Tag Archives: stephen king

Flashback Friday: Misery

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Flashback Friday is my own little weekly tradition, in which I pick a book from my reading past to highlight — and you’re invited to join in!

Here are the Flashback Friday book selection guidelines:

  1. Has to be something you’ve read yourself
  2. Has to still be available, preferably still in print
  3. Must have been originally published 5 or more years ago

Other than that, the sky’s the limit! Join me, please, and let us all know: what are the books you’ve read that you always rave about? What books from your past do you wish EVERYONE would read? Pick something from five years ago, or go all the way back to the Canterbury Tales if you want. It’s Flashback Friday time!

My pick for this week’s Flashback Friday:

misery

Misery by Stephen King

(first published 1978)

From Goodreads:

Novelist Paul Sheldon has plans to make the difficult transition from writing historical romances featuring heroine Misery Chastain to publishing literary fiction. Annie Wilkes, Sheldon’s number one fan, rescues the author from the scene of a car accident. The former nurse takes care of him in her remote house, but becomes irate when she discovers that the author has killed Misery off in his latest book. Annie keeps Sheldon prisoner while forcing him to write a book that brings Misery back to life.

I was thinking about Stephen King this week. Because, why not? He’s everywhere! Last week, I happened to catch him on The Colbert Report. This week, I received my copy of his newest book, Joyland. I have Doctor Sleep on preorder for the fall. And I just set my DVR to record Under The Dome for the next several weeks. See what I mean? He’s everywhere!

For Flashback Friday, I thought I’d go back to the late 1970s for the super creepy but not at all paranormal thriller Misery — about fandom gone horribly, horribly wrong. Do you think Stephen King was worrying about his legions of devoted fans when he wrote this? I loved the psychological terror of this book, in which an author is forced to do endless rewrites to please his public — as represented in this case by one psycho lady with an axe. Whoa. Just thinking about it gives me the chills. It may be time to dig up a copy and reread Misery. There’s nothing more satisfyingly scary than a really scary Stephen King book.

A brief housekeeping note: Flashback Friday and other weekly features at Bookshelf Fantasies will be on a wee break next week. (Woo hoo, it’s vacation time!) Check back in two weeks for the next Flashback Friday!

Note from your friendly Bookshelf Fantasies host: To join the Flashback Friday fun, write a blog post about a book you love (please mention Bookshelf Fantasies as the Flashback Friday host!) and share your link below. Don’t have a blog post to share? Then share your favorite oldie-but-goodie in the comments section. Jump in!

News for bookslovers: Oddities and goodies

Posted in Bookish Thoughts, Pop Culture by

All sorts of good book news came our way this past week. In case you were snoozing and missed something, consider this your friend public service announcement from the land of book obsessives:

In book-to-TV news:

  • The BBC announced that it will be producing a TV adaptation of Susannah Clark’s wonderful Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. So far, it sounds like this will be a six-episode mini-series airing in the UK sometime in 2013… let’s hope it crosses the pond to the US soon thereafter. You can read more about this delightful news here.
  • Coming next summer on CBS: Stephen King’s Under The Dome! This was one of my favorite books read in 2011 — big, creepy, and scary in an all-too-human sort of way. I can’t wait to see how this translates to TV. Read about it here.

In sheer insanity news:

  • Because apparently it’s not enough to have read and loved the Harry Potter series… Amazon is selling a $1,000 gift set about the Harry Potter movies. Sure, why not milk this cow for all it’s worth? If you’re thinking, “So worth it! Where do I get one?”, click here to read more. As of today, Amazon is offering this item at a 40% discount… so for just $600, all this can be yours:

hp set

Author updates:

  • Herman Wouk has published a new novel — at age 97! The Lawgiver, an epistolary novel about screenwriters working on a movie about Moses, is Wouk’s 18th book, and, he says, not his last. According to this article in the New York Times, he’s already begun his next writing project.
  • In early November, Philip Roth announced his retirement from writing. His last book, Nemesis, was published in 2010.

And in other bookish news:

  • British author Nick Hornby will be writing the screenplay for the movie adaption of Cheryl Strayed’s memoir Wild. I haven’t read the book yet, and I always enjoy Nick Hornby, so… wait for the movie version?
  • Remember the Janie series from your distant or not-too-distant teen days? Starting with The Face On The Milk Carton, published 20 years ago, Caroline B. Cooney’s engrossingly addictive series focuses on a teen girl named Janie, leading a happy suburban life, who accidentally discovers that she may in fact have been kidnapped as a child. If you walked away from the final book in the series wishing for more, your wishes are about to come true! Janie Face To Face will be published in January, and promises to reveal (according to the Amazon blurb) “if Janie and Reeve’s love has endured, and whether or not the person who brought Janie and her family so much emotional pain and suffering is brought to justice.”
  • Did y’all see this awesome creation from EpicReads? It’s a YA fiction map to the US, with a book for each of the fifty states. Pretty amazing — check it out. You may even want to hang up a copy, or use it as a checklist, or — just thinking here — put it up on the wall and throw darts at it in order to pick your next book. I’ve read 10 out of 50, and can definitely see a bunch more that I’d like to add to my TBR list. Fun!
  • And finally, on a hopeful note, NPR Books reports that this is looking to be a good holiday season for independent bookstores. Which reminds me, I have more shopping to do…

Cheers, all! If you have any other interesting tidbits from the world of books, please share in the comments!

A quick giggle to start the week

And along the same lines:

My top 5 favorite timey-wimey books

Posted in Bookish Thoughts by

It’s September 1st, and you know what that means, right? It’s the return of the Doctor! (And if you’re asking, “Doctor who?”, the answer is — yes!). The BBC’s Doctor Who returns for a much-anticipated 7th season tonight, and Whovians everywhere are dusting off their bowties and sonic screwdrivers in preparation for another fantastic journey through time and space.

“People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint – it’s more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly… timey wimey… stuff” – The Doctor

Inspired by the Doctor, step inside my TARDIS (that’s Time and Relative Dimension in Space, for the uninitiated) for a tour of my favorite timey-wimey books — books that deal with time travel, time slips, or just plain old time-related weirdness.

1) The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

I was just swept away by this mind-bending journey through a relationship between a woman who is fixed in time and a man who is not. Claire meets Henry when she is six years old; Henry meets Claire when she is 21. Early on, they discuss their temporal relationship in comparison to a Mobius strip, and it’s an apt metaphor. Older Henry visits child Claire; young Henry visits older Claire. In the midst of all the comings and goings, they find true love. At once tragic and beautiful, this book will make your head spin as you try to puzzle out whether the words “before” and “after” have any meaning whatsoever. This was one of the very few books that I began reading a second time immediately upon reaching the end the first time through, just to see how the pieces fit together knowing what was still to come.

2) Kindred by Octavia Butler

As Kindred opens in the mid-1970s, Dana is an African American woman in her 20s, happily married to a white man and living a contented life. She is yanked back through time to the ante-bellum South, where time and again she must intervene to save the life of her ancestor Rufus, son of a slave-owner. Dana’s experiences are shocking, raw, and brutal, and the effect upon her and her marriage is indelible. Kindred is less about time travel than about slavery, power, and freedom. It is a shocking book, and packs a powerful punch. Not to be missed.

3) Replay by Ken Grimwood

Replay is not about time travel, but the timey-wimey weirdness is here just the same. At age 43, unfulfilled and bored, Jeff Winston has a heart attack and dies… but wakes up again in his 18-year-old body, with his whole life ahead of him again, and with all the memories of his previous life. Is this a chance to right old wrongs? to set a new path for himself? to make an impact on the world? Jeff relives his life, but with alterations along the way, all the way through to age 43, when he dies again… and so on, and so on, and so on. Each time around, Jeff comes back to himself just a bit later, and each time around he thinks he’s found the way to get it right — but of course, life isn’t something you can plan for or make turn out just the way you want. Replay is hard to explain, but marvelous to read.

4) Somewhere in Time by Richard Matheson

Until a couple of years ago, I actually had no idea this was a book. I fell in love with the lush romance of the Christopher Reeve/Jane Seymour movies years ago, and was astonished to find the book at a used book sale. And by Richard Matheson, no less — someone who really knows how to tell a story. Richard is a modern man who falls in love with a woman in a photo from decades earlier, and using the power of his mind, finds a way to travel back in time to be with her. Passionate and intense, this is yet another interesting spin on a journey through time. (For more details, you can see my Goodreads review here).

5) 11/22/63 by Stephen King

I love Stephen King, am fascinated by the Kennedy assassination and all the associated conspiracy theories, and adore reading about time travel. Clearly, this massive novel was right up my alley! Given the opportunity to travel back through time and avert a national tragedy, would you? Should you? 11/22/63 is a combination of time travel, historical fiction, and romance, and it works. As I say in my review, I recommend this book wholeheartedly.

I’m leaving out some other great ones, not because I don’t love them — I do! I really do! — but because time’s a-wasting, and I must move on. So I’ll wrap this up with a list of a few other favorite books full of timey-wimey goodness. Let me know what time-related books you’ve enjoyed!

More time-travel, time-slip, and time oddities:

Outlander (and sequels) by Diana Gabaldon (which I didn’t include in my top 5 despite my mad love for them, just because I’m always raving about these books to the point of sounding like a broken record. Read these books! There, ’nuff said.)

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by J. K. Rowling — the book that introduced my children to the brain-twisting concept of time travel!

Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs
The Revisionists by Thomas Mullen
The Future of Us by Jay Asher
The Rose Garden by Susanna Kearsley
Lightning by Dean Koontz
The Sound of Thunder (short story) by Ray Bradbury

Fictitious fiction, TV-style

Posted in Pop Culture by

Earlier this week, I put together a photo collection of TV characters reading books. Why? Because I wanted to. And I read. And I watch TV. And it gave me a good excuse to search for cool pictures.

The one that was hardest to find was from an episode of Sons of Anarchy [SPOILER ALERT], in which the dearly departed Piney (RIP) sat in his mountain cabin, drinking heavily and reading a Stephen King novel.

Boards were a-buzz the day after the episode originally aired. Shock, outrage, and sorrow were rampant. Me? I wanted to know what book Piney was reading, and so, apparently, did lots of other book-loving viewers. The question kept coming up: Was it The Stand? Nah, not thick enough. Christine? Nah, the artwork didn’t seem right.

Show creator Kurt Sutter was kind enough to put the debate to rest by sharing this image, with the explanation:

February 11, 2012did anyone notice what piney was reading right before clay killed him? asked SK if he wanted to plug a book, he said have piney reading CYCLE ZOMBIES. our art department created this —

Mystery solved! Wouldn’t you love to read Cycle Zombies by Stephen King?