mostly harmless books

I’m skipping over the many books I want to write about because I have a good reason to write about an older one. Nemira, one of the biggest publishing houses in Romania and the people who fed my teenage love of SF&F (black is still the color I associate with spec fic because of their SF collection) is having a contest. Write a review of one of their books and win another book. Free books!

I was thinking of reading a new book but the only available ones were too big. I have Lisey’s Story but I already read it and I’m not so eager to re-read just now, and I could borrow one of the Dozois anthologies from my boyfriend but damn, it’s big! So I’ll resort to talking about a favorite of mine: Stephen King’s The Stand.

Let’s start with the bad. The translated title is Apocalipsa (obviously, The Apocalypse), which sounds worse than the original. However, I see the point: there’s no direct equivalent of “making a stand” in Romanian. Then: hooow did you manage to make a normal(ish) sized book into two volumes of large paperback?! My English version was a normal paperback, just thicker…

But if you ignore that… oh boy. This must be one of the first post-apocalyptic books I read, so one of the books that made me love the genre. Back then I was trying to read all the books connected to The Dark Tower prior to reading the series, and my friend/Stephen King advisor had told me that: a) the book rocks; b) the characters in Dark Tower pass through the world. What I wasn’t expecting was to be hooked so fast.
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What do you do if you have to spend 27 hours on a train. Stare out the window; talk to people; read; listen to music. Staring gets boring after a while, I liked the sound of the train better than any music, and the woman in my compartment was nice, but only knew Russian and a couple of words in Romanian and English. So I read.

I had been looking forward to Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse for about a year, so I had really high hopes. Too high, apparently. No, it’s not a bad anthology by all means, but it didn’t blow me away either.
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