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)

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)

27, WG10, M12, E27

Stephen King, Hearts in Atlantis

Das letzte Mal, dass ich dieses Buch komplett wiederlas, muss sehr lange her sein, irgendwann vor 2008. Tatsächlich hatte ich auch schon einige Handlungsfäden und sogar einen ganzen Teil - Blind Willie - völlig vergessen, bevor ich das Buch wiederlas, dachte ich sogar es bestünde aus drei Teilen. Im Grunde ging es mir um die beiden Hauptteile, Bobby und Ted Brautigan und Pete und das Kartenspiel Hearts im College. So schön es war, die Stellen wieder zu lesen, die mir im Gedächtnis geblieben waren, so wundervoll war es auch, die vergessenen Teile neu zu entdecken. Irgendwann tue ich es wieder. Ganz bestimmt.
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I felt that lightness inside me again, that sense of lifting off. Sometimes your view widens and grows hopeful. Sometimes you think you can see around corners, and maybe you can. Those are good moments.

(Stephen King, Hearts in Atlantis, 1999)

26, WG9, M11, E26

Stephen King, Joyland

Ich kann mir selbst nicht erklären, was mich an dem Buch so fesselt, dass ich es jetzt zum dritten (oder vierten?) mal lesen musste. Vielleicht der Geist in der Geisterbahn. Oder Devin im Howie-Kostüm. Oder der todkranke kleine Mike. Oder Devins erstes Mal. Oder diese überaus anschauliche Beschreibung des Vergnügungsparks in den 70ern. Oder ... oder ... wer weiß. Weil's eben einfach ein gutes Buch ist.
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The end of my first love doesn't measure up to the death of one old friend and the bereavement of the other, but it followed the same pattern. Exactly the same. And if it seemed like the end of the world to me - first causing those suicidal ideations (silly and halfhearted though they may have been) and then a seismic shift in the previously unquestioned course of my life - you have to understand I had no scale by which to judge it. That's called being young.

(Stephen King, Joyland, 2013)

25, NG17, F15, E25

Lisa Jewell, The Truth about Melody Browne

Noch ein vom Fleck weg faszinierendes Buch, das mich von den ersten Seiten an in die Geschichte hineinsaugte. Wobei ich den Handlungsteil in der Gegenwart mit Melodys langsamer Öffnung und Neuentwicklung noch interessanter und spannender fand als die Geschichte ihrer Kindheit, ungewöhnlich wie sie war.
Allmählich sind nicht mehr viele Jewells übrig, alas. Im August kommt ein neues Buch, bis dahin werde ich die verbliebenen vermutlich auch geschafft haben ...

Parents, Melody realised, were the linchpin of normality, even when they were far from normal themselves. Parents, even distracted, slightly ambivalent parents, acted as a kind of a strainer through which life got poured. They were there, in essence, to catch the lumpy bits. Without parents, life felt oblique and directionless. Without a parent, the world was too close for comfort.

(Lisa Jewell, The Truth about Melody Browne, 2009)

20, NG13, F11, E20

Lisa Jewell, The Third Wife

Auch dieses Buch saugte mich binnen kürzester Zeit in das faszinierende und komplizierte Familiendrama hinein und ließ mich nicht mehr los, so dass ich das Buch einmal mehr viel schneller aushatte als geplant. Besonders bewunderswert ist hier, wie gekonnt Jewell mit den Erwartungen des Lesers spielt bis sich bei der Auflösung am Schluß alles anders herausstellt als gedacht.

He was aware that there would always be the last time for these intimate nuances of his relationships with his children and that often that time would pass unnoticed. When, for example, had Cat sat on his lap for the last time? When had he last kissed Otis on the lips, picked Pearl up in his arms, called Luke one of his childhood nicknames, held Beau up on his shoulders? He had no idea. He thought of crying at the leavers' ceremonies of his oldest children, knowing that he would never again see them in their primary uniforms, that they would never again be little. But there were no ceremonies for these other 'lasts', no realisation or acknowledgement that something precious was about to end.
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She had been so desperate to be a part of this, had watched the machinations of this life from a distance all those months, marvelling at the magical glow of it all: the Islington townhouse, the trophy wives and darling children, the weekends away en masse, the ramshackle parties, the legends, the traditions, the glittering story of them all and their sprawling mass of friends and people. She'd seen it, she'd smelled it and she'd wanted it. And now it was hers. And, like a shiny thing seen and coveted through the plate-glass windows of a fancy shop, now she had it in her hands it had lost its allure.
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(Lisa Jewell, The Third Wife, 2014)

18, WG6, M8, E18

Stephen King, The Green Mile

Das ist eines der Bücher von King, die ich - vermutlich - nur einmal gelesen habe (vielleicht ein zweites Mal kurz nach dem ersten Mal oder nach dem Film) und die trotzdem mir gut im Gedächtnis geblieben sind. Eigentlich kam es mir nur auf einige Stellen an, wie der Rahmenhandlung mit Briar Ridge und die Wunderheilung, aber mit so einem Pick & Chose habe ich es nicht mehr so, oder nur bei Kurzgeschichten, und statt die sechs einzelnen Bücher zu lesen, die immer noch in meinem Bücherregal stehen, lud ich mir das Buch auf den Paperwhite. Und ja, viele Passagen sind sehr bedrückend, noch mehr als ich sie in Erinnerung hatte. Und dadurch, dass ich das Buch schon kannte, nervte der Krebsgang-Erzählstil mit den ständigen Neuansätzen nicht mehr so sehr wie beim ersten Lesen, als ich wochenlang auf die Fortsetzung warten musste.
Und in dem Vorwort fand ich endlich die kleine Anekdote, die mir im Gedächtnis blieb und die ich irgendwie immer woanders verortet hatte - bei 'Misery' oder 'Bag of Bones' z.B. Aber sie ist hierdrin enthalten:

And I liked the high-wire aspect of it, too: fall down on the job, fail to carry through, and all at once about a million readers are howling for your blood. No one knows this any better than me, unless it's my secretary, Juliann Eugley; we get dozens of angry letters each week, demanding the next book in the Dark Tower cycle (patience, followers of Roland; another year or so and your wait will end, I promise). One of these contained a Polaroid of a teddy-bear in chains, with a message cut out of newspaper headlines and magazine covers: RELEASE THE DARK TOWER BOOK AT ONCE OR THE BEAR DIES, it said. I put it up in my office to remind myself both of my responsibility and of how wonderful it is to have people actually care - a litte - about the creatures of one's imagination.

(Stephen King, The Green Mile, 1996)