First Ladies, An Intimate Group Portrait of White House Wives, by Margaret Truman
Margaret Truman, daughter of Harry S. Truman and Bess Truman, was born on February 17, 1924 in Independence, Missouri and died on January 29, 2008 in Chicago.
The Presidential Daughters book, “First Ladies”, is of course opinionated and takes the view that the importance of the women themselves are secondary to the President.
Compare this impression with a quote from an article “Daughter Knows Bess that was in the Washington Post: "Mother told her secretary, 'I don't give a damn what they want to know,' and the secretary translated that to 'She hasn't made up her mind yet,' " Margaret Truman says.
For the book protecting the President is her message of importance saying. ``While I am heartily in favor of women achieving maximum opportunities and power, I doubt that the First Lady is the ideal symbolic vehicle for this ascent.''
With this yardstick it is not surprising to see Nancy Reagan presented in the book as the type of first lady that Margaret admires. The criticism that Nancy Reagan received in Ron Reagan’s first term due to her decision to replace the White House china, which had been paid for by private donations, doesn’t seem very heavy weight by today’s standards but Margaret likely would feel ok about it being bold enough.
Another First Lady that Margaret referred to as the “almost perfect First Lady” was Lady Bird Johnson. With the praise for these two First Ladies it is really no surprise to find Margaret take a shot at Jacqueline Kennedy saying she had a ``visceral repugnance for average Americans.''
Eleanor Roosevelt even though very accomplished on a personal level was judged by Margaret against what she termed as Eleanor’s ``tragic limitations'' as a wife.
What is clear from the book is that First Ladies find themselves in a job that is impossible to define, and just as difficult to perform. Margaret Truman brings her unique perspective and tries to reveal the truth behind some of the most misunderstood and forgotten First Ladies.
The Body, by Stephen King
Gordon Lachance is an adult telling this story in the first person, looking back to 1960 when he was 12 years old, living in the fictional town of Castle Rock, Maine.
A boy from a nearby town is missing and Gordie, Chris, Teddy and Vern decide that the boy has been missing so long that he must be dead, and they suspect he was hit by a train along the rail tracks between the towns. They tell their parents they are camping out and begin the quest to find the corpse.
The idea of finding a dead body excites them but they start out their trip not clearly understanding death. They each come from abusive or dysfunctional families with challenges and stories that are revealed and become clear as the trip proceeds.
When they see the boy's body the reality of death hits them and become clear. "The kid was dead. The kid wasn't sick, the kid wasn't sleeping. The kid wasn't going to get up in the morning anymore or get the runs from eating too many apples or catch poison ivy or wear out the eraser on the end of his Ticonderoga No 2 during a hard math test. The kid was dead."
Gordie's, even as a boy is a writer and storyteller, and the trip gives him time to tell some of his stories and they are written out in the book in the form that it is suggested they apparently later appeared when published in magazines. Gordie’s first person comments on writing can connect with the reader with them recalling Stephen King’s own life story which might be considered a little confusing.
In the final chapters the future fate of the coming years for the boys is discussed. This short novella was made into the movie, Stand by Me, and the book is another example of how very effective Stephen King is in taking us back to this time period
See the Literary Favorite Section for more on Stephen King
Quotes From This Book
“Speech destroys the function of love, I think-that's a hell of a thing for a writer to say, I guess, but I believe it to be true. If you speak to tell a deer you mean it no harm, it glides away with a single flip of its tail. Love has teeth; they bite; the wounds never close. No word, no combination of words can close those love bites. it's the other way around, that's the joke. If those wounds dry up, the words die with them.”
“I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, did you?”
“Gordie: Do you think I'm weird?
Chris: Definitely.
Gordie: No man, seriously. Am I weird?
Chris: Yeah, but so what? Everybody's weird”
Paris to the Moon, by Adam Gopnik
“Paris to the Moon'' was taken from essays originally written for the New Yorker by Adam Gopnik, who was assigned to live in Paris from 1995 to 2000. Gopnik begins his account telling us ''I've wanted to live in Paris since I was 8.''
Americans fascination with France, Paris in particular, goes back to Benjamin Franklin’s time and when this book was published in 2000, Gopnik pleads guilty to the same affection.
The essays make statements about the deeper subjects of literature by focusing on small day to day things. “Christmas lights, fax machines, children’s stories” all are items where Gopnik tries to finder larger truths about French and American life.
Gopnik wondered why his refrigerator in New York looked so different as the one he had in Paris and wrote: ''It is as if all American appliances dreamed of being cars while all French appliances dreamed of being telephones,'' He concluded that the French are obsessed by telephones because they love to communicate.
America’s “official culture”, of course, is compared to France’s “civilization”. (Benjamin Franklin likely said something like that) “The Rookie”, one of the most popular chapters in the book, seems to say that life in America brings with it the “gift of loneliness”. Gopnik finds a way to label the culture of both countries by telling us that he wanted to “protect his child from the weather on CNN in favor of the civilization of the carousel”
At the end of Paris to the Moon, when the family decides to return to America, Gopnik’s wife Martha says, “In Paris we have a beautiful existence but not a full life, and in New York we have a full life but an un-beautiful existence.”
Has anything changed since Benjamin Franklin went to find culture?
Quotes
We breathe in our first language, and swim in our second.”
“American long for a closed society in which everything can be bought, where laborers are either hidden away or dressed up as nonhumans, so as not to be disconcerting. This place is called Disney World”
“The loneliness of the expatriate is of an odd and complicated kind, for it is inseparable from the feeling of being free, of having escaped.”
“After all, spinning is its own reward. There wouldn't be carousels if it weren't so.” “Writers are married to their keyboards, as to their passports.”
“...you have taken part in the only really majestic choice we get to make in life, which is to continue it.”
Charles Dickens…………………“I cannot tell you what an immense impression Paris made upon me. It is the most extraordinary place in the world!”
Honoré de Balzac“Whoever does not visit Paris regularly will never really be elegant.”
The only train leaving for the moon would likely be from Paris
61 Hours Jack Reacher, by Lee Child
Jack Reacher is riding in the back of bus half full of senior citizens on a cheap winter tour going through South Dakota on their way to see Mt. Rushmore. A storm comes in, the bus slides off the road, and they find themselves in Bolton, South Dakota. Reacher helps the victims and helps the local law enforcement deal with the situation.
The police tell Reacher about their local prison, one of the largest in the US, and their obligation to always respond first when it has a need, explaining why they were delayed so long to help those on the bus.
He also learns about a band of outlaw bikers that has settled outside the town and are running a drug making operation. The local leader has been arrested and is being held waiting for trial in the prison and the police are also struggling to protect Janet Salter, a witness to the drug dealings.
Plato is an evil drug lord who lives in Mexico and is the one really in control of the Bolton area drug operation and in directing someone to kill Janet Salter. When Reacher learns of the drug lord he says: “Plato is a weird name for a Mexican, don’t you think? Sounds more like a Brazilian name to me.” When we finally meet Plato, we find out how really weird he is.
The whole story starts with what is going on in the prison telling us: “Five minutes to three in the afternoon. Exactly sixty-one hours before it happened. The lawyer drove in and parked in the empty lot. There was an inch of new snow on the ground, so he spent a minute fumbling in the foot well until his overshoes were secure. Then he got out and turned his collar up and walked to the visitor’s entrance.”
Reacher helps the police and establishes his own contact with Major Susan Turner, the current leader of Reacher's old command, the elite 110th Special Investigations Unit to try to learn the history of the drug facilities location which is in an underground location built during World War 11.
61 hours finally pass, and Reacher made the difference of course. Everything must be ok with Reacher because you find him one page after the end of this story in the “thrilling preview of Night School”. **
**See Daily Comments - of course everything is ok- this is book 14 of 28 Jack Reacher books. See some thoughts about this and other well known series books click here
Self-Reliance and other Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Self-Reliance,” is considered Emerson’s most influential and important essay. His message is that we should trust our instincts and listen to our own inner promptings. If we have truths that are influencing us, others will also have the same instincts and influences: what we say based on these inner thoughts will resonate with others.
“To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all … That is genius,” Emerson writes. “Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost.”
Avoid conformity, do your own thing, recognize and listen to your own conscience and do what you believe is right are the core messages in "Self-Reliance." The result may be that society is critical but that is not important to Emerson.
Self-reliance defines independence. Growing your own food and thinking and taking actions without the influence of others.
Ralph Waldo Emerson attended Harvard at the age of 14, where he studied to become a minister. He moved away from the ministry and became a public speaker expressing his philosophical views and gathering followers in a group called the Transcendentalist Club. This book also contains some of Emerson's other best-known essays and his address to the Harvard Divinity School.
Quotes
“Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.”
“Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.”
"I like thethe silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching.”
“Ne te quaesiveris extra." (Do not seek for things outside of yourself)”
“You will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it.”
“Do your work, and I shall know you. Do your work, and you shall reinforce yourself.”
A Trail Of Memories- The Quotations Of- Louis L'Amur, Angelique L'Amour
Angelique L'Amour has remembered her father, Louis, by organizing many of the quotes from his books into the book, A Trail of Memories: The Quotations of Louis L'Amour. The chapter titles are categories that the quotes fit into: Life, Opportunity, Hard Work, Family and Home, Women, Time, Growth and Change, Civilization, Belief and more.
The quotes are interesting to L'Amour fans and remind us of the compelling flow of his dialog. He said: "Characters have a way of taking on a life on their own, expressing themselves in the simple philosophy of their times, and expressing beliefs acquired through living, working, and being. Once characters are established, they become their own persons and the ideas of the characters are such ideas as they might have acquired in the circumstances of their daily existence."
Angelique said in book's introduction "By reading his words, each reader has met a part of my father......Each hero has a bit of Dad's experience that makes him who he is. With Lanso, it is all those boxing matches as Dad grew up. With Barnabas Sackett, it is the sailor and explorer in my father...I think that this collection of quotations from my father's books reveals much of what makes Dad who he is, for these words are the heart and soul of what he believes, and what he wants to leave behind."
Louis L'Amour would likely not want to be remembered for his quotes which is clear when he said; "I think of myself in the oral tradition-as a troubadour, a village tale-teller, the man in the shadows of the campfire. That's the way I'd like to be remembered- as a storyteller. A good storyteller."
See Literary Favorites for more on Louis L'Amour click here
Quotes
Sackett's Land (1974)
- We are all of us, it has been said, the children of immigrants and foreigners — even the American Indian, although he arrived here a little earlier.
The Quick and the Dead (1973)
- He was almighty quick at a time when a man was either quick or he was dead.
The Lonesome Gods (1983)
- Each people has its gods, or the spirits in which they believe. It may be their god is the same as ours, only clothed in different stories, different ideas, but a god can only be strong, Hannes, if he is worshiped, and the gods of those ancient people are lonesome gods now.
Reading the Classics with C.S. Lewis Edited by Thomas L. Martin
Why are the Classic's important? Why read them? Because "in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do." (C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism)
Martin said in his introduction to Reading the Classics with C.S. Lewis, "Lewis's mind was nurtured on the study of literature." Literature was so important to Lewis that he spent a great deal of time analyzing how it affected his thinking.
C.S. Lewis's breadth of impact and influence on the literature of our time is significant. His Oxford education, personal character and creativity is only a starting place.
His knowledge of important literature is deep, and his skills as a theologian, poet, fantasy and science fiction writer give him a deep well to dip into for inspiration.
His understanding of what he writes is not just other authors but from his own personal experiences. This connects him to those who also have struggled.
Quotes
“No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good.” Source: “Mere Christianity”
"I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else
"the good of literature is that we want to to be more than ourselves. We want to see with other eyes to imagine with other imagination, to feel with other hearts, as well as with our own".
The Four Loves, by C.S. Lews
The Four Loves, by C. S. Lewis is based on love as defined by affection, friendship, eros, and charity. His thoughts reflects his Christian and philosophical points of view and were taken from radio talks he gave in 1958.
Lewis says that one type of love also depends on the other types:love can be perverted when love “presumes itself to be what it is not”.
He received some criticism for his thoughts about Eros. He felt is was “being in love” or “loving” someone rather than raw sexuality. He made the distinction to clarify this to discuss the difference of “wanting a woman” compared to “wanting one particular women”.
The highest love, Agape, was felt to be the greatest of the four loves. It doesn’t change but remains constant in our lives and is given unconditionally and is what God’s love is.
The book is intended to help the reader see the difference from the different uses of the word "love" which even when this was written seemed to have become more informal. Loving our car and a movie and then loving our friends all fall short of the highest love, of course.
(Is C.S. Lewis a Literary Influence? It is easy to say "of course he is". Some suggest that his beliefs were not literary influences? His writings of fantasy were literary influences. For more on this see Literary Influences Section)
Quotes
“Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art.... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.”
“Friendship ... is born at the moment when one man says to another "What! You too? I thought that no one but myself . . .”
“You have not chosen one another, but I have chosen you for one another.”
“The mark of Friendship is not that help will be given when the pinch comes (of course it will) but that, having been given, it makes no difference at all.”
How Reading Changed My Life by Anna Quindlen
Ann Quindlen’s book, “How Reading Changed My Life” is exactly what the title suggests, and that is an accomplishment. She loves the books she writes about and you feel her sincerity, when she tells us that and how they took her to different places.
Quindlen said of her own book love: “It will make your hours pleasant to you as long as you live.” Yet of all the many things in which we recognize some universal comfort – God, sex, food, family, friends – reading seems to be the one in which the comfort is most under sung, at least publicly, although it was really all I thought of, or felt, when I was eating up book after book, running away from home while sitting in that chair, traveling around the world and yet never leaving the room. I did not read from a sense of superiority, or advancement, or even learning. I read because I loved it more than any other activity on earth.”
Her revelation in the book about a "special neighbor" serves to help us understand this book love. She said that when she was about ten years old, “Mrs LoFurno began allowing me to borrow books from her basement, books without plastic covers, without cards in brown paper pockets in the back filled with the names of all the others who had read Hans Brinker and the Silver Skates before me. Many of her books were older books, with the particularly sweet dusty smell that old books have; they had bookplates in the front………………It was both a world in which, I imagined, books would be treasured, honored, even cosseted on special shelves, and a world that had formed its imaginary self in my mind from books themselves.”
The fact that she alone determined what she thought of the books she picked and read from her neighbor’s library let her start her approach to books with a purity that comes through in this book.
Quotes
“Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.”
“In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own.”
“those of us who read because we love it more than anything, who feel about bookstores the way some people feel about jewelers.
The Crooked Staircase, A Jane Hawk Novel, by Dean Koontz
Jane Hawk- #1 most wanted fugitive and past FBI agent- is the key character that anchors Dean Koontz's series of 4 books.
The series third book,“The Crooked Staircase, if you only plan to read just this one book in the series, and even, like myself, if you have only read one other Dean Koontz book so far, then Jane Hawk will still hold your interest.
Hawk, in the prior books, was an FBI agent and now she is on a campaign against the mind-control conspiracy of a cabal of government agencies and private industry who have wrongfully indicted her for treason, espionage and murder making her the #1 most wanted person in the country.
The cabal has created nanotech implants that turn people into slaves. Booth Hendrickson, a high-ranking Justice Department official and his evil brother Simon are Hawk’s targets in this story and she holds them responsible for the death of her Marine Husband.
She evades being caught by the surveillance of cameras on nearly every corner throughout the country that the two who are tracking her can access connecting by laptop to the NSA surveillance headquarters in Utah. She finds a place with no cameras and hides her son Travis with friends.
She first finds Hendrickson’s evil half-brother using psychological torture that breaks him and helps her free the helpless women who he is controlling.
Hawk is a beautiful woman, has excellent taste in classical music, and seems to know everything about everything. Eventually she and Simon must go down “The Crooked Staircase” to find his evil mom. The trip down and her return offer scenes of torture and terror.
Near the end of the story, that really doesn’t end, Travis is hiding out with Cornell Jasperson a brilliant, highly eccentric, end of times guy, living in a well-fortified hidden bunker. We learn from a Cornell, who is spending his life in this bunker reading books, that reading action novels is just as important as reading the classics.
(see Dean Koontz compares Real Life and Fiction Essay by Brent M. Jones in Essay Section)
(See Koontz and Child daily comments on series books)
This last fact may not be relevant to the book or the review, but I thought I would stick it in just like Koontz did.
Quotes
“I think to myself, I play to myself, and nobody knows what I say to myself.”
“There’s not much news in the news anymore. The lies they tell don’t leave a lot of time for the facts about anything.”
“None of us ever has more than this moment. Tomorrow becomes today, today becomes yesterday. The best I can do for my boy is give him enough today’s that he can make a past for himself that will have had some meaning in it.”
“a touchstone by which they both could test their commitment to what was good and true in a world of darkness and lies. But a touchstone had value only if they acted with reason, from a sense of duty, rather than because sentimentality overtook them.”
“I hate the people who think we’re just part of the great unwashed”
The Raven and Other Poems by Edgar Allan Poe
“Nevermore” is the name of "The Raven" in the narrative poem by American author Edgar Allan Poe. As the poem progresses “Nevermore”, the only thing “The Raven” ever says, becomes more.
Lenore likely was Poe’s recently deceased wife Virginia, who had died of tuberculosis. They married when she was 13 and Poe’s love for Virginia was deep. She wasn’t the first love he had lost: his mother, brother, and foster mother had all died of the same disease.
The mysterious visit from a dark devil bird, “The Raven”, symbolizes the narrators never-ending sorrow and grief for the loss of Lenore as well as his slow fall into madness. He soon realizes that the raven has come and speaks to him, only because of his love for Lenore.
Now the narrator is incensed and tells the bird to leave, but the bird just replies "Nevermore”. The meaning of the word has gone from an odd name for the raven, for simple replies, to a prophetic warning that he will never again see Lenore, nor will he ever, ever get rid of the bird.
Edgar Allan Poe’s book, published in 1845, begins with the poem, "The Raven", the single most famous American poem of the nineteenth century. The book also contained the poem Annabel Lee and many of the poems Poe had written. It didn’t make him much money but it established his reputation as a poet and author.
Quotes See Opening Verses of Poem Below
“Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.”
“Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore.”
“Let my heart be still a moment and this mystery explore...”
“Leave my loneliness unbroken”
The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe see Poetry Section
“Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
Tis some visitor," I muttered, "tapping at my chamber door —
Only this, and nothing more."
See Poetry Section for full Poem............Click Here
Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything
Bill Bryson introduces his book, ‘A Short History of Nearly Everything”, saying in the introduction: “Welcome. and congratulations, I am delighted that you could make it. Getting here wasn’t easy, I know. In fact, I suspect it was a little tougher than you realize.".
“To begin with, for you to be here now trillions of drifting atoms had somehow to assemble in an intricate and intriguingly obliging manner to create you. It’s an arrangement so specialized and particular that it has never been tried before and will only exist this once.”.
Bryson continues in the book to discuss the size of the universe, the history of geology and biology and the development of man. He sought the help and advice of numerous scientists when he wrote this book. He said of what he wrote: "Just because something is important doesn't mean people will read it ... you have an obligation to entertain as well as instruct."
I did find some humor in the overview of the introduction, where it said: “The physicist Leo Szilard once announced to his friend Hans Bethe that he was thinking of keeping a diary: “I don’t intend to publish. I am merely going to record the facts for the information of God.” “Don’t you think that He knows the facts?” Bethe asked. “Yes,” said Szilard. “He knows the facts, but He does not know this version of the facts.”
The book has six sections and related chapters including: LOST IN THE COSMOS, THE SIZE OF THE EARTH, A NEW AGE DAWNS, DANGEROUS PLANET, LIFE ITESELF and THE ROAD TO US.
The last chapter of section six is titled GOOD-BYE, and appropriately ends saying: “We really are at the beginning of it all. The trick, of course, is to make sure we never find the end.”
Quotes
“When you sit in a chair, you are not actually sitting there, but levitating above it at a height of one angstrom (a hundred millionth of a centimeter), your electrons and its electrons implacably opposed to any closer intimacy.”
“Incidentally, disturbance from cosmic background radiation is something we have all experienced. Tune your television to any channel it doesn’t receive, and about 1 percent of the dancing static you see is accounted for by this ancient remnant of the Big Bang. The next time you complain that there is nothing on, remember that you can always watch the birth of the universe.”
"There are three stages in scientific discovery. First, people deny that it is true, then they deny that it is important; finally they credit the wrong person."
"Consider the Lichen. Lichens are just about the hardiest visible organisms on Earth, but the least ambitious."
"Geologists are never at a loss for paperweights."
Interesting
There is more life under the Earth than on Top of it. ...........“We now know that there are a lot of microbes living deep within the Earth… Some scientist now think that there could be as 100 trillion tons of bacteria living beneath our feet in what are known as subsurface lithoautotrophic microbial ecosystems… Thomas Gold of Cornell has estimated that if you took all the bacteria out of the Earth’s interior and dumped it on the surface, it would cover the planet to a depth of five feet. If the estimates are correct, there could be more life under the Earth than on top of it.”
Fallen Leaves: Last Words on Life, Love, War, and God by Will Durant
What should we expect from a last book from Will Durant, the author of the 11-volume Story of Civilization? He hinted at his work on the Fallen Leaves before his death, but it wasn’t found until 32 years after his death when his granddaughter by chance found the manuscript in a box when she decided to move.
“The Story of Civilization”, was a biography that considered the living conditions of everyday people. Durant said that curious readers had challenged him to speak his mind on the timeless questions of human life and fate having spent so much of his life focusing on just that.
Durant wrote the preface to Fallen Leaves when he was 95 years old and in answer to those curious readers he said: “Please do not expect any new system of philosophy, nor any world-shaking cogitations; these will be human confessions, not divine revelations; they are micro- or mini-essays whose only dignity lies in their subjects rather than in their profundity or their size.”
Even though he says that he isn’t going to bring to us deep insight and great depth of knowledge or thought, the book still leaves us waiting for it. The 22 chapters might be considered Durant’s most important work, condensing his thoughts of sixty-plus years of his work, researching the philosophes, religions, arts, sciences and civilizations of the world.
The first eight chapters are insightful when taken together and Durant's voice seems especially clear in them: Our life begins, On Youth, On Middle Age, On Old Age, On Death, Our Souls, Our Gods, and On Religion.
With all that Durant wrote in his life, about human beings and the human condition, this final book is certainly less of a definitive conclusion about life than some may expected and wanted. He said that he was fond of his own unique soul *, but he left some question as to what comes next. He expressed fond memories and gratitude for his Catholic faith.
*See "Is the Soul Eternal" in Essays
He confirmed his love of, and insight into the value of history, saying: “you are what you are because of what you have been: because of your heredity stretching back into forgotten generations: because of every element of environment that has affected you, every man or woman that you have had: all these are accumulated in your memory, your body, your character, your soul.”
In closing Durant’s said “A wise man can learn from other men’s experience; a fool cannot even learn from his own.”
Quotes
“The fear of death is strangely mingled with the longing for repose.”
"I found it impossible to continue my pretenses to orthodoxy” "
Knowledge is power but only wisdom is liberty.”
“Education is the transmission of civilization.”
“To speak ill of others is a dishonest way of praising ourselves. Nothing is often a good thing to say, and always a clever thing to say.”
“Truth will make us free.”
Lisey's Story, by Stephen King
Stephen King has often used authors as characters in his stories and that is what he did in “Lisey’s Story”. Lisey Landon is the wife of Scott Landon, an award-winning author who died two years ago.
King said he was inspired to write this book by his own thoughts of death after his accident when he was hit by a car walking on the side of the road near his home in Maine. The accident was so brutal that it almost killed him, and as you read his account of what happened it seems like a violent story from one of his novels. He said when he returned home from the hospital to find his wife had rearranged his study the thoughts for this story came to him: what becomes of his wife after he dies.
When Scott Landon dies, Lisey is pressed, even threatened, to find any unpublished manuscripts and as she searches and cleans out his writing area, she remembers much about his life that had been buried in her memory.
Scott had come from a family that had a history of mental illness and he often had to find a place where he could go to deal with his demons. He had shared this with Lisey telling her that he transported himself to another world called “Boo’ya Moon” which was a place that terrified and healed him, that it could eat him alive or give him the ideas he needed to write and live.
With these memories coming back to her, Lisey’s found her own demons to deal with when she begins to be stalked, terrorized and eventually mutilated by an insane fan of her husband.
The story brings the past and present together for both Lisey and the reader to deal with.
see section on Literary Influence of Stephen King
Quotes
“There was a lot they didn’t tell you about death, she had discovered, and one of the biggies was how long it took the ones you loved most to die in your heart.”
“She nods. You're good for the ones you love. You want to be good for the ones you love, because you know that your time with them will end up being too short, no matter how long it is.”
“Lying in the bed that had once held two, Lisey thought alone never felt more lonely than when you woke up and discovered you still had the house to yourself. That you and the mice in the walls were the only ones still breathing."
“The harder you had to work to open a package, the less you ended up caring about what was inside.”
“Time apparently did nothing but blunt grief’s sharpest edge so that it hacked rather than sliced.”
“I loved you then and I love you now and I have loved you every second in between.”
