#5 - Finish reading Stephen King's Dark Tower series

Free at last!  As of about 7:00PM yesterday, Monday, April 25, I can say that I have completed Stephen King's Dark Tower septology (imagine taking a trilogy and beating yourself over the head with an additional  four volumes.)  That's right, Volume VII - The Dark Tower, the sequel to the sequel to the sequel to the sequel to the sequel to the sequel of Dark Tower Volume I - The Gunslinger.

I had read the first four volumes way back around the dawn of time, Volume IV probably sometime not too long after it was published in 1997.  After that I pretty much forgot about the series, not really even tracking whether the author had written any other books in the series.

I reintroduced myself to the series when Jake was in Loma Linda, having downloaded an audiobook of The Gunslinger to have something to listen to during those long nights in the hospital.  I never finished it in the hospital because, 1) it was impossible to focus on it - I kept falling asleep and having to rewind my iPod to find where last I was awake - and, 2) because I had forgotten that there is a character of a young kid named Jake who dies (a couple times) in the book.

Anyway, I eventually started listening to the book on some road trip or other and got back into the thing.  I had forgotten nearly everything, so I got the next two installments on audiobook and eventually re-read the paperback edition I had of Volume IV - Wizard and Glass.  Somewhere along the line I got Nick interested in it and ended up buying him the remaining volumes for his birthday.

Parts of the first four volumes were excellent, although when I reached the end of Volume IV this time around I recalled one of the reasons I had sort of dropped the series the first time; it started to get fairly stupid right toward the end.

Anyway, forging ahead, the excellent parts became fewer and farther between.  It was becoming excruciating, in fact.  Saner people asked questions like, "If you're not enjoying it why don't you stop reading?"  C'mon, by the time I reached Volume VII I had invested in probably about four thousand three hundred pages, plus change.  Can you imagine how many miles my lips moved during that amount of reading?  At this point I had to suffer through.

So, I used parts of the 12-hour drive home from Arcata to finish up the final hundred pages or so.

I'm glad I finished it because now that I know how it ends I can definitely say that is was....LONG.

Oh well, it is behind me now and I thank God.

Postscript: In pasting the above link to the official Dark Tower web site I happened upon a frightening piece of news; The Dark Tower - The Movie!  Then OMG!  In 2012 he's COMING OUT WITH A VOLUME VIII!!!!!  Aaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!