Stuff pt. ni

From SJ: 2. What's the best book you've ever read?

Hearts in Atlantis by Stephen King is my personal all-time favorite. It has some references to his Dark Tower series, but is fine as a stand-alone work. It is really five stories: one short novel, three novellas, and a short story. It is written in three distinctly different tones and jumps from character to character between stories, but the war in Vietnam is a common thread among them. Another common theme is the impact of the group on individual behavior. This all sounds like it would make a good primer for a writing class, and it would (it breaks every rule espoused by writing groups while creating fantastic tales), but its real strength is that it is a gripping human drama. I was enthralled in the tales involving a boy’s first kiss, neighborhood bullies, dorm life in college, etc. The next book I read was Black Hawk Down. Despite the gunfire and RPG’s and black hawks going down, it was a dreary slog after HiA.

Honorable mentions – The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy for breaking another major rule that humor and sci-fi should never mix, and the Conan series written by the original writer Robert E. Howard for getting me into books in the first place (our schools did everything they could to discourage reading and writing).
Note – if you are trying to judge Hearts in Atlantis by the movie, you are a moron who would claim to be an oenophile because you once drank Welch’s grape juice as a kid. The movie is a bastardized version pulled from parts one and five of the book, neither of which is the titular story.