Reading on the Eights

Yes, I’m applying this recurring “on the eights” theme to my reading as well as running and piano. So, what’s been going on for the past eight weeks with my “pleasure” reading? As I mentioned on June 20, I had been reading Isaac Asimov’s Foundation and Earth, the fifth book of his Foundation series. Once I reached the surprise ending to this book, I decided to go back and read novels of his that were set in the same fictional “universe”, but whose stories predated the era recounted in the Foundation series. I started by reading his collection of robot short stories titled The Robot Collection. You may have seen the movie The Bicentennial Man (starring Robin Williams), which was based on a story with the same title in this collection. After finishing this, I started on his The Caves of Steel, a full-blown robot novel. There are more novels to come after this, covering the “Robot” era, the “Empire” era, and finally the pre-"Foundation" period. Plus, Asimov came out with novels that had a glancing connection to the others. Naturally, to be reading all of these works, I have to enjoy his writing style, which Asimov himself had described as plain. And that style worked for Isaac Asimov.

Plain is the opposite, though, of the style of another favorite author of mine. Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes is, for me, as much a celebration of the English language as it is a story about life, death, fear and love. I’m curious as to how anyone would go about translating Bradbury’s almost flow-of-consciousness way of describing things into another language. His style in this novel reminded me of his book Dandelion Wine, another of my favorites. Something Wicked is a novel that merits a more detailed analysis at a future time.

I’ve also been continuing my Stephen King readings, finishing his puzzling short novel The Colorado Kid and reading From a Buick 8, Pet Sematary, Rage, and Gerald’s Game. Of all of these, Pet Sematary was easily the best as well as the scariest. Rage was an earlier “Richard Bachman” work that King had pulled from publication because of violent student shooting incidents in high schools. From a Buick 8, I suspect, may somehow be tenuously connected to some of his other works, but that’s just idle speculation on my part (if you ever read Hearts in Atlantis, you may know where I’m driving at). I just finished Gerald’s Game and, to be perfectly honest, I found it to be the most difficult and wrenching of his works to get through so far. King used a total solar eclipse that cut through Maine in 1963 as a theme in both this story and Dolores Claiborne as well as making it a nexus linking the two stories’ protagonists with each other.

Finally, the crowning moment of my readings this past eight weeks has to be J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. What a great, exciting, fitting end (if it is truly the end) to this series! I was one of those fanatics who spent every free moment I had reading it, starting as soon as I arrived home with it in the wee hours of July 21. Truly, The Deathly Hallows was her best work of the series.

When browsing through bookstores or the book sections in grocery and department stores, I’m tempted to just start reading a completely different author, such as Nora Roberts, for example. Who knows, there may be a writer out there who says it all for me!