Today I was at the library, and so I picked up The Dark Tower, the 7th book in Stephen King’s long-running series. A 770 page tome.

I’ve chewed up the previous books quite happily, as they’ve grown longer I’ve managed to make quick work of ’em, even. I have memories of reading this series going back many years (I could tell you when the first book came out, but I see that Amazon lists the 2003 edition so if they are going to make it tough for me – whatever – suffice to say it was probably in the 80s).

The amount of complexity and jargon jammed into the first 30 pages was overwhelming and hard to take seriously. And of course I remember very little from the last book in the series from about 2 years ago. Anyway, I see that Mr. King himself is a character in the book.

I put it down. No thanks. Not only is there an attempt to combine dozens of mythologies from previous books into this super-story, but the author himself is appearing? How daring! How circular! How post-modern! How poorly executed and frankly…annoying. And you sir are no Charlie Kaufman. Heinlein did something like this when he was well past writing anything good but was still marketable. Blecch.

It’s a drag that I won’t have the sense of completion that I imagine could come from having “read ’em all” – but I guess life’s too short to put the time into this. There’s certainly no shortage of stuff that I’m more eager to read.