Build Me Up, Tear Me Down...

6:00 A.M., Monday, June 13, 2005

That is when I completed my reading of The Dark Tower.

Now, give me a minute. I need to urinate and read Stephen King's message to me....

Done with the urination...

Done with the other thing.

Now.

I have spent a great number of hours of my life reading this story. I know it's gotta be somewhere between 4,000 and 6,000 pages long. Which amounts to about eighteen hours of reading. So, I'm happy to be done, and I'm excited about reading it all over again. The ending was about perfect (I already knew how it would end thanks to all of the hints throughout the story and my great sense of direction). The book had different endings for different characters (Endings isn't the right word, but it's the first word that comes to mind.), and one of these was very happy and the other was somewhat depressing. The depressing one was the perfect one that I expected.

When I was in the fifth grade, my uncle, Timothy, got me a book for CHRISTmas. It was a big book and would be the first of it's kind that I would ever read all the away thru. I took me a while, but I loved it. It was Stephen King's (should be classic) fairytail novel, The Eyes of the Dragon. Previous to this book, I had lost all interest in reading as a result of an infinite supply of mindless accelerated reader books. At first I thought for sure this could be the only book in the world worth reading. I believe I read it four times before even considering the possibility of other good stories coming from the author. At the end of the story, he mentions there might possibly be another tale connected to this one somewhere down the line. I did a search on the internet for the book's villain, Flagg. I found that he was also a character in two other novels by Stephen King. One, The Stand, and the other, The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands. So, I decided to go in search of these two books. I had my dad buy me The Stand and The Gunslinger. The Gunslinger is the first volume of The Dark Tower, and I didn't want to start reading half-way through the story. I read Gunslinger, finding it to be a bit boring at first, and then loving it by the end. I was somewhat scared about reading The Stand, because it would be by far the longest story I had ever read (1,141 pages, 761 pages longer than the my previous record, and with a much smaller font, which means many more words to a page). I read it, though. I took a few breaks from it, but I did read it all. I actually read the last 250+ pages one Sunday, before reading half of Fuckelberry Hinn and the first twenty pages of a retarded fictional Native-American novel about a girl making tea with her grandparents. These other two greatly pissed me off. But The Stand was an amazing tale about people dying all over the place, and I loved it. After a while, I again read The Gunslinger, right before CHRISTmas, because I was expecting to get the next three installments as a gift from my parents. I got the books, and spent the next week reading the second and third books, The Drawing of the Three and The Waste Lands. The fourth book, Wizard and Glass, was much slower and harder to get into, but now remains my favorite of the seven. Once I got done with Wizard and Glass, I went back to The Eyes of the Dragon. I then read some other good books from varying authors, all the time wanting to read The Dark Tower. I eventually caved in and read The Gunslinger and The Drawing of the Three. I found out in there somewhere, that my good friend, Tyler Walker, was a big "tower" fan. I eventually talked him into letting me borrow his copy of Episode V: Wolves of the Calla. I took me a very long time to read, because school was sucking all of my mental energy right out of me, and I was only able to read when we had big breaks. I got it done over CHRISTmas break, right before CHRISTmas (no, wait a minute, it was after CHRISTmas), and was excited, because I was hoping to get the last three volumes. I got the last three. I quickly read Ishmael, by Daniel Quinn (also a good read) before jumping into the sixth book of The Dark Tower. I read most of Song of Susannah during our conference swim meet. I read the last fifty pages of it the next night. This was a huge difference from the time I spent on Wolves of the Calla, which I believe took me about four months (we should also take into consideration the fact that Song of Susannah was a number of pages shorter, but come on). I read about a third of the book before school again drained me. I just picked it up again about four days ago, and I have been going out to the front porch with it and some Gatorade from five to seven a.m. It's been fun. I started reading the last hundred some pages at about three this morning, and it was all a bunch of good. I liked it. It's what's been keeping me alive all this time.

I'm going to add some more stuff in certain areas of this blog if you have even cared to read this far. I like the subject. I could go on for days, but right now, I'm hungry, and I have to run in about 28 minutes. That's why I'm stopping now.