What a Pace!

So at this rate, I'll finish these 100 books some time in 2014. This is not quite the pace I was hoping for, but there have been... uh... mitigating circumstances. I finished reading this book several weeks ago, so my memory is starting to haze over some of the details, but I still got the gist of it. Anyway.

All the King's Men is a miserable book about miserable characters living out their miserable lives while attempting to make each others' lives more miserable. I loved it. Jack Burden is, in my opinion, a character with a depth you don't see very often. His motivations, his habits and history that are alluded to but never outright addressed, his thinly veiled arrogance and sharp tongue, his casual mid-conversation change in dialect from good ole southern boy to highly educated Guy You Should Take Seriously, his incredibly unlikely relationship with Willie Stark (who, with the possible exception of Tom Stark, I found to be the least interesting character in the whole story - hell, I was more interested in Sugar Boy)... All this adds to the fact that he's just a miserable, self-loathing bastard. I love books about miserable, self-loathing bastards.

I think the thing that stood out most to me about this book was the very real sense of closure I got upon finishing it. It's rare that I'll be completely happy with any endings. There's always another adventure, or some unresolved tension between characters, something that makes me think this story is not yet over. Not so with this one. The stories of these characters (for the most part) end within this book, or are at least, well, sort of directed. We may not know the specifics, but we know the strengths and weaknesses of the characters well enough to know where they're going. I was stunned with Adam Stanton. The progression of his character just floored me. If the story had focused more on him, it probably would have been easier to see what he was going to do, but the way it was presented, in the end, I was quite shocked.

The one thing that frustrated me about All the King's Men was the section in the middle where Burden is explaining the papers that he was organizing and cataloging for (iirc) his doctorate. While it was an interesting narrative in its own right, and did serve a purpose in explaining Jack's inner workings and the things he hides in, as well as the fact that you could draw parallels between the story in the papers and the story of Burden's own parents, it was very lengthy and felt too out of place in what was otherwise a very tidy and tightly put together story.

In my opinion.

Hey, it was good and I enjoyed it. :thumbsup:

I am skipping ahead to read Watchmen next because I will be seeing the movie in a few days and I'd like to read the original first so I can bitch about how bad the movie is after the fact.