In addition to the usual reviews and comments you would find on a horror movie blog, this is also a document of the wonderfully vast horror movie section of the video store I worked at in my youth.

Wednesday, February 6, 2008

Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came.

It gets harder and harder to find time to read with each passing year. I’m a terribly slow reader, so there’s a large time investment there. With other easier stimuli like my PS3, VOD and the Internet at my fingertips at all times, reading often unfortunately gets shuffled to the bottom in my list of priorities.

I made an effort last summer to get back into reading and have been pretty diligent since then. Stephen King once said something like, “You need to write four hours a day and read four hours a day before you can even think about being a successful writer”. Now, obviously I can’t do that, but the fact still remains that reading improves your writing.

Of late, I’ve been slogging my way through the rest of Stephen King’s Dark Tower series. I had tried a few times before, but always seemed to hit a brick wall when I came to the fifth book, Wolves of the Calla. This was not due to poor quality or anything like that, it was just extremely slow. Much like many in this day and age, if my mind is not immediately engaged, it tends to wander. That’s not to say I can’t concentrate if I want to, it just takes more effort and as you know, laziness and I are old chums.

Last weekend, I finally finished Wolves of the Calla. It was a cumbersome read, essentially six hundred pages of palaver for fifty pages of action, but that’s not to say it wasn’t fulfilling. It’s incredibly intricate and King has somehow even managed to weave many of his other books into the Dark Tower universe. It’s really quite astonishing when you think about it. So, now I’m onto book six and hopefully come Spring, I will be in the home stretch and reading the seventh and final book of this fantastic and sprawling opus.

Now, please permit me to segue this little diatribe into this week’s theme for Coverbox Wednesday.

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