of trying to figure out what this, obviously smarter than I, person is trying to pull forth with his/her story. I love the head smack feeling when you know you should have figured that particular twist out AGES ago in the story. I LOVE it, it is one of my favourite book drugs! That being said, I don’t love when the retrieval system is NEVER explained. I don’t love feeling like a drooling infant with no knowledge about anything….. it’s a fine line, and King crossed it in The Waste Lands. There is too much mind fuck...



I am left with so many more questions than answers. Now I understand that this isn’t a standalone book. It is a piece in the jigsaw puzzle that is The Dark Tower series, I get that. I don’t get why he ends this book THERE! Why? I don’t understand why he had to hiccup back and forth between layers and layers of mind fuck, never solidifying anything...

AND it makes me feel like a dumbass! I don’t like feeling like a complete dumbass.

I have said it before and I shall say it again, I WILL continue with this series BUT I hope to hell I get some answers soon.

Fabulous buddy-read with my Dark Tower Posse: Quick Draw Stepheny, Jumpin' Jeff, Calamity (slow poke) Bev, and last but not least- Bronco Bustin Black Jackin' Jason- The name stands PERVERTS!!!!



Five weeks after The Drawing of the Three- Roland, Susannah, and Eddie are deep into the woods of The Out-World- where they encounter Shardik- a ginormous cyborg bear on his last legs.



After putting him out of his misery- they realize- they have to follow the path of the beam to The Mid-world...

....but first they need to bring back a fallen member of their ka-tet...



...meet a billy bumbler- Oyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!!!!...take on a demon...and catch the train ride from Heeeeeeeellllllllllll. Blaine the Paiiiiiiiiiiin.



Sooooooo much to do sooooooo little time...and there are more than a few bumps in the road along the way.



I cannot express how thrilled I am that I started this series (*take note Anne). And I couldn't have asked for a better group of people to be experiencing this reading adventure with. On to book IV- Wizard and Glass. I can't wait!!!

Actual rating: 4.5 stars Definitely my favorite of The Dark Tower books so far!

My favorite section was everything to do with Jake in New York. I was absolutely glued to the page! And the ending? So exciting!

Lots of new questions, not a lot of answers, but I'm still here for the ride. Not sure how I'll feel about book 4 since I think we're going back in time to learn more about Roland's backstory, but I may be surprised and love it too.

Moving onward...

This had everything for me. Adventure, action, monsters, battles, time/world travel, witty dialogue… it just goes on and on. Holding off on summarizing the stories until I make it through all the books but of the 3 I’ve read so far this is easily my favorite. What a fun ride this one was! Excited to continue this incredible journey with Roland, Eddie, Susannah, Jake and Oy

“April is the cruellest month”

Stephen King’s ambitious and challenging Dark Tower series continues with the third novel, The Waste Lands, first published in 1991.

I am reading this series very slowly. I read The Gunslinger in 2012, not really sure what I had read and why and not understanding what all the fuss was about. The second book, The Drawing of the Three, was more impressive and more complicated and though I liked it (after a three year gap after the first book) I was still unsure as to how to contemplate and follow the storytelling.

“What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water.”

Now, I THINK I get it and am captivated. This is not just the Great American fantasy but the “world that has moved on “ is THE postmodern fantasy, rich with allusions to literature, film, art, and popular culture. The Gunslinger provided a foundation of medieval / feudal setting but with American western motifs and styles. In Roland of Gilead (who looks like Clint Eastwood) King has given us an impressionistic look into our world peripherally, seen in allegory in a world pulled free of it’s moorings – it has moved on. This is a world made up of not just the remains of our physical world, but also composed of the intellectual and cultural elements that form our perceptions and make us who we are.

“Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,
And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,
Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,
Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find
The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.
I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring.
Thank you. If you see dear Mrs. Equitone,
Tell her I bring the horoscope myself:
One must be so careful these days.”

A casual reader, as I was initially, may be flustered by the surreal and even absurdist qualities of the writing, but King is not just imitating Beckett or Ionesco for absurdist sake, but rather to give life and breadth to a poetic attribution. The references to Browning and Elliot and all the other Easter eggs of reference and allusion are the detail with which King fills his landscape and discovering these hidden gems was part of the great fun of reading. ** I especially liked that King makes a Discworld reference with the turtle guardian with the world on its back.

“Unreal City
Under the brown fog of a winter noon
Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant
Unshaven, with a pocket full of currants
C.i.f. London: documents at sight,
Asked me in demotic French
To luncheon at the Cannon Street Hotel
Followed by a weekend at the Metropole.”

The inclusion of the city of Lud and of the train is a further connection to our world, but made strange and alien by King’s narrative. Likewise, the perspective from Roland shifts to Susannah and Eddie and Jake as their POV provides a scaled viewpoint from which to compare our world to King’s great vision. I love that King broke the fourth wall by discussing Jake’s essay about Roland and the Dark Tower and it is this kind of personality that gives this work life and makes it such an enjoyable, page turning book.

“In this decayed hole among the mountains
In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing
Over the tumbled graves, about the chapel
There is the empty chapel, only the wind’s home.
It has no windows, and the door swings,
Dry bones can harm no one.”

A great book and series and I am now fully on board. Highly recommended but you have to reads in order.

Phew...

This is (only) the second time through The Waste Lands and I enjoyed it as much, if not more then the first read. The world King creates in this series is unforgettable and the characters become very real, to the point that I actually miss them when I finish a book.

This books ends with a huge ass cliff hanger. Fortunately for me and Stephen King I did not read this series as it was released. I tried to imagine how I would have felt if I had to wait "six. goddamn. years." as one of my friends so eloquently put it......I think I may have gone a little mad.

Instead, since I bought the first four books at once, I just put down The Drawing of Three and picked up The Waste Lands without missing a beat.

dnf.. bored out of my mind

The third installment in this series was not as good as the second book in my opinion, but still definitely better than the first one. I found this story okay.

I guess I liked the symmetrical structure of the previous book more, in this one there are two parallel plots that connect at some point. This book is primarily the return of Jake, who is a very significant character in this book. He is the main axis and driving force behind this story.

But I'm afraid, as with many of Stephen King's books, soon I won't be able to tell what happened in this story. Even now, fresh from reading it, I'm not sure anymore what exactly filled all these pages. I'll probably remember Jake, maybe the train (possibly mainly because it's on the cover) but what else?

However, when I read this book, I had no problem with it, and I was quite interested. The world that the gunslinger and his companions go across takes on ever clearer shapes. I was reading the end of the story, mainly the scenes in a ruined city, at the same time that I read “Station Eleven” and it made a really disturbing impression.

I was also surprised that Eddie didn't irritate me at all. He's one of the characters I don't like in my books, with his goofy responses and his bravado. And even the rape scene wasn't that problematic for me, although I wish it wasn't there because I think King could achieve a similar effect in a different way.

Overall it wasn't a bad book, and I will probably read another one in this series one day.

The story begins five weeks after the end of The Drawing of the Three. Roland, Susannah, and Eddie have moved east from the shore of the Western Sea, and into the woods of Out-World. After an encounter with a gigantic cyborg bear named Shardik, they discover one of the six mystical Beams that hold the world together. The three gunslingers follow the Path of the Beam inland to Mid-World.

I'm very, very disappointed with this one

“I do not aim with my hand; he who aims with his hand has forgotten the face of his father.

I aim with my eye.

I do not shoot with my hand; he who shoots with his hand has forgotten the face of his father.

I shoot with my mind.

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.”

The Gunslinger's Catechism


Ka –tet
“Ka—the word you think of as ‘destiny,’ Eddie, although the actual meaning is much more complex and hard to define...,”
‘tet, which means a group of people with the same interests and goals.”
“Ka-tet is the place where many lives are joined by fate.”


“Be ye on a quest, gunslinger?”
“Ay,” Roland said. “We go in search of the Dark Tower.”

Roland has drawn his Ka-tet of gunslingers from a parallel Universe, from the city of New York, from the same where, but different whens. But the new ka-tet is in danger of collapsing before it begins. The man in black, the hoary cripple of Robert Browning’s poem, has laid Roland a trap in the form of a paradox that is driving the gunslinger slowly but surely insane.
In the first book Roland found the boy, Jake, who died in the parallel place called New York to be born in Roland’s universe. Roland loved him, but let him die to further his quest. But this is not the trap.
In book two Roland visited Jake’s where and when and stopped him from being killed by the man who looked like a priest. This was the trap. For if Jake never died in his world, how could he come to Roland’s. If the boy did not die then...

There was no boy.
Was.
Wasn’t.
Was—

To end this paradox, both the gunslinger and the boy will need to face down their dual memories and swing by “The Drawers.”

“The Drawers are places of desolation,” he said. “The Drawers are the waste lands.”


The Drawers are dead places

“All is silent in the halls of the dead,” Eddie heard himself whisper in a falling, fainting voice. “All is forgotten in the stone halls of the dead. Behold the stairways which stand in darkness; behold the rooms of ruin. These are the halls of the dead where the spiders spin and the great circuits fall quiet, one by one.”

But The Drawers are not entirely empty places

“Not all is silent in the halls of the dead. Behold, the sleeper wakes.” He turned his haunted, terrified eyes on Roland. “There’s a monster.”
“The demon—”
“No. A monster. Something between the doors—between theworlds. Something that waits. And it’s opening its eyes.”


And there’s no going around the wasteland. The Path of the Beam, the road to the Dark Tower runs straight through it and at its heart lies insanity, a Choo Choo train that the ka-tet of gunslingers have to take.

What lies within, be it a demon or a monster or the pox ridden denizens of a crumbling city, they have all forgotten the face of their father. But when Roland comes to town, they will all see what he is.

“Hail Gunslinger”

They will see it in his ice cold bombardier blue eyes

“Hail Gunslinger”

They will see it in the sandlewood grips of his irons slung low on his hips

“Hail Gunslinger”

He won’t need to tell them who he is. They will see it very well indeed. He won’t need to say a word. Because when Roland pulls leather, those ancient guns will announce him in fire and gunsmoke and lead. And they won’t stop talking until their message is received, and there is nothing left but fear in a handful of dust.

"Hail Gunslinger"


5 stars.

Another fantastic entry of this entirely insane and totally original series. I'm loving the Dark Tower so far and my only (minor) complaint about this book is there was a point near the middle where I felt like it seemed a little long but that went away by the end of the book. I can't wait to get to Wizard and Glass.

OH YEAH!! 5-stars, yet again! Who is surprised?!



Earlier:

It's time for another Stephen King reread. This time I am joining my fantastic friend, Shannon.

The Waste Lands is sure to make for lively discussions. Onward to the Tower!!



Original:

Let's cut right to the chase, shall we? The Waste Lands blew my mind.



The riddles, Blaine the Mono, I mean, who comes up with this stuff?



The King, that's who.

Stephen. FRICKING. King.



What more can I say besides the fact that I loved this with my whole heart and soul?!

As you know, if you are reading this, this is the third book in King's epic Dark Tower series. This book knocked The Drawing of Three out of the top spot for me.



It was that good! As the series continues to build, it's hard not to be overwhelmed by the complexity of it all. Even with this in mind, however, it's such an enjoyable story. It just seems to work.

The most compelling element of this for me was the resurgence of my favorite character!



There is really nothing else I can say about this that would be any more creative, or insightful, than what countless others have no doubt written in their reviews.

For me, one thing I always think when reading a book from this series is how absolutely EPIC it is.



The detail, the atmosphere, the artfully-drawn characters, it is truly astounding that all of this, ALL OF THIS, came out of the brain of one man!

I look forward to seeing this series out to its conclusion.