Needful Things - Stephen King (1991)
I'm not sure why I ended up reading Stephen King's Needful Things, as I expected it to be terrible. Turns out I didn't hate it, and even enjoyed it! Focusing on the human instincts of greed and jealousy, Needful Things actually is a clever and unique horror story that I was pleasantly surprised by. It has plenty of blatant Stephen King-isms, love 'em or hate 'em, and the obvious characters you're supposed to be rooting for (which I find annoying here), but the plot's complexities and originality of the story made for a fresh read. Additionally, the intense violence and gore helped. While I strongly prefer The Shining and It, one can add Needful Things, believe it or not, to the list of King novels worth reading, even if its ending is one of the most ridiculous I've ever read.
The Pale King - David Foster Wallace (2011)
I was sooooooooo looking forward to David Foster Wallace's posthumous novel, The Pale King. Now, after finally getting through it, I'll be straight up: it was disappointing. Severely. His first two novels, The Broom of the System (1987) and Infinite Jest (1996), were lights out. It is unfair how much better of a writer Wallace was than pretty much everyone else in his brand of art/school of thought and beyond. His amazing prose is definitely present throughout The Pale King, but, while I know that the novel is technically unfinished, there was little else that I found appealing here. I will say that one of the most frustrating things about the book also was one of the coolest: one of the prime themes is boredom and dealing with it, and how else would DFW go about this than to make the chapters within so incredibly boring and tedious. I feel like I've been Punk'd, and for some reason I'm into that. Like I said, Wallace's masterful language is there in spades, it's just that the details are so complex yet mundane (the characters work for the IRS, so in ways, especially those of DFW, this is fitting). Sure, some of these characters are completely fascinating, and tidbits of this fractured plot (it feels more like a collection of short stories and essays than a novel) were really fun in Wallace's darkly clever way. It's all just much too much. Most people I talk literature with I have recommended David Foster Wallace to, and I will continue to do so, but certainly The Pale King is not the place to start.
The Book Thief - Markus Zusak (2006)
The Book Thief, the popular, critically acclaimed young adult novel, was touching and featured wonderfully rich characters, and also was sad and dark in all the right ways. However, in spite of its subject matter (coming of age in Nazi Germany in the late 1930s/early 1940s, helping a Jew in said Germany during the early stages of World War II), it didn't carry as much weight as perhaps it should have. Granted, it probably would have been very effective had I read it in early high school or something like that. Additionally, Markus Zusak's decision to narrate the story under the flowery and poetic guise of Death, while unique and clever, ruined any chance of me taking this story as serious as I'm sure he would hope.
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