Misery -- Finished

Posted by Backyard Urban Gardening on Monday, January 01, 2007

I finished reading the last 80 pages of Misery last night.

I started reading the book on the airplane trip back home to visit my mother during the Christmas holidays and breezed through it quickly. The fact that I read it in less than two weeks is a tribute to Stephen King's talent as a story teller.

I'm not someone that has two or three hours each day to sit down and read a novel--even though I'd love to be able to do it. I have to read a little here and read a little there when I have a few minutes. With Misery, I was compelled make time. As King writes, it has the "gotta" factor. I purposely saved the last 80 pages to read all in one setting. I wanted to experience the finality of the book, positive or negative, all in one setting with minimal distractions.

As a reader I'm aware that reading a few chapters at a time, or even partial chapters if time is really short, makes it a little bit harder to pick up the story again. In this video age, writers are competing with video games, DVD movies, satellite dishes, cable television, and must get the point more quickly to hold the readers' attention from the first page. Otherwise the reader might find another form of entertainment, put the book back on the shelf, and never return to it. For writers like Patterson, King, Hiaasen, and Crichton the risk is in losing sales of the next book released. For writers struggling to be published, it could mean the difference between publication and an endless trail of rejection slips.

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