I should do a weekly entry telling you about my amazing nightstand, now stacked to four feet off the ground with things to read. Things we pass around, things from people I know who tell me I have to have a look or should take time out to check this or that. And though most weeks I get about a half hour at the end of every day to read for pleasure, I take it like medicine.
However, reviews are rare from me. I love what I love for my own reasons and I find people's individual tastes and subjective love of music, movies, television and books far too esoteric to be able to share most of the time. What makes you love Modest Mouse leaves me vaguely confused and I will never be able to explain my intense, overwhelming love of Tool.
So forgive me but I want to talk about something.
I mentioned a while back on a painful day that I was obsessed with being an ungracious widow and I said I was reading Lisey's Story by Stephen King.
Those of you literary-type folks who will nod approval of my mentions of Hemingway or Stevenson will now turn up your nose as if Mr. King, purveyor of fine horror novels that marked most of my adolescent reading jaunts, is a lesser writer somehow. Christine, anyone?
You would be wrong.
Read his offbeat novels-Dolores Claiborne, Rose Madder, Stand by Me, or one of my favorites of all time (of his), The Girl who Loved Tom Gordon.
And yet, Stephen King outdid himself here, with Lisey. And while I knew when I picked this up in Chapters that this widow, like all the others I have encountered, was happily married when her husband died, Lisey struck a chord in me that resonated and I can still feel the vibrations.
Her husband was mentally ill, destroyed by a terrible childhood that left him mostly crazy. I identified with the character of Scott Landon because he wrote his dreams, he harnessed his baggage and turned it into his lifelong work through his writing, all the while well aware that he was merely outrunning his pain.
Which is kinda sorta how Bridget lives.
Granted Scott was a multi-million dollar bestselling author and I might never be and that's okay, it was refreshing to read of their love through the eyes of his strong and adoring wife, who simply loved him, as Jacob does me, maybe in spite of and because of our demons.
There was even a bad guy, named Gerd Allen Cole. I'd be lying if I didn't choke when I saw that. But damned if I didn't sob like a baby through the final pages of that book, wishing it would never end and positively struck by the beauty with which Lisey found her closure for her life with Scott. And it was a little scary too. But like Tom Gordon, the scariness of the threats never manages to overshadow the emotional map drawn of the central character.
There's something to be said for just letting the words out, and not worrying about whether they will sound cheesy or if anyone will really understand them. Is it too deep, too feeling, too honest or too revealing? Mr. King managed to let it out, he let the words flow over the page and he spun an incredibly moving river of a tale of love and loss and he did it with such aplomb. Or maybe I was in the right place at the right time to be able to find a personal theme in this book and so perhaps it touched me more. I'll never know any different, so here you go.
Well done. It's now one of only three works of fiction that have literally brought me to tears in my life and it's by far the most compelling.
Now I'm back to reading college review mags because Thorn is so much more bitter and harder to swallow.
