My blossoming love affair with Stephen King continues, with yet another behemoth of awesomeness: The Stand. This particular edition was released in 1990, twelve years after the first release. It was updated and expanded, and I have no reference to the first edition but, according to “Publisher’s Weekly,” at least as quoted on amazon.com, “The same excellent tale of the walking dude, the chemical warfare weapon called superflu and the confrontation between its survivors has been updated to 1990, so references to Teenage Mutant Ninja […]
Portrait of an Ordinary Woman
Olive Kitteridge is a book about folks in Crosby, Maine, basically a collection of short stories that amount to a (light) novel. Each story is about someone in Crosby, Maine–sometimes Olive is the main character, and sometimes she makes an appearance as a supporting character or even in someone’s memory. Olive is a sourpuss middle-aged lady, big-boned and no-nonsense. She’s described by different characters as scary, large, imposing, and she knows these things about herself with a kind of partial self-awareness that felt extremely familiar. […]

