I'm nowhere near as prolific in my reading as my sister who is also trying to read more this year, but I hope to do about 50 pages of reading per day. I begin my list with "The Gunslinger," which is book 1 of Stephen King's opus "The Dark Tower" series.

I'm a HUGE fan of Stephen King and I'm a HUGE fan of hero quests, so it may be a shock to some of you that I didn't particularly care for the book. I thought it was okay, but it didn't knock my socks off.

I've heard that that the next books in the series are better and get more into the heart of the material, but I found "The Gunslinger" to be a bit of a slog. I didn't really feel like it went anywhere.

I don't really feel like it quite established the stakes. I don't really comprehend what's at stake for him. What happens if he never finds the Dark Tower? What happens if he does find it?

I do like that the book set up the idea that the series is going to traverse space and time, but that's all I really took from the book.

I also found the prose to be a little confusing at times. I sometimes got a little confused on what was happening. That may have been more a function of taking a month and a half to read the sparsely worded 300 page book, but I do think that it was a bit inaccessible at times. It jumps back and forth from the present to the past and I felt that sometimes the past scenes halted the forward action.

Oh well. I'm in it at least through to the second book, so I'll see how it goes from there.

- Matt