Saturday night ramblings

I'm sitting outside in my screenhouse, it's still raining a bit, music is drifting over from the Red Bank Jazz and Blues Festival - somehow this reminds me of camping. Maybe it's the tacky lights. I love to sit out here; especially now that I have a laptop with a wireless connection. Once the weather warms, I really hate to be stuck inside. It rained all day today, so we didn't get to pot up any of the new plants we bought - that will have to wait until tomorrow when hopefully the weather will be better.

I finished up the book I've been reading this week. What a disappointment that was! Stephen King was my favorite as a teenager - I first read "Pet Sematary" as a freshman in high school and was hooked! I didn't read other horror writers, just King. Something about his sense of storytelling and character development always appealed to me. The last 10 years or so all I've read by him are his Dark Tower books - sad to see them be done. His other books haven't appealed to me at all, but I bought "Cell" on a whim, to see if maybe he'd gotten back to the writer he used to be before churning out a new book every six months. The story was good enough, but the ending! I feel totally cheated - it's as if he got tired of writing half-way through the story and just wrapped it up as best he could in a few short pages. What a waste of my time! The reviews were good, though, so maybe my criticism is unfounded.

My students this past semester had a similar reaction to the ending of "The Kite Runner" which I've been using the past year in the course I teach. They were annoyed that the ending leaves the reader *hanging* somewhat, and doesn't answer all the questions a reader might have. I like that kind of ending to a book; one that lets you imagine how things may have turned out for the characters. The technique was well used in that book, not so well used in the King book. I suppose King is just setting us up for a sequel - one I will not be wasting my time with!