Brought along a cheapo cheapo paperback I picked up the other day at the second hand bookshop at Holland Village of Part 1 of Stephen King's Under The Dome. Saw a little bit of the version for telly which didn't look much good but suspected that the novel would offer the usual roller coaster ride in terms of a gripping narrative, and was not wrong. I'll have soon finished its six hundred plus pages in less than three days, even with our guests around.
One reviewer quoted on the back cover compares it to The Stand, but this is completely wrong. It may look epic in scale but this is King in small town territory, uncovering all the dirty secrets that lurk therein. In an odd way it reminds me of Salem's Lot, without the supernatural element, or at least with that element minimised. I don't think King takes this stuff terribly seriously but just lets it all rip, and powerfully so.
One thing that seems more prominent than usual in the writing this time is the emphasis on what might broadly be termed the drug culture of small town America, ranging from alcohol, to prescription drugs, to dope, to crystal meth. Put simply, there's a lot of imbibing in the early pages of the novel to the point where you wonder how anyone ever gets anything done. If King is right about young Americans' fixation with leaving reality a long way behind then it seems to me the nation has a lot more to worry about than mysterious domes descending on its townships.
Also finished Billy Collins's The Trouble With Poetry, which is full of highly accessible poems creating very little trouble at all, for this reader at least. It's easy to see why he's such a popular writer. Nice to just breeze through a collection for a change, especially after the rigours of Mr Harsent's recent work.
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