Good Morning Folks! I’ve not done as much navel gazing as I usually do around this time of the year. Normally I do these posts over the holiday break as filler to keep my blog active. This year however I just took most of that time off from blogging entirely. I think it was good for me to finally take a proper break. However this also means that you are probably going to get a spate of navel gazing posts now in January. During late 2022 and all of 2023 I was on a tear of consuming way more books than I have previously. Generally speaking in a given year I would normally read one or two books, but in 2023 I set a goal of 20 and made it through 52. As such I set the ambitious goal of 50 for 2024… and fell extremely short of it. Essentially I made it through 39 “books” though several of those were short stories and a few graphic novels.
I still use Bookwyrm as my primary platform for keeping track of my reading, and when I logged in I was presented with my summary of 2024. If you are curious you can also still see 2023 for reference, and weirdly I did not read that many fewer pages this year. Part of this was of course that I dove much deeper into the world of Brandon Sanderson and his epic over-thousand-page tomes. What kept me from my goal is the fact that I essentially hit a gulf mid-year where I just stopped reading altogether until the tail end of the year. Had I kept up a consistent clip, there is no doubt I would have burned through those 50 books that I set as my goal for the year. For 2025 however, I set myself a bit more realistic goal and landed on 30.
Another tool that I started using more reliably was Storygraph. This was a suggestion from my friend Cuppy some time ago as a Goodreads alternative, and more than anything the feature that I like the most is its recommendation engine. While Bookwyrm is my primary tool, I am keeping Storygraph updated as well and then using their algorithm when I get stuck for something new to read. I don’t use any of these apps on my phone, but instead prefer the web application experience. My wife however has shifted to using Storygraph entirely and uses the app reliably to keep track of her own reading. Sometimes its suggestions are painfully obvious, but occasionally it chooses something that would not have normally piqued my interests.
For example a few of my favorite short books last year came from storygraph. I would say honestly that The Lost Girls was quite possibly my favorite book of the year, and I would not have been tipped off to it were it not for randomly searching its generated suggestions. It is so painfully “90s goth culture” and well worth the read and has a sort of Vampires meets Heathers vibe to it. Where Darkness Blooms is quite honestly not that dissimilar from a book I read in 2023 called Dark Harvest, but it still takes an interesting spin on the “small town has a dark secret” trope. It wasn’t necessarily the most amazing or original book I have ever read but it sure was a fun little read and I would recommend it to anyone just looking for something quick.
Another thing that I am proud of from last year is that I made my way through the entire Dark Tower series back to back at the beginning of the year. This is something I had always wanted to do, but struggled to get hooked into. I am not necessarily the biggest Stephen King fan, but now having finished this series I understand a bit more of the unvarnished admiration of this sequence. I think my favorite bit of this series is the language of the characters… specifically Roland. I admit I have said “thankee sai” more than a few times over the past year. Admittedly… now that I am indoctrinated into the shared universe of the Dark Tower, I have a not so insignificant desire to go back and read some of the other King books that are connected to it as well. If you believe the fans… essentially EVERYTHING King has ever written is connected to this one universe.
As far as 2025… I am off to a decent start so far. I just finished the two books in the Cerulean Sea series by TJ Klune and will absolutely read the next one whenever it comes out. These are very much “Wizarding World” but unapologetically queer. In fact the afterword of the second book essentially says as much and that their goal is to write queer stories that embrace everyone. Really well written. I think I like the first book a bit better than the second book, but mostly because the second takes a bit to get rolling and is a very different sort of tale. Essentially all of the books from this author are soft adds to my long list of “I should probably read this at some point”.
I’m not really sure where I am going from here. I did not start something new last night after finishing Somewhere Beyond the Sea. I checked into a few things but they were not available through any of my now four library cards. I’ve been hesitant to dive into another Sanderson epic, because I know those are such massive commitments. I want to read What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher so I might try and find a copy of that somewhere. I also want to dive into the Feed series by Seanan McGuire writing as Mira Grant, so that might be a thing I do. I’ve also read zero of the Murderbot books so that is a possibility as well. Maybe today I will decide where I am heading next so that I can go there tonight.`
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The Dark Tower is above all else a book about obsession, and this month I have been on my own obsessive journey. After wrapping a very short read for reasons beyond the scope of my understanding I landed upon the first book of the Dark Tower series for my second read of the New Year. I started with The Gunslinger on January 2nd and wrapped the seventh book in the series on January 27th. The time between I existed in a world parallel to Roland and his Ka-Tet. This is one of those unwieldy foundationary mythos that I had been interested in for decades, but never really sought out to complete on my own. I had read some of the comics associated with this series, and read a few novels that are adjacent to this tale but never really dove headlong into the abyss that is The Dark Tower. I should warn you that from this point forward, there will be spoilers regarding each of the seven books in the series.
The Gunslinger
I have to be honest… I did not really think much of that very first book. It felt like a novel compiled together out of bits and pieces of disconnected story. That makes sense I guess given that it was originally published starting in October 1978 and continuing intermittently through November of 1981 in five separate chunks in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Like all science fiction and fantasy of the 80s and 90s… it has some problematic elements. It is weird to me how much the cultural landscape has changed, but if I had to peg the story it felt like a Sergio Leone movie… which also makes sense given that was a large chunk of the inspiration. It is a tale of very one-dimensional characters set against the backdrop of an epic quest… that felt a bit hollow. I remember questioning friends’ sanity over the years when they talked about The Dark Tower like it was this holy grail of fiction. Was this paper-thin story that I was reading really worthy of so much praise and adoration?
The Drawing of the Three
To be perfectly honest… after finishing that first book it was a bit of a coin toss if I continued forward. It was mostly out of sheer laziness and not wanting to try and figure out a new book series to read that I continued forward and in truth I am glad that I did. The Drawing of The Three is the book that begins to allow some color to creep into the otherwise sepia-toned visage of the Gunslinger’s world. This transformation is brought on by the introduction of three characters: Eddie Dean, Odetta Holmes, and Detta Walker. These characters begin to influence and expand the persona that is Roland of Gilead slowly sanding down the sharp edges and turning him into a begrudgingly likable character. The tale of this story is a bit of a meandering mess but it somehow worked. This tale is filled with broken people who strive to improve themselves.
The Waste Lands
Blaine is a pain. The third book in this sequence was the one that almost broke me. There are some aspects of the book that I greatly like and other aspects that were a bit much for me. The tale largely revolves around redemption and Roland making up for the mistake of the first book… aka when he betrayed Jake and let him fall into the abyss. In the second book, Roland goes out of his way to keep Jake from dying in the “real world” which causes a schism to form… where Roland and Jake are torn apart by the knowledge of him dying and also living being in constant conflict. The summoning of Jake as the third member of the ka-tet makes perfect sense and quite honestly… had this book entirely focused upon that quest it would be whole. Instead, the quartet continues forward into a future “Not-New-York” in the form of Lud and then ventures across an imaginary Kansas in an AI-controlled Monorail that wants to kill them where the story just sort of abruptly stops.
I cannot imagine how livid fans of this series were at the time. Six years pass until the story picks up again with Wizard and Glass. The Waste Lands feels like a bad case of editing. It seems like there was more than a book’s worth of content here and should have been kept to a tighter scope. Maybe that would have meant that there were eight books in the sequence rather than seven, but it would had a better flow to it. That is not to say that I did not enjoy the book greatly. There were moments in the book that were the best yet, and I really liked the world-building that this novel added to the story… but it was still a bit of a mess. It very much still felt like King wrote himself into a corner and then did not know how to proceed and simply just stopped the story as a result.
Wizard and Glass
This is the least favorite book in the entire sequence. I think part of the problem is that you have the conclusion of The Waste Lands just sort of crudely tacked onto this completely different flashback story. There is this night’s palaver around a campfire as Roland attempts to explain who Susan Delgado was… and that just sort of consumes the majority of the novel. The things I liked about this novel are something that I have loved about the series as a whole. I like the language of this book and the Mejis region’s particular curious dialect. I think my biggest issue is that I did not think that Young Roland, Cuthbert, or Alain were particularly likable characters. I liked Susan Delgado quite a bit and as far as I am concerned she is the primary protagonist of this tale. I also particularly liked Sheemie aka Stanley Ruiz and thought him one of the most sympathetic characters to date, but got somewhat frustrated that he kept getting entangled in the mess.
I feel like this is supposed to feel like some grand love story… but instead, it ends up feeling like a tragedy brought on by the naivety of youth and the hubris of Roland’s obsession. There are many a character to outright hate in this novel so there is at least a bit of joy in watching them all get their just deserts. I think the other issue that I had with this novel is that I could see the shape of the tale before it was truly started. Partially this is the fault of it being a flashback and partially due to bits of details from the other books… but on some level, it felt like King was just going through the paces and writing out of obligation more than love of this particular tale.
Wolves of the Calla
This is without a doubt my favorite of the novels of the entire sequence. I think this is because it is the first time that the group actually acts like the “Arthurian Knights” that they purport to be. Once again I love the language of the series and the dialect of Calla Bryn Sturgis. I think a lot of this comes down to the fact that I myself come from a backwater town in the middle of nowhere where most of the locals speak a specific way… and it just seems fitting to have these towns develop their own detailed mannerisms. I like the folk of the Calla and the simple mission of trying to stop these invaders from stealing the children and doing god knows what manner of experiments on them before returning them “roont”. This is also the last time that the Ka-Tet is whole, and as a result, it sort of serves as the payoff before the fall. The Dark Tower is a series where there are no truly happy endings, and as a result, we all knew that there would be no lasting peace.
Death, but not for you, gunslinger. Never for you.
Son of Susannah
Being perfectly blunt… this is a book that I did not like terribly much. It is a tale of things slowly falling apart. I am not sure if Mia the entity that is now possessing Susannah is supposed to be sympathetic or not. I did not find her particularly so and mostly just hated her single-minded focus. The book serves to flesh out some more of the cosmology of the world and how each particular “when” fits into the puzzle, but it was largely just a letdown after how damned good Wolves of the Calla was. I think another problem is around this point… I was just ready for it all to be over. I was six books into a series that I had been shotgunning book after book and was growing tired of living in this world’s particular headspace. This felt like something I had to endure to get to the end, which is sort of sad considering how much I loved the character of Susannah Dean across the rest of the books. The title of this book feels like a lie though, because this is less the tale of Susannah and more the tale of Mia.
The Dark Tower
Regardless of anything else… starting this book felt like an accomplishment because I would finally be finished with this series. I am not entirely certain what I think about this conclusion to the tale and from what I understand at the time it was rather controversial amongst King fans. I think the piece of this tale that I like the least is how Roland of Gilead begins to unravel. What I mean by that is that during this tale he had begun to grow as a character and take on some measure of emotional connection to his Ka-Tet and in the end… that all sort of drains away and all he is left with is the obsession that started the entire story in the first place. It’s a bit tragic I guess, that at the end of the day… the only thing that matters to Roland is his Pyrrhic quest for the tower. The Ka-Tet is truly broken and this novel sees the death of Eddie Dean and Jake Chambers and the escape of Susannah Dean leaving him only with the quest and a particular Deus Ex Machina required to allow him to accomplish his goal.
I think the frustration with this novel is that there are a lot of things that are set up as epic story arcs that just sort of fizzle out. For starters the child Mordred seemed like we were heading towards an epic battle between the aging Gunslinger and his cursed heir. Instead Mordred seems to exist just to remove one more member of the Ka-Tet as Oy takes the death that was intended for Roland. Then there is the battle with the Crimson King… which gets resolved by the “magical art boy” costing neither of them anything in the process. The piece that does not bother me in the least though is the causality loop that Roland and his quest for the tower end up being. There will always be a Gunslinger, Tower, and Man in Black that fled across the desert and I am okay with that. Given the tragic nature of this tale, it seems fitting for his quest to never be completed and for him to leave nothing but death in his wake.
Final Thoughts
Was this worth a month of my life? I am honestly not sure. I am not as connected to this tale as many of the diehard fans who joined in along the way and anxiously awaited the next chapter. I don’t think this is the work of genius that many folks seem to think it is. I think it is a flawed tale that somewhat developed a life of its own as it went. It is a colossally untidy mess. What it feels like is a pen-and-paper game where the Gamemaster did not have enough time to prep for it… so they just sort of winged it and made things up as they went. I’ve done this a few things and while there are moments of genius inspiration that come through that process… there is a lot of muddling about which seems rampant in this tale. I think the whole is definitely better than the sum of the parts, but The Dark Tower is still a bit of a mess.
Do I regret shotgunning my way through this series book after book over the course of January? Absolutely not. I am happy to finally understand the scope of this tale after having seen its evidence for decades. The piece that will stay with me though is the language of this tale. I will likely incorporate “Thankee-Sai” and “Say True, Say Thanks” into my ongoing melange of linguistical scavengry from assorted pop culture icons. In spite of my criticisms… I liked the tale quite a bit and it had moments that I will cherish from this point forward. That said, I am not exactly certain I would recommend the experience of slogging through these seven books to anyone else. Like most everything else I have consumed in my life, I will hold a timeless love for the best bits… and jettison the lesser debris.
Did I miss the point? Do you feel like my assessment of the whole was unfair? Drop me a line below. Truth is it won’t likely change my opinion of the tale but it might make you feel better at expressing yourself. After all, I am just some random dude on the internet with a blog that is entirely based on my personal opinions and doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things.
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