A Piece Of My Mind

the great pleasures of my youth

I discovered a few months back that enough years had gone by for me to have forgotten almost every detail of the great books I’d read in my youth.  I had run out of reading material, and had idlly grabbed one of the early Anne Rice novels off the bookshelf in my wife’s offce, and scanned a few pages.  Nothing at all stirred in my memory. I realized I could easily read this again.   As I thought about it, I realized that all the great old books I could remember reading in my youth were like this.  Largely forgotten, each memory just an impression that could fit on the smallest of notecards.

For each book, I could remember the title, a value judgment that ranged from good to fuckin’ awesome, and a vague concept of the subject.  Cujo, merely a good book, not a fuckin’ sawesome one, was about a rabid dog.  Papillon, a great book but not quite a fuckin’ awesome one, was about this guy that keeps escaping from all these jails.    

So anyway, discovering this first taste of impending senility meant I could read them all again and enjoy them like it was the first time.  I went out and got a copy of the expanded reissue of The Stand, my favorite book of all time.  The Stand, a genuinely fuckin’ awesome book, about a battle between Good and Evil fought among the few survivors of an apocalyptic pandemic flu. 

It was as good as I remembered.  So now I’m going to reread them all, the entire Stephen King cannon. 

I’m shopping for bargain overstocked hardbacks on the internet, letting availability be the deciding factor on what to read next, with the proviso that it has to be at least 15 or so years since I read it the first time. I learned that the hard way, buying Dreamcatcher and having to set it aside because I was remembering too much of what happened next. Ah the vagueries of memory.  

So far, besides The Stand, I’ve knocked off Desperation, Salem’s Lot, The Talisman, The Black House.  I was surprised to find that I’ve had to change my appraisable on some of them.  Salem’s Lot was not as good as I remembered it, Desperation was considerably better.

I’ve just started It, an at least great and quite possibly fuckin’ awesome book (I’m not sure yet, I’m a bit fuzzy on this one), about a scarey clown who is the embodiment of a nameless evil oppressing a small town in Maine.