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Title: Bag of Bones

Author: Stephen King

Type: Fiction

Page Count/Review Word Count: 660

Rating 2/5

Well, I finally found a Stephen King book that I didn’t enjoy. Goodness me, it was just incredibly dull and difficult to engage with. I didn’t care about the characters, the antagonist wasn’t even a villain, and while there were supernatural elements, they were super minor for 550 pages and then suddenly went nuts at the end. It just didn’t work for me.

Don’t get me wrong, I like what King set out to do here. I guess this was written during his “literary horror” period, after he got sober and before he found his feet again. Some people (Todd the Librarian, for example) say that after King sobered up, he was never the same. I disagree because he has some great recent novels like 11/22/63, but I do think that his hit to miss ratio took a big hit when he cleaned up.

But I don’t have a problem with that, and I’ve already decided that I’m going to work my way through everything that King has ever written. I’d also rather that he lived longer instead of burning himself out, because occasional bad books are offset by the fact that he’s also written plenty of other good ones.

This one felt a lot like filler, and I think he could have told the story a lot better if he’d dropped it to half the length. There were also a few good ideas in there, and it’s not exactly badly written, it was just super boring. I rated it a 2/5 based on my enjoyment of it, but objectively I guess I’d say it’s around a 3/5. I also know a few different people who love this book, and so I guess as always it’s a case of different strokes for different folks.

It also doesn’t help that I’ve read enough King books by now that I’m bored of reading about characters who are writers. He’s done it to death, and I wasn’t a particular fan of it even to begin with. They say you should write what you know, but I don’t think it’s meant to be taken that literally. Plus it’s not like he knows about all of the creepy stuff that he writes about, and if he can come up with that then surely he can come up with someone who isn’t a writer.

I also wasn’t a fan of the back story here. It’s one of those where we keep having little flashbacks to the past until eventually the past and the present come together. I’ll agree that when it works well, it really works, but I also think that it’s pretty rare for authors to nail it, and I don’t think King did it here. It got to the point where things were being revealed towards the end and I just didn’t care because it had taken far too long to get to that point and I wasn’t that interested to begin with.

Overall then, I’m not about to recommend this unless you’re a completionist and you want to read all of Stephen King’s stuff, and even then I think you should go in with low expectations. I only got a couple of hundred pages in before I realised that I didn’t want to keep it as my main book. Instead, I switched it out as the book that I read before bed, and it’s true that it helped me to fall asleep. Apart from the times when it made me rage so much that I had to wake my girlfriend up to rant about it.

I think the main problem is just my own expectations of Stephen King’s stuff. I’m a fan of his and love reading his stuff, but then I get to a book like this and it’s just a disappointment. Avoid it unless you’re determined to read it.

Click here to buy Bag of Bones.

Dante Alighieri – The Divine Comedy | Review

Title: The Divine Comedy

Author: Dante Alighieri

Type: Poetry

Page Count/Review Word Count: 752

Rating: 4*/5

Dante Alighieri – The Divine Comedy

Okay, this is going to be a long one. It’s at times like these that I start to regret my rule of making each review have the same number of words as the book had pages, because The Divine Comedy is a bit of a beast. Nevertheless, the fact that it’s written in verse actually makes it easier to read because there aren’t too many words on the pages. I powered through the whole thing in three or four days, although I should also point out that I skipped Inferno because I’d already read that.

I think a lot of people think of The Divine Comedy as the kind of book that you can only enjoy if you’re an academic. I wouldn’t class myself as one – although I do write books of my own and I got an A in GCSE English Literature when I was sixteen – but I still enjoyed reading my way through it. I saw it as a challenge, and I like a challenge – so the fact that it was actually enjoyable came as a nice surprise.

If you’re not familiar with the concept, it’s basically a three-parter of epic poems that take you on a journey through hell, purgatory and heaven, and while I’m not exactly the religious sort, I still thought that there was plenty there for me. In fact, Dante’s use of symbolism was one of the major draws for me, although I did often struggle to tell what he was talking about when he referred to Greek legends.

Dante Alighieri

Of course, this isn’t the best book for everyone. You need to be a certain type of reader to enjoy it, but I for one am glad that I picked it up and gave it a chance. Sure, it taxes the brain a bit as you’re working through it, but it feels more like a mental workout than actual torture and you feel better for it when you reach the end of it.

I even took the time to read all of the notes, because I’m a completionist, and I found the notes to be just as interesting as the rest of the book. They added a huge amount of extra information that kept it all interesting, and it was great to be able to put things into context and to actually understand what Dante was on about. I think that part of that is thanks to the impressive work by C. H. Sisson, the translator of the edition that I read, and the great job he did of translating the work into English. The language still feels a little old, of course, but it’s not so inaccessible that it drives the reader away.

So overall, The Divine Comedy deserves its place as a rightful classic as part of the literary canon, and I think it belongs on all of those lists that talk about the books you should read before you die. After all, this basically covers what happens next – if you believe in that sort of thing. I don’t, but when you start to see religious work as fiction, it allows you to enjoy the elements of the story itself. It adds a whole new dimension.

Dante Alighieri Quote

I would recommend this book, but only to certain people. I don’t think my mum would enjoy it, for example, but I think my friend Neil would. You have to be a literature lover to get the most of it, but don’t be put off because it’s required reading or anything like that – it’s a genuinely interesting read, if only to put the wider literary canon into perspective. Better still, Dante’s language is beautiful (unless it’s just the translator), and his writing is great to read for its own sake. Although you will enjoy it more if you understand what’s actually happening.

Just don’t be put off by the length of it or by any reputation that proceeds it. And if you’re worried that you might not enjoy it, start with a copy of The Inferno and then see how you get on with that. If you liked it, like I did, then you can pick up The Divine Comedy and whizz through it by only reading the two thirds of it that you haven’t already read. Result.

Basically, only you can decide whether you’re willing to make the commitment. But for my part, I don’t regret it.