There are other worlds than these

I finished rereading The Waste Lands yesterday.

I don't know if I can properly describe the place this book has in my life - as a reader, and as a writer. As a reader, technically speaking, it's probably the book I have reread the most.  It's a book where I think the illustrations (I have a big old color-picture copy) really add something, isntad of just being a nice bonus. I think its a story that's fed my appetite throughout my life with the travelogue story, and with mashing westerns into jsut about anything you can think of.

I KNOW it's where my tendency to read books out of order came from. This was my first ever not only Dark Tower book, but Stephen King book as well. I was a little lost a the beginning - no matter how well an author tries to present the actions of previous books, there's always a lot of detail and nuance missing that makes for confusion -  but I quickly figured out how to compartmentalize things that were too confusing and to figure the rest out enough to enable me to go forward.

This is also, as a writer, a book that I look to when I want to study characterization. I've long been a fan of how King writes people - the diversity and the way he's more than happy to paint the bad along with the good in equal measures. Mental arguments? detailed alien-world description? this is the place I go to see how it's done. :)

I keep hoping I'll find another book that moves me as much and means so much to me, but I guess it's true what they say, your first is special...