Even before Facebook and social media made political discussions a rage filled collision of unresearched but volatile memes, I've hated them.

I've occasionally convinced someone to back down from a particularly tactless method of conversation, or had them admit that their sources were unreliable,and I've even had people fray at my own methodology and language, and question my own sources, but I don't believe I've ever truly changed anyone's worldview, and I don't believe anyone has fully altered mine. So why bother.

After the contentious election of 2000, I was living in Burlington, Vermont, a very left-wing, very political city. I agreed with the politics but didn't have the passion to do more than shake my head at the television.

In the summer of 2001, I moved back to Boston, and back in with a family that included someone who was heavily invested in protesting. I started making signs, driving people to protests and hoping I had enough money on me to post bail if it came to that, and writing really terrible politically based poetry that was entirely too clever (by which I mean it imagined itself clever...it wasn't) to be taken seriously.

Dark days. Ah, Discordia.

My proximity to protesting didn't last long, though. I couldn't handle the vitriol, even regarding issues I agreed with. My close friend who protested, while definitely in agreement with her fellow protesters, seemed to be more attracted to the theatre of protests rather than their ability to change anything. In that way, at least, they weren't delusional.

The human antagonists in Insomnia are right wing protesters. And they believe in the theater of violence. It is disconcerting to read how far these fictional characters are willing to go, and to realize how similar they are to people I encountered at protests.

At my worst, I have my own violent thoughts about people I find morally reprehensible, but the imagined violence is always preceded by an imagined trial where they are found guilty of a crime worthy of their punishment. I am never the imaginary judge at this imaginary trial. I am never on the imaginary jury. I am neither an imaginary lawyer or witness. I imagine the machines of this imagined justice will do its work without me, and I'll just get imagined satisfaction seeing the imagined outcome of the imagined scenario. My imaginary hands are free of the imaginary blood.

It is when people believe they must make their imagined scenarios happen in reality that things go horribly awry. Hands of God, Director of Fate, Justice's Bullet. These are dangerous titles to imagine for yourself or a colleague or enemy.

Much of Insomnia hovers around abortion rights. And how willing a particular fictional faction of pro-lifers are to murder adults and children to protect the idea of unborn fetuses. 

It's a tough subject. One I didn't imagine King would handle well. He's not known for subtlety. And while he's not subtle here, I think he's more realist than in any other book I've read so far.

The connection to The Dark Tower is that the human antagonist doesn't see himself as a servant of God, but as a servant of The Crimson King who might be Randall Flagg or Walter or someone higher up the chain, we're not really sure at this point. We also learn about the bags that surround people and work as a sort of Video Game Health Meter. We'll be seeing these alluded to later on. 

Stray Observations:

--I read this several months before making this post (I've post-dated it) and have forgotten what I intended for this Stray Observations section

--Presumably, a character or two from this book will show up later on in the chronology, but I have just a few hundred more pages to go, and have seen no mention of any of them

--given the roles vampires play in The Dark Tower (not Dracula vampires, but vampiric creatures), it's interesting to see the protagonists portrayed as also being a  type of vampire

--you can tell this book was written by someone who has experienced long bouts of insomnia themself

--we are 6,549 pages closer to the crumbing Dark Tower, O Discordia

​1.​ The Case Of Velvet Claws. Hearts In Atlantis is chock full of book references, as the main character has his coming of age moments via literature recommendations from an old man who moves in upstairs. This is the Perry Mason book that Bobby Garfield is reading at the beginning of the book before he meets Ted Brautigan. 

​2. Ring Around The Sun is the book in Bobby's hands when he first meets Brautigan, who informs him that it's a great book, before offering him a job to read the newspaper to him on a daily basis. I haven't read any Simak, but this will be the first one I do once I"m done with my own Dark Tower chronology read through.

​3. Lord Of The Flies is the classic book that Brautigan recommends and that Bobby falls in love with. The moral play of the kids on the island factors into many of his decisions as the story progresses, and even other characters later in the book are noted to have read or be reading it.

​4. The Midwich Cukoos is the basis for the classic movie The Village Of The Damned, which Bobby and Brautigan go to see together in theaters. 

​5. But Brautigan claims that Wyndham's best book is The Kraken Wakes. I don't intend on  repeating many authors, or having too many books in the same genre back-to-back, but since both of these are mentioned, I thought I'd include them He also mentions that Day Of The Triffids is very good but that this book is better.

​6. Cosmic Engineers marks three sci-fi books in a row from the recommendation of a fictional Breaker from The Dark Tower series. King, himself, also recommends this book in On Writing.

​7. Roman Hat Mystery is a closed-room mystery,and the first of the Ellery Queen books. Bobby Garfield sees it on a library cart, and debates picking it up and reading it. The period mystery is a nice break from the sci-fi books, I hope.

​8. The Inheritors is another novel by The Lord Of The Flies author, this one about prehistoric man, and the extinction of the Neanderthals. This is the book that Bobby Garfield picks up in place of The Roman Hat Mystery.

​9. The Complete Stories Of Flannery O'Connor is the first book mentioned by Carol Gerber, Bobby's young love interest. She mentions that she should be in her dorm reading one of these stories instead of going to see a movie with another student.

​10. I debated putting The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien on this list, as it's one of my all-time favorite books. But If I Die In A Combat Zone is one of the many phrases that shows up in the second section, so I thought this book might be a slightly better fit.

​11. As has become evident, much of the latter portion of Hearts In Atlantis is about the Vietnam War. This was the first twentieth century war that Americans were willing to admit being ambivalent about. (We way over-romanticize our involvement in World War II considering how long we waited to get involved.) Jerry Lembke is a Vietnam vet and a sociologist who attempts to dis-spell some of the false narratives that have sprung up about the Vietnam era in the past forty years. I thought a non-fiction book might be a nice change of pace here.

​12. I'm not a big Hemingway fan, but The Sun Also Rises gets name checked as one of the books recommended to one of the characters.

​13. Finally moving into The Wind Through The Keyhole, here's the story of a changeling, which is awfully similar to The Skin Man that Roland is sent after in the story-within-a story, and which Tim Ross is afraid of encountering in the story-within-a-story-within-a-story.

​14. Wild Seed is another book that deals with the changeling trope. I'm always looking for an excuse to put Octavia Butler on a reading list, and this fits real nicely here.

​15. Our story-within-a-story-within-a-story features a young boy whose father dies, and he and his mother are thrust into an adventure when she remarries. Queen Sugar is about a mother and daughter in a similar situation.

​16. Tim from our s-w-a-s-w-a-s is on a quest that blurs the lines of fantasy and reality, and takes him along various literature references along the way. Grant Morrison and Sean Murphy's Joe The Barbarian is a more modern take on that trope, in graphic novel form. The story is great, and the art is lovely.

​17. During his journey, Tim encounters creatures that I visualized as very similar to Swamp Thing. Alan Moore has the most famous run on the series, but in 2012 Scott Snyder began his run, which isn't better than Moore's from a storytelling perspective but Yanick Pacquette's art is mesmerisingly good, so I recommend checking that out instead.

​18. Has it been mentioned at all that Roland is supposedly descended fromhis world's version of King Arthur And His Knights Of The Round Table? That seems important. And Maerlyn keeps getting name-dropped over the course of the series, but this is the first time we meet Maerlyn by his name, so nows as good a time as any to brush up on Arthurian legends.

​19. The ka-tet's journey to the tower is along the Bear-Turtle Beam, which gets referenced with some frequency both in the main series, and in It. Mainly, it's the turtle who gets the headlines, but they do have to defeat Shardik The Bear in The Waste Lands. But in the s-w-a-s-w-a-s, Tim is journeying along the Eagle-Lion Beam. He meets Maerlyn in the form of a tyger, and believes him to be one of The Beam's guardians, but Maerlyn points out that the guardian of this beam is Aslan, sooo...Narnia is a part of The Dark Tower, too.

​20. When one of the characters in Insomnia starts to lose his shit, he starts quoting a bunch of Bible verses. We don't have time to read The Bible for this chronology but Mark Russell and Shannon Wheeler's God Is Disappointed In You is a great modern, illustrated cliff-note version. Well worth your time.

​21. The aforementioned Bible quoter is fixated on a powerful female historian named Susan Day, who is fictional. I think Hannah Arendt is one of her real world contemporaries, as this book would definitely piss off Ed Deepnau. And, really, in this horrible time in American history, it never hurts to read up on how The Origins Of Totalitarianism threatens.

​22. Closing off this list, although I'm only 100 pages into Insomnia right now, is Even Cowgirls Get The Blues, which is the book Deepnau is reading when Ralph approaches him after a significant event in the book. Tom Robbins is one of my favorite writers from when I was in high school.

​1. The Story

The set piece. The familiar. A missing part of a journey (if you were reading this when it came out.) Inconsequential? Sequential? 

It's great seeing the five main characters of the quest: Roland, Jake, Eddie, Susanna, and Oy. They only have one adventure in this book, and it's just a vehicle for King to tell his two other stories, but it feels like part of the main series. And given how much I enjoyed the flashback portions of The Gunslinger, and of Wizard & Glass, I had high hopes for the stories this would envelop.

Four out of five burritos.

****

2. The Story Within A Story

I couldn't focus on this at all. Roland as a narrator is excruciating. First person fiction is Stephen King's kryptonite.  I couldn't even give you a synopsis of this story, as I kept skimming ahead, hoping it would get better, but it never did. It seems more like Dark Tower fanfic than an actual part of the series.

One out of five burritos.

*

3. The Story Within A Story Within A Story

The heart of the book. The fairy tale. The focus. The beam. A different beam. Seriously, this story takes place on a different beam from all the other books. 

I did really enjoy this story, though, even if it doesn't really affect the main quest of the book.

Four out of five burritos

****

Mathematically ,that makes this collection three out of five burritos.

***

Stray observations:

--Apparently, moving from beam to beam allows King to move from The Wizard Of Oz references to The Chronicles Of Narnia.

--This beam does also have the Arthurian motif, though.

--I've never hated a piece of Stephen King's writing as much as I hated the story-within-a-story in this book. Congrats to The Eyes Of the Dragon for no longer being my least favorite piece of King's mythology.

--I always thought a starkblast was something that happened after Iron Man had too much shwarma