Carrie by Stephen King

American Literature 7 Comments

Synopsis:
An outcast girl with telekinesis wreaks havoc at her prom.

Review:
I’m ending the year by clearing some easy reads off my nightstand, and gearing up for some big reads in the first part of 2007: Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone, Fyodr Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, and Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities. I’m not sure if I’ve got the best translations of the Tolstoy & Dostoyevsky–any advice?

I’ve read Carrie a zillion times and it never ceases to thrill me. I was fortunate enough to read it before I saw the movie (a favorite of mine), but now the two intermingle in my mind to form one seamless text.

7 thoughts on “Carrie by Stephen King”

  1. I always try to promise myself that I will re-read all of Stephen King’s work one of these days, and usually just end up re-reading “Carrie”. It’s a spledid book and better by far, I think, than the movie. Happy New Year.

  2. Some are worth rereading; others, not so much. I tend to enjoy re-reading his early works and his Castle Rock books. Sometimes I’ve found the re-reads to be enjoyable, but I’m just as likely to notice all the flaws. The Dark Tower series is a horse of a different color, of course.

  3. Carrie’s great, one of the ones that seems to stand the test of time. I admire anyone who can read those Russian books in any translation. Same goes for Wilkie Collins, I guess. Victorian stuff is just too difficult (unless it’s really creepy Victorian stuff like Poe and Hawthorne and some of Melville–that stuff seems worth it somehow.) I need somebody to translate that stuff for me, render it in contemporary sentence structure.

  4. We’ll see if I make it. I have been thwarted by both Anna Karenina and another Dostoyevsky (Crime and Punishment) in the past, but I’m going to go for it.

    I find Dickens and Wilkie Collins to be eminently readable (much more so than Poe) because they’re both so, so funny in their characterizations. They tweak the idiosyncrasies of human nature in a very accessible way. I really love 18th Century British literature, it turns out–I used to think I hated it until I found out how marvelous Jane Austen and company really were.

    I have not been able to get into Hawthorne at all.

  5. Pingback: reading is my superpower » Judgement in Stone by Ruth Rendell

  6. I enjoyed Carrie as a paranormal-type fantasy story. Firestarter was similar, maybe a bit more enjoyable to read.

    Then I saw the movie Carrie. If that was what the book was supposed to be portraying .. That was the last Stephen King I read. Although Firestarted came off a lot better, for me, as a movie than Carrie did.

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