Brian

https://www.goodreads.com/dorchadas

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Brian is Currently Reading

Brian is currently reading

The Son and Heir: A Memoir

by Alexander Münninghoff

bookshelves: currently-reading

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Dec 17, 2025 11:06AM

Brian is currently reading

The Fires of Heaven (The Wheel of Time, #5)

by Robert Jordan

bookshelves: fantasy, currently-reading

Reading for the 2nd time

read in January 2013

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Brian said: " This is where the rot begins.

Okay, that's admittedly a bit overdramatic. Nonetheless, it's easy to see some of the trends that plague the rest of the series starting here. The long periods that admittedly do feature character interaction but have ver ...more "

progress:

(page 534 of 912)
"I knew there was a reason I didn't like Nynaeve. Not only is she whiny, pigheaded, and annoying, she's a libertarian." — Jan 21, 2013 05:40PM

Aug 27, 2024 11:28AM · see review

Brian is currently reading

The Drawing of the Three (The Dark Tower, #2)

by Stephen King (Goodreads Author)

bookshelves: dying-earth, weird-fiction, currently-reading

Reading for the 2nd time

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Brian said: " It's honestly kind of difficult to think that The Drawing of the Three is even in the same series as The Gunslinger. That book is terse. Sudden. There is a man in black, fleeing across a desert, and a gunslinger who follows him through a world that h It's honestly kind of difficult to think that The Drawing of the Three is even in the same series as The Gunslinger. That book is terse. Sudden. There is a man in black, fleeing across a desert, and a gunslinger who follows him through a world that has moved on. A post-apocalytpic wasteland, with little life, no water, and no hope. And in the end, the gunslinger finds his man in black.

The Drawing of the Three is nothing like that and at the beginning, almost seems like it's about a different character. Would the Roland from The Gunslinger have fallen asleep in such a way, in an unknown place? I don't think so, but this Roland does. Perhaps its for the best, as the maiming he suffers from the lobstrosity introduces a dependency on others that the old Roland explicitly eschewed with his abandonment of Jake. And that dependency brings forth the drawing of the three, three people plucked through doors from another world, but only two of whom show up in this book, so perhaps it's not the best title. Well.

The first is Eddie Dean, a heroin junkie and one of the characters with the most chutzpah I've ever seen in a literary work. Once he realizes that he has an ironclad excuse for his actions, he starts tweaking people's noses with an ease and grace that's a joy to read. The scene with him being questioned by the customs officers--undegoing the Clearing of the Customs, as Roland thinks of it--is especially amazing. And while Eddie is understandably distressed by being pulled into another world by the man in his head and left there with no heroin and no way back, he never becomes unsympathetic to me. Hauling someone on a wheelchair over rocks, undergoing heroin withdrawl, having to survive on lobstrosity meat after watching those same lobstrosities kill and eat someone else? I'd be on edge too.

Eddie comes through and sticks with Roland even though he doesn't really know what's going on. He knows that Roland seeks the Tower, but even though Roland won't tell him what he's looking for there--he probably doesn't know himself--he still follows him. He's the one who decides to shoot the lobstrosities for food, he pushes the wheelchair through the sand, and he finds the third door. He has more fire than Roland does, in a way. He came straight from New York and did what he had to immediately, whereas Roland had been following the Man in Black for who knows how long after a life spent training as a gunslinger.

The second is O/detta Holmes/Walker, and I can't say that she's handled nearly as well as Eddie is. From the start where schizophrenia is used as a literary stand-in for multiple personality disorder to the way that the personalities are divided up. Odetta is sweet and congenienal and...mmm, articulate, with all the baggage that word implies. Detta is, as Eddie says, a "cartoon black lady" who speaks like a cross between a minstrel show performaner and a jive turkey and is fueled only by hate and the desire to kill the white people who have, admittedly, kidnapped her to a bizarre world on a beach that is certainly not New York. But all I can think of when I read it is that it was written by a forty-year-old white man from Maine. I found it weird when I first read it almost twenty years ago, and I find it worse than weird now. It's really only my knowledge of what happens to the character in the future that allows me to put up with it at all.

The third is not in the book. The third door through to another world leads to a serial killer that Roland uses to gain more ammunition and medicine before disposing of him in perhaps the most poetic way possible. The real issue during this part is Detta's attempt to kill Eddie and Roland, which is inextricably tied up with her portrayal in the book and so I mostly ignored that part in favor of Roland's attempts to navigate at-the-time modern New York by using another man's stolen memories and body.

This is the book that really starts the Dark Tower series, as Roland starts to assemble his ka-tet, and in my youth I would have given it five stars unreservedly. The portrayal of Detta is distasteful enough to me that I'm chopping off a star, though. But it reminds me where the series is going, and I'm going to have to check out the third book get to it sooner rather than later.

Previous Review: The Gunslinger.
Next Review: The Waste Lands. ...more "

Jan 02, 2024 10:20AM · see review

See all 5 books that Brian is reading…

Brian’s Quotes

“You’re my friends now. We’re having soft tacos later.”
― Breehn Burns, Best of Catbug: My Name is Catbug, What's Yours?

tags: bravest-warriors, catbug, cute, sugar-peas

6 likes

“Yeah but I don’t know how to make myself go there. Maybe it might never happen again. AAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!”
― Breehn Burns, Best of Catbug: My Name is Catbug, What's Yours?

tags: bravest-warriors, cartoon, catbug, cute

2 likes

“I'm Catbug!”
― Breehn Burns, Best of Catbug: My Name is Catbug, What's Yours?

tags: bravest-warrriors, catbug, cute, sci-fi

2 likes

“Science fiction didn’t see the mobile phone coming. It certainly didn’t see the glowing glass windows many of us carry now, where we make things amazing happen by pointing at it with our fingers like goddamn wizards. That, by the way, is what Steve Jobs meant when he said that iPads were magical. The central metaphor is magic. And perhaps magic seems an odd thing to bring up here, but magic and fiction are deeply entangled, and you are all now present at a séance for the future. We are summoning it into the present. It’s here right now. It’s in the room with us. We live in the future. We live in the Science Fiction Condition, where we can see under atoms and across the world and across the methane lakes of Titan.”
― Warren Ellis, CUNNING PLANS: Talks By Warren Ellis

1 likes

“Here's how much some people dislike living Jews: they murdered 6 million of them. This fact bears repeating, as it does not come up at all in Anne Frank's writing. Readers of her diary are aware that the author was murdered in a genocide, but this does not mean that her diary is a work about genocide. If it were, it is unlikely that it would have been anywhere near as universally embraced.”
― Dara Horn, People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present

tags: genocide

7 likes

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