Registered: Apr 2003
Location: Houston, TX
Posts: 292

I just finished reading The Talisman.



Without telling too much about the story, I can say that it's about a 12 year old boy going on an unusual fantastic journey to get to the thing that will save his mother from dying.

It was very slow during the first pages and about a third into it, but I forced myself to keep reading, and I am glad I did.

When I finally turned the last page I felt a little sad as my journey with this book was over (until the day I take it down from the shelves again).

If you get this book, please give it a chance - you won't regret it.

I'm now passing the time until Dark Tower book 6 comes out (June 8th) with Karate-Do, My way of Life by Gichin Funakoshi. He wrote this just before his death in the fifties at the age of 90.

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Registered: Jul 2000
Location: Upstate NY
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bumping up to the BOOK forum

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Registered: Apr 2003
Location: Houston, TX
Posts: 292

Sorry, didn't realize there was a book forum (plus an already started thread like this)...

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Registered: Sep 2000
Location: MadCo
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Just finished another King Book, the Dark Tower Book Five. It's back, I now love that series. I always liked it, but this one was so much better.

Melesse

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Registered: Jul 2000
Location: my mother's bloody womb
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i loved the talisman, and the sequel, "black house" is a wonderful story as well.

if you liked that story, you'd probably love king's dark tower series, as melesse already mentioned. i'm actually re-reading the series right now. halfway through "wizard and glass".

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neverwhere- neil gaiman

been meaning to read this for a while.
quite good.

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Registered: Apr 2003
Location: Houston, TX
Posts: 292

You're absolutely correct. King's OPUS (as he calls his Dark Tower series) is finally done, and the 6th book will be out on 6/8 and the 7th book will be out on 9/21. Wouldn't it be cool if Peter Jackson took on The Dark Tower and made ???-ology of movies in the same quality as Lord of the Rings?

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Registered: Jul 2000
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neverwhere is awesome. gaiman is my favorite writer. king is a very close second.

jensen- mmm...no. i just...don't want to have someone tell me what the gunslinger should look like. i have an idear in my head, and i like it that way. besides, as much as i love the LOTR movies, they're not the books. the gunslinger series, as we're finding out, is about all stories, all tales. twould cheapen them to make a movie out of them. i hope to god king never sells the rights.

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quote:

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Originally posted by morgana
i hope to god king never sells the rights.

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Registered: Jul 2000
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i was referring to the tower series. but i agree- king is a fan of cinema, but his best productions are just mediocre.

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Registered: Apr 2003
Location: Houston, TX
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You're right. There have been good King movies but there certainly have also been some bad ones. As for what they look like in your head vs the director's head is one of those side effects with all movies based on books. Personally I hated the fact that they had chosen Margot Kidder (I believe her name is) as Lois Lane in the Superman movies. She's NOT my type of beautyful woman AT ALL!!!

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BTW, one thing that I've been wondering about is how it works when two guys sits down and write a book together like King and Straub did on The Talisman and The Black House. I don't think they took turns writing because the flow seems pretty much the same, so do you think they just talked about it (maybe even over the phone) and then one guy (probably King) wrote it all?

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Registered: Jul 2000
Location: Upstate NY
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The former is how it happened, as I recall. They were on opposite coasts, banging out alternating chapters on their word processors (I think King said he used an Apple computer, not sure if it was a Mac), and sending them to each other. Saw King talk about this long ago in an interview.

Last edited by MstrG on 04-08-2004 at 09:23 PM

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Registered: May 2002
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interesting anecdote.

mogana, fuck off. you don't have to go see the movies now do you? jesus, like anyone cares about your defiled innoncence. a bad movie is still a preferable as an option to waste a day than is no movie at all. the exception, ironically enough, being neverwhere. that bbc mini cheated me out of a few precious hours. i want them back. if anyone [well, at least anyone but King himself, as paint already mentioned] were to put the series onto film, it wouldnt have to be nearly as good as the book for it to be entertaining.

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Registered: Apr 2003
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Hmm, Interesting...

The Talisman - The Movie

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Registered: Apr 2003
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You were right MstrG:

From an interview with Straub:

Did the Internet and electronic media make the collaboration of Black House easier?

Straub: Yeah, that's right. Though we had one of the first modems in the early '80s. The modems were big machines with telephones on top of them. You had to dial the number, we didn't have hard disks then. The floppys were like 78 records. This was before Windows, so you had to punch in a certain DOS code. Then you could hear your computer make these digesting sounds. Grumble, click, growl. It went on for half an hour while it sent a hundred pages.

When I got the pages from Steve [King] I could see them come onto the empty floppy. Line by line down the page of my monitor. They scrolled by past, but you could still read them.

There were all sorts of glitches in codes. He was using a Wang and I was using an IBM. They had different codes for italics, for bold, all that kind of thing. Even for paragraphing. We had to figure out little symbols to use in place of the ordinary symbols and inform the machine that those symbols were codes: italic, indent, etc.

After I wrote the whole thing, I'd then do a global search and replace for italic, quotation marks. And Steve would do a reverse global replace.

This time around, of course, it was much, much easier. It took seconds to send 100 pages through the Internet. It is vastly more convenient.

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Registered: Mar 2004
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One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest--I had to read it for an english class...

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go away.

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Registered: Jul 2000
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But I liked One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

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Registered: Mar 2002
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but do you like spinning candy?

and it just had to read that for english class.

how do you still have more points? I used all mine up on you. ass.

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I only post to garner and gift you with my little missives of Unicorn Love.

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I enjoyed it a fair bit.

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Consider The Oyster by MFK Fisher. I couldn't put it down!

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quote:

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Originally posted by Caffeine
Unbearable Lightness of Being.

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