A Lack of Color

What is longer than ”Moby-Dick,” ”War and Peace” or ”Ulysses”? If you guessed the Bible or the Manhattan telephone book, you would not be wrong (though there are small-print Bibles that are under a thousand pages). There are, of course, other longer books, but not many are novels and few of those have been able to sustain a hold on the popular imagination. ”The Stand,” unabridged and 1,153 pages long, may prove the exception. – Robert Kiely, May 13, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition – Final Section 7; Page 3, Column 1; Book Review Desk

If I wasn’t paranoid enough already….being on the bus makes me nervous, someone coughing in a movie theatre makes me want to run for the door and I’m constantly checking my glands to make sure they aren’t swollen.  All in all, great book. I have only read the ‘uncut’ version – it’s hard to imagine what King had left out because every part of the book felt necessary.  Sometimes I felt physically ill while reading because King describes every little detail so vividly from dead corpses being pitch-forked into the ocean, the effects of radiation or even simply a bone breaking was made to sound ten times more revolting than normal.  I was terrified to leave my bed but so addicted that I couldn’t put the book down. Yes, it’s a fantastic book.

Now, not only am I obsessed with Russion literature, I have a new obsession for Post-apocolyptic fiction. Not that “Left Behind” shit. More like “The End of an Age”, “Deus Irae”, “Swan Song”, “The Road” etc. Just read.