Previous installments of This Week in Reading can be found here. Most recently: Books That Should Be Banned.
I read two terrifying books this week, gang. One was about Vladimir Putin, and the other was about a traveling posse of polyester-wearing ex-humans who feed off the steam released by torturing psychic children. I’m not even done the latter yet, but why let that stop me from talking about it?
Let’s start with Masha Gessen’s The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin. Oh, man. You should already be reading this book. Let me make this abundantly clear: it is not boring. It is basically a Tom Clancy novel but real and by a woman and about Vladimir Putin, who should be in jail. If you have any hesitation about buying a biography of a foreign head of state, the Vanity Fair article that resulted in Gessen’s book should allay those concerns. She’s a clear and entertaining writer, and she is incapable of stepping back from her subject, which could really screw the pooch, but doesn’t. What it does, instead, is remind you that she is writing a living history. She’s mad and frustrated and intermittently hopeful and has enough dead journalist friends to be very conscious of the skin she has in the game.
Despite being a biography, The Man Without a Face is most fascinating in the insights it provides into civic engagement: the forms it can take, and the festering that comes from its repression. Gessen and her wife remain in Russia, and the passages in which she wonders how best to explain her country and its seemingly eternal leader to their children are intensely moving. As a parent living in a semi-dictatorship, how do you raise your children to view the system?
And now, we come to Stephen King (may he live forever and write until the end that never comes.) I love Stephen King. I love everything about Stephen King. I love The Tommyknockers (did you know they made a movie of it with Jimmy Smits in 2004? me neither! tell me more.) I love reading his reviews of things in Entertainment Weekly. I love his children. I love long articles about his children. I hold people who sneer at Stephen King in the utmost contempt. I have never heard anyone sneer at Stephen King who was a better writer than Stephen King, or who turned out to be decent in bed. On Writing is phenomenal. I’m done with this rant now, we’re going to talk about Doctor Sleep.
This morning, I woke up at 3:15am and couldn’t go back to sleep, so I went down to the kitchen, made coffee, and started reading. That was pretty dumb of me, and now I’m very tired, but, in some ways, it is the only way to read a Stephen King novel. Stephen King’s ideal reader is a shiftworker who’s had too much coffee, and the more you can do to recreate that atmosphere for yourself, the better.
How is it? It’s what you expect, and ideally what you want. It is very frightening. It is also, perhaps, King’s strongest writing about substance abuse (Danny Torrance not having escaped this aspect of his father’s legacy.) You do not need to have read The Shining, but I would rather die than tell someone not to read The Shining.
Okay, I’m going back to it now. If it becomes terrible I’ll let you know.
Tags: books, masha gessen, reading with nicole, stephen king, this week in reading
I also love Stephen King! I read Joyland during my recent beach vacation, and it was the perfect thing to read. I’m on the hold list at the library for Doctor Sleep!
Oh my God, On Writing. On Writing is the best. I read it in college (in Maine! how apt!) and I got to the section at the end where he talks about his accident. There’s a line there that just cracked me apart, about when he was in the hospital, peeing in a tube, his leg shattered into so many pieces but still so fortunate to be alive.
“You try to tell yourself that you’ve been lucky, incredibly lucky, and most of the time it works because it’s true. Sometimes it doesn’t, that’s all. Then you cry.”
“Cracked me apart,” indeed. Wow.
Nicole, I think you would really enjoy the fact that my boyfriend is a nightwatchman at an art museum, and he’s currently listening to the audiobook of The Shining. On his shift. In a barely-lit giant museum with old paintings and creepy storage rooms (one of which is filled with nothing but naked mannequins).
PICS.
DR SLEEP IS THE BEST KING NOVEL IN YEARS
I finished in two days, rapt the entire time
DR SLEEP IS THE BEST KING NOVEL IN YEARS
I finished in two days, rapt the entire time
I completely agree about Gessen’s book. I would add that what is best about it (and what most separates it from American writing on Putin) is her restraint—she never dives off a conspiratorial cliff, hewing instead to proven thuggishness. (Which ties it into a compelling Rosalyn Deutsche-esque critique of warrior masculinity.) An important read! Thanks for bringing it up.
I found On Writing to be delightful, Lisey’s Story overly long but viscerally horrifying (can opener!), various short stories enthralling and well-done…there have been some others I’ve enjoyed, but I think King is an author who greatly benefits from a good editor. This probably can be said of many writers, but he stands out to me as an example of someone who so guaranteed sales that he wasn’t always properly reined in. When he’s on, he’s excellent, but unfortunately, he sometimes gets away with more than he should. Not stopping me from taking The Shining with me for long weekend at the beach for Columbus Day!
Oooh, I mean, I LOVE Stephen King, but I love his son, Joe Hill, SO SO much more. NOS4A2, besides having kinda a terrible title, is SUCH a terrifying, awesome book. SO GOOD.
Also, it’s the perfect time of year to start reading 20th Century Ghosts again!
I just put a hold on the Putin book at my local library, thanks to this review. Thank you.