It's a King thing

 I'm in a bit of a Stephen King mood lately, although to be fair I'm almost always in a bit of a Stephen King mood - you can always pick up his books and be guaranteed a really good read. I've got plenty on my bookshelves, mainly because I always like to pick one up in an airport to read on plane journeys.

Looking for something to read on the way to the MSO in London last month, I randomly pulled "Duma Key" from the bookcase, which is a silly thing to bring to a memory competition considering the central character is recovering from a traumatic head injury which left him with severe memory problems. Doesn't quite put you in the right frame of mind. And also, finishing the book on the train back to Redditch, I looked out of the window at the canal that runs alongside the railway line and saw we were passing a narrowboat with the name PERSEUS in big letters on the side. As anyone who's read the book will know, this is more than a little creepy.

Not daunted by this, I've just started re-reading "From a Buick 8", which I bought in Malaysia, back in 2003. That was a great trip, and it's a great book too, although if I'm finding excuses for not winning the world memory championship that year I might try to blame it on the minor pedantic annoyance with the book's many chronological inconsistencies. The narrative structure works very well, with present-day sequences narrated in the first person framing third-person flashbacks covering a twenty-something year history, but the dotting back and forth in time leads to some careless mistakes that a proof-reader or editor really should have picked up. Stephen King tends to thank his editors in the forewords, but it must be a very easy job - anything he writes is going to be a bestseller, so just put it into book form and job done!

That said, I've also got on my bookshelves the original six-part publication of "The Green Mile", including the wonderful moment when Percy has the tape over his mouth removed, rubs his lips (described at length by the narrator) and then is released from the straitjacket that had been confining his hands and arms. Stephen King did fix that part for the collected one-volume edition. But he left a mote in the comic-collecting reader's eye - the pornographic Popeye comic is sadly just anachronistic by a year or two. I wouldn't change that bit even if I was an editor, though...