Irais Guzm Guzm itibaren Manerinerina, Madagascar itibaren Manerinerina, Madagascar

Finally finished it! Everyone kept telling me the ending was horrible and wasn't worth it, but I quite liked it and honestly don't see how else it could have finished. It was leading up to something like that the whole series. I feel like a chapter in my life is closed now that I'm done. However now I hear The Dark Tower: The Wind Through The Keyhole is coming in 2012. The Dark Tower never leaves you...

Speaking as someone who hasn't read any Stephen King or grand fantasy sagas (and feels no particular draw to either), I found The Gunslinger to be a decently enjoyable novel. It definitely didn't evoke much love or hate emotions in me but there are qualities to it (mostly the prose) that made it interesting enough to stick with until the end. The problems I find with it are mostly due to the fact that it's the first in a series and raises more questions than it answers. I've meant to try reading King for a while. One of the reasons I haven't tried him much before is that I don't know any avid King fans to try to convert me or give me a good recommendation. I also have always had a aversion to him because of the sheer length of most of his novels because I'm a firm believer that a good story can be ruined by flooding it with too much detail. I've only tried once before to read 'Salem's Lot and quit after about a hundred pages because reading it felt like a chore and I was having the problems I was expecting. But after researching and polling a few people I found out that King's "magnum opus", The Dark Tower Series, is one of his mostly highly rated though lesser known/read works. And though the later books grow the mammoth size he's notorious for, The Gunslinger is a more than manageable length (I flew through it pretty quickly, actually) so I decided to give it a try. As previously mentioned, I don't have much experience with grandiose fantasy epics so I can't really compare it to others, though I suspect it shares certain qualities. As far as the events of this first novel of the series, it almost seems hard to judge the book on it's own. I've read some other reviews where people said that they didn't think much of this book but when they went further into the series they went back and changed their rating. This seems really odd to me because I don't think you should have to wait 3 or so books in to appreciate the predecessors. In terms of making me want to continue with the series, I don't think The Gunslinger did a good job of making me want to find out more of the story. I don't know that I would be as motivated to continue with this series if it wasn't for the promise that it gets much more interesting because the events in this book by themselves don't have much meaning. They seem to be symbolic of greater meanings that haven't yet been revealed which might be engaging to some readers but I felt they were a bit frustrating. That isn't to say that the events of the book aren't somewhat interesting on their own and don't hold some general themes (with Jake, the loss sacrafice of innocence is a pretty clear message). But you have to be okay with being confused as to exactly why things are happening because King holds out a lot of explanations and the explanations he does give are pretty vague most of the time. I was ambivalent to Roland as a main character. He's definitely not the typical Hero-on-a-Quest archetype other than maybe the fact that he's very dedicated to the journey for some yet unknown reason. In this volume, he comes off as sort of boring. He's not a particularly good or bad guy which left me not really caring for him much. Though my favorite scene of the book was his Coming of Age story near the end since it was one of the only times he showed emotion that I could understand and relate to. All that said, the language of the novel was very pleasant to read. Even though it was frustratingly vague, Stephen King's descriptions were poignant and vivid. It was far from a literal narrative where actions are simply reported. There were really excellent metaphors that brought the storytelling to another level. It's so good, in fact, that it makes me see why it was easy for a lot of people to fall in love with this first book before the story even really gets started. I think I may continue on with this series since it's so highly rated though I may take a break and read some other things before I come back to it.