32, NG19, M16, NA8, E32

Justin Cronin, The Passage

Die Beschreibung meiner Fanfiction-Genossin und die Tatsache, dass es einen so aktuellen Bezug hat, reizte mich es zumindest mit dem ersten Teil zu versuchen, und ich bereute es nicht. Nachdem der erste Wlzer endlich geschafft ist, denke ich wird Teil 2 und 3 auch nicht lange warten müssen.
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A man sat in a concrete box long enough, thinking about his own death, and he boiled down to milky dust like water in a teapot forgotten on a stove; to understand him, you had to figure out waht that dust was made of, what was left of him after the rest of his life, past and future, had turned to vapor. Usually it was something simple - anger or sadness or shame, or simply the need for forgiveness. A few wanted nothing at all; all that remained was a dumb animal rage at the world and all its systems.
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The war - the real war, the one that had been going on for a thousand years and would go on for a thousand thousand more - the war between Us and Them, between the Haves and the Have-Nots, between my gods and your gods, whoever you are - would be fought by men like Richard: men with faces you didn't notice and couldn't remember, dressed as busboys or cab drivers or mailmen, with silencers tucked up their sleeves.
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His body was an immense, dying thing his mind could scarcely contain. And yet it was still his - the same body he'd lived in all the days of his life. How strange it was to die, to feel it leaving him. Yet another part of him had always known. To die, his body told him. To die. That is why we live, to die.
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Grief was a place, Sara understood, where a person went alone. It was like a room without doors, and what happened in that room, all the anger and the pain you felt, was meant to stay there, nobody's business but yours.
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He has to come to it on his own. Those were the words Prudence had said to Auntie, true words; for it was the way of all things. The things of your life arrived in their own time, like a train you had to catch. Sometimes this was easy, all you had to do was step onto it, the train was plush and comfortable and full of people smiling at you in a hush, and a conductor who punched your ticket and tousled your hair with his big hand, saying, Ain't you pretty, ain't you the prettiest girl now, lucky lady taking a big train trip with your daddy, while you sank into the dreamy softness of your seat and sipped ginger ale from a can and watched the world float in magical silence past your window, the tall buildings of the city in the crisp autumn light and then the backs of the houses with laundry flapping and a crossing with gates where a boy was waving from his bicycle, and then the woods and fields and a single cow eating grass.
...
Because sometimes it was one way, easy, and sometimes it was the other, not easy; the things of your life roared down to your and it was all you could do to grab hold and hang on. You old life ended and the train took you away to another, and the next thing you knew you were standing in the dust with helicopters and soldiers all around, and all you had to remember folks by was the picture you found in the pocket of your coat, the one your mama, who you would never see again in all the days of your life, had slipped in there when she'd hugged you at the door.
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So perhaps the greatest worry of all was that one day you would realize that all the worries of your life amounted to one thing: the desire to just stop worrying.
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(Justin Cronin, The Passage, 2010)

Before she became the Girl from Nowhere - the One Who Walked In, the First and Last and Only, who lived a thousand years - she was just a little girl in Iowa, named Amy.

(Justin Cronin, The Passage, 2010)

Frohe Ostern allerseits!

...und bleibt gesund!

31, WG13, M15, E31

Stephen King, Bag of Bones

Obwohl ich es längere Zeit nicht mehr gelesen habe, rangiert dieses Buch von King bei mir ziemlich weit oben auf meiner Stephen King Topliste (sind es eigentlich schon hundert oder sogar mehr?). Abgesehen davon, dass ich eine Schwäche für Geistergeschichten habe, finde ich in diesem Buch auch interessant wie das Geschäft mit Büchern funktioniert. Davon abgesehen hatte ich einiges total vergessen, wie z.B. die Nachrichten aus Kühlschrankmagneten. Schon seltsam.
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This is how we go on: one day at a time, one meal at a time, one pain at a time, one breath at a time. Dentists go on one root-canal at a time; boat-builders go on one hull at a time. If you write books, you go on one page at a time. We turn from all we know and all we fear. We study catalogues, watch football games, choose Sprint over AT&T. We count the birds in the sky and will not turn from the window when we hear the footsteps behind us as something comes up the hall; we say yes, I agree that clouds often look like other things - fish and unicorns and men on horseback - but they are really only clouds. Even when the lightning flashes inside them we say they are only clouds and turn our attention to the next meal, the next pain, the next breath, the next page. This is how we go on.
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What the publishers want in return, especially from an author who can be counted on to sell 500,000 or so copies of each novel in hardcover and a million more in paperback, is perfectly simple: a book a year. That, the wallahs in New York have determined, is the optimum. Three hundred and eighty pages bound by string or glue every twelve months, a beginning, a middle, and an end, continuing main character like Kinsey Millhone or Kay Scarpetta optional but very much preferred. Readers love continuing characters; it's like coming back to family.
Less than a book a year and you're screwing up the publisher's investment in you, hampering your business manager's ability to continue floating all your credit cards, and jeopardizing your agent's ability to pay his shrink on time. Also, there's always some fan attrition when you take too long. Can't be helped. Just as, if you publish too much, there are readers who'll say, 'Phew, I've had enough of this guy for awhile, it's all starting to taste like beans.
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Stupid, maybe, but sometimes things work just because you think they work. It's as good a definition of faith as any.
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Murder is the worst kind of pornography, murder is let me do what I want taken to its final extreme. I believe that even make-believe murders should be taken seriously; maybe that's another idea that I got last summer. Perhaps I got it while Mattie was struggling in my arms, gushing blood from her smashed head and dying blind, still crying out for her daughter as she left this earth. To think I might have written such a hellishly convenient death in a book, ever, sickens me.
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(Stephen King, Bag of Bones, 1998)

30, WG12, M14, E30

Lawrence Block, Hit and Run

Keine Ahnung, warum der vierte Band der Keller-Serie mich auch nach dem xten Wiederlesen immer noch so fasziniert. Auf jeden Fall war es eine gute Sonntagslektüre, als ich keine Lust hatte ein neu geladenes Buch anzufangen.

29, NG18, F16, NA7, E29

Greer Hendricks & Sarah Pekkanen, The Wife Between Us

Das Buch geht wieder auf eine Empfehlung einer Fanfiction-Genossin zurück. Weil mich die Synopsis reizte, lud ich es mir auf den Paperwhite und bereute es nicht. Obwohl mir Stories um Beziehungskonflikte, Eifersuchtsdramen und gestörte Persönlichkeiten eher Unbehagen bereiten, beeindruckte mich der meisterhafte Plot mit den vielen überraschenden Wendungen doch sehr. Das Autorinnenteam werde ich mir auf jeden Fall vormerken.

28, WG11, M13, E28

Stephen King, Misery

Eigentlich wollte ich das Buch schon länger mal wiedergelesen haben, aber scheute dann doch immer wieder davor zurück, weil ich soviele Szenen als zwar nicht un- aber doch schwer erträglich in Erinnerung hatte. Aber da war soviel was mich reizte, vor allem Paul Sheldons Gedankenprozesse rund ums Schreiben, seine Theorie um das Scheherazade-Syndrom und diese Ironie, wie ihn genau das rettet, an dem er vorher fast zugrunde gegangen war. Und ja, ich gebe es zu, die bewußten Stellen hab ich ziemlich schnell gelesen.

There was no ten-second deadline, of course - he'd had no contract for the book, had written it on spec, and hence there was no delivery date to think about. Yet there was always a deadline, a time after which you had to leave the circle, and most writers knew it. If a book remained roadblocked long enough, it began to decay, to fall apart; all the little tricks and illusions started to show.
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The gotta.
It was something he had been irritated to find he could generate in the Misery books almost at will but in his mainstream fiction erractically or not at all. You didn't know exactly where to find the gotta, but you always knew when you did. It made the needle of some internal Geiger counter swing all the way over to the end of the dial. Even sitting in front of the typewriter slightly hungover, drinking cups of black coffee and crunching a Rolaid or two every couple of hours (knowing he should give up the fucking cigarettes, at least in the morning, but unable to bring himself to the sticking point), months from finishing and lightyears from publication, you knew the gotta when you got it. Having it always made him feel slightly ashamed - manipulative. But it also made him feel vindicated in his labor. Christ, days went by and the hole in the paper was small, the light was dim, the overheard conversations witless. You pushed on because that was all you could do. Confucius said if man want to grow one row of corn, first must shovel one ton of shit. And then one day the hole widened to VistaVision width and the light shone through like a sunray in a Cecil B. DeMille epic and you knew you had the gotta, alive and kicking.
The gotta, as in: 'I think I'll stay up another fifteen-twenty minutes, honey, I gotta see how this chapter comes out.' Even though the guy who says it spent the day at work thinking about getting laid and knows the odds are good his wife is going to be asleep when he finally gets up to the bedroom.
The gotta, as in: 'I know I should be starting supper now - he'll be mad if it's TVdinners again - but I gotta see how this ends.'
I gotta know will she live.
I gotta know will he catch the shitheel who killed his father.
I gotta know if she finds out her best friend's screwing her husband.
The gotta. Nasty as a hand-job in a sleazy bar, fine as a fuck from the world's most talented call-girl. Oh boy it was bad and oh boy it was good and oh boy in the end it didn't matter how rude it was or how crude it was because in the end it was just like the Jacksons said on that record - don't stop til you get enough.

(Stephen King, Misery, 1987)