For this week I decided to read Stephen King's first book of The Dark Tower series, The Gunslinger. I already knew I wasn't going to read The Hobbit or LOTR right away...I had tried before, and never again. It is exactly the type of books I don't really enjoy reading - waaaay too much description for me. It just bores me and then I lose interest in everything else that is happening. Unfortunately for me, that is exactly how most fantasy and even science fiction books are written. I'm rather picky in these genres...Many I don't find myself interested in because they sound the same as many before them, while others scare me away with their pages and pages of long descriptive paragraphs. Well, regardless...
The book was just kind of "okay" to me. The writing was fine, but I didn't find the story particularly engaging. It kind or irritated me that I had a lot of questions which weren't ever answered in this first book - like why Roland is obsessed with his journey to the tower, what exactly IS the tower, and where the heck are they anyway?! There seemed to be a discontinuity between time where they were. Roland seems to be from an older time, yet knows what a gas pump is. Yet the world of Jake from New York City was completely baffling to him and he didn't understand most of what he would talk about of that place. Since they seem to be so disjointed in their times, I found myself baffled and wondering about where they must be and how they can be so disjointed. And it seems there is something wrong with the world, that its in some kind of chaos, yet I don't understand still how exactly or why. I can only assume the gunslingers' journey has something to do with saving it. And why is he the last anyway? Is he some kind of immortal and time has moved on, and that's how Jake has come to be in a more modern time? Or are they perhaps in some other dimension of field of existence where people come when they die (since Jake did die in NY before the man in the suit took him)? I really have no idea. Roland also seemed very apathetic and accepting he was told was to come, and he wouldn't really dispute it. His apathy certainly didn't help me feel any less apathetic towards the book.
I like my stories to make sense. It's not that I think they have to tell you everything, no, not at all - I like having to wonder about things. But I don't like being wondering about everything and getting little to no answers to anything by the end of the first book. But perhaps that's just me, and I'm the same person who doesn't feel the need to be described every flower in the field or every item that they packed...If they pull it out and its nothing unusual, I'll assume they packed it.
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