Last night I finally (after about five months of reading) finished Stephen King's The Stand. A 1000+ page book, it wasn't the best King book I've read; that honor goes the The Dark Tower Series, especially Book 4:Wizard and Glass.
Anyway, after reading the last page of that epic, monster, brilliant novel I got the same feeling that I usually get when I finish a really good book/series. I felt a like a burden has been lifted, because when I undertake the task of reading a book/book series there's always that point when I have to make the decision to either stop reading now or continue on even if the story becomes pure shit and I become dissatisfied with the ending. That point of no return can come within the first chapter or up until the second to last book in a series.
This rule that I give myself when reading can sometimes bite me in the ass, really hard. For example, I read Twilight about four years ago, way before the desperate virgin fangbangers gobbled it up. After reading the first book, I'm not gonna lie I liked it, I was eager to read New Moon and there was a point in New Moon where I realized that I had to finish this incredibly cheesy story. It was when Edward breaks up with Bella and is basically gone for over half the novel. I thought Stephenie Mormanface Meyer was being bold by removing Bella's pretty boyfriend from the narrative for so long. That was my point of no return for that series. Then Breaking Dawn came around and I completely regretted ever going through with that series. Breaking Dawn is pure idiot writing. I don't want to talk about it. It was just terrible. But I accepted the ending and decided that that book had just ruined the entire series. Way to go Mormanface.
The point I'm trying to make with my point of no return is that if you are going to start a book/book series you need to decided at some point to either finish it or not. If you decide the story isn't for you and you stop reading, that's fine. BUT (and this is one of my commandments in life) if you decide to finish you must accept that the ending that was written is the only ending for that story. I HATE when people finish a book and say "I hated the ending, that's not how it should've ended. So-and-so shouldn't have died." The books is that the story and characters are copyrighted for a reason. Because they are the author's stories and characters, and ONLY the author, the original author, has the ultimate say in how a story is supposed to end. Because they created it, they see the story in their minds before they even write it. IT'S THEIR STORY, THEIR ENDING, THE ENDING CAN'T BE WRONG BECAUSE IT'S THEIR STORY.
It's hard to remind myself of this fact of life after reading shit like Breaking Dawn. I just have to let the ending rest in my mind and thoughts for a day or two and finally accept that that's the ending to the story and those characters and nothing else could've happened. The End. For example, the ending to the Dark Tower series is completely controversial. It has split fans down the middle and more people probably hate it than like it. When I first read it, I felt completely cheated. I didn't know what to do. I closed the book and sat there for at least fifteen minutes contemplating what had just happened. However, the next day I re-read the last couple of pages and it the ending made sense to me and even though I still wished it had ended differently I accepted it.
I just decided that this post is going to be a two-parter. Part Two will be posted sometime tomorrow.
Kay-bye.
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