I have a set of those BBC mini-series...

Oliver Twist, Martin Chuzzlewitt, Bleak House, Hard Times, Great Expectations, and Our Mutual Friend.

Highly recommend it to anyone who really enjoys literature on TV/film, especially if you're a Dickens fan (though be warned that the DVD series range from the 1970s onward, so a couple--Oliver Twist in particular comes to mind--look very cheesy in terms of the sets and costumes...Great Expectations fares a little better, still not great, but it has a pretty damn good cast that makes up for it...and then most the others are of good quality...I don't think any are really terribly done, they all range from average to very good in terms of performances, with a few shining stand-outs among the lot.)

I used to love Dickens, then in high school I ended up with having to do a project on Great Expectations that I was in no way prepared for...I transferred in my sophomore year to a high school that was set up so that you were intended to start a major project in 7th grade and complete it your senior year (it was a private high school). Now, clearly, you weren't intended to be writing the project straight through, but you were intended to build on the collegiate level research methods you learned in 7th grade, etc, to have everything you needed to defend it like a dissertation in 12th grade. And there was no format for going back and taking the classes you had missed due to a late transfer. So that sucked and robbed that book (and most of Dickens by transference) of my love of it. I can't even think about it without getting angry, 20+ years later.

Anyway, I read every word, and I think here's the main issue, Obi. You dismiss a lot of things that you haven't really analyzed, and it comes off kind of brusque when you're comparing how well you remember something that you're a huge fan of to something that you've admittedly sampled and tossed to the wayside. Yes, I've read all of Shakespeare's works and all of Poe's, and Doyle's Holmes stories, and I have not read all of King's, but what I have read I've felt much more favorable towards. I'd also like to toss a few things out there to the discussion.

1) You don't mention some of the most often referred to King works, such as the Dark Tower series which was popular enough that several of the ancilliary comic books were among the 50 best selling individual issues of the period 2000-2010. That list was almost exclusively big company big events beyond those issues. I disagree with you on It, I enjoyed it immensely, but personal tastes being what they may...also, The Stand is a hugely popular King work, and also one he went back and edited about later to bring it to the further discussion point you had. But then again, I'm much more of a pop culture guy than you, which is part of why I toss comic books into the discussion. I feel, and have always felt, that the dynamic forces of pop culture are far more interesting to me than stuff that's been dissected for the last 400+ years. Yes, even bad pop culture.

2) You like the Shining, especially the film version, but can't name the main character? "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" is an enduring quote from it, but I understand your confusion since "Heeeeeeeeeere's Johnny!" is also an enduring quote from it...oh wait, enduring quotes from King? The hell you say. "Your money's no good here." :)

3) Even as I am the defender of the pop culture, allow me to say that after King had a very serious accident that hospitalized him and left him on death's door for a time...well, it definitely downgraded his ability such as it was and upgraded his desire to just churn out crap. Which he was already doing before that to some degree, admittedly. I mean, try to read Dreamcatcher sometime (but honestly save yourself from the movie at all costs, I don't hate any human being enough to willingly subject them to that) and you can see that it was the psychotic dribblings of a man who had way too many painkillers and a disturbing focus on his bowels (which were in a very sorry state after that accident).

4) God, I wish I could remember what movie it was that you likened Holmes to...it wasn't Star Wars, it was something much more in the vein of Indiana Jones, but you beleaguered the director sending the hero out into the sunset (the quote I remember from you was "He literally rode off into the sunset!") only to bring him back for another story and said he could learn from the great authors of history including Doyle...and I was just like..."Seriously, dude?" I'd always heard that he caved to fan pressure and hated himself for writing new ones. Then again, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had some pretty wacky adventures in life beyond that, like his desire to be a polar explorer...man, an interesting guy he was.

Anyway, that's all the pre-coffee thoughts I have, but I'll tldr it real quick for you: I find that you tend to make snap judgements of things you don't like and compare how memorable they are to how well you personally remember the things that you more or less devote your life to memorizing. I can name more individuals who have played for the Buffalo Sabres than individuals who have played for the Montreal Canadiens because I love the Sabres and don't give a shit about the Canadiens, but ultimately it says nothing about either's worth as a franchise.

Oh, also, the number you quote for King is the number of published books he has, which includes his short story collections and non-fiction books and also a few books that are far shorter than his traditional ones (he wrote a couple of books that were intended to be like old dimestore paperbacks, for instance). So you kind of stacked the deck there. But yes, page for page, he's written more...it's also worth noting that we cannot actually know how many pages Shakespeare wrote since plays were not typically circulated at the time for fear of people stealing them. There's at least a few plays that we have historical evidence to believe existed but can't find any scripts of, and he also was very key in translating the King James Bible, a pretty big piece of work in itself.

Once more unto the breach... :)

@SD:

"1) You don't mention some of the most often referred to King works, such as the Dark Tower series which was popular enough that several of the ancilliary comic books were among the 50 best selling individual issues of the period 2000-2010."

I'll be a snob here--

I don't care about comic books, they "don't count." There. I said it. I'll be concise and not elaborate for seven pages and I'm going to to get hammered for it, likely, but I have to stand by it--comic books are their own sort of medium, they don't really "count" towards the literary canon.

"But 'Watchmen' and 'V for Vendetta'"--

Are awesome works, I don't doubt it--still a different medium. That King's works inspired comic books...frankly doesn't surprise me (that's not meant to denigrate his works, I mean that sincerely, as I said in my essay above, I think he's a lot better with mood and setting than characters, and of course in a comic book/graphic novel you can really bring out that mood and tone even more with images and color and shadows and the like) but that doesn't mean that I'd count them towards the literary canon.

"But other books have illustrations, such as Lewis Carroll's works and Roald Dahl's"--

Both "children's authors"--though I use that term extremely loosely, as especially Carroll can be taken as speaking to adults as well--and it's the words, not the images, that make their story, the images are supplement, whereas in a comic book or graphic novel...well, the images come first, you couldn't call it a comic book without the images but you could, conceivably, have a comic with all images and no words.

So again--different medium, to not place it "higher" or "lower" than anything else.

As for King's books being popular in that regard--to condense this, I'll address this with another of your points, so hold that thought.

" I feel, and have always felt, that the dynamic forces of pop culture are far more interesting to me than stuff that's been dissected for the last 400+ years. Yes, even bad pop culture."

In fairness...

Elizabethan theatre and serialized stories in magazines like Conan Doyle's stories ARE pop culture...

Or were in the equivalent of it in their own time, at least. ;)

Certainly Sherlock Holmes was pop culture in his day, and seeing an Elizabethan play was more like a cross between seeing a hyped-up movie and going to a stadium (and their actually was a bear-baiting arena across from the Globe in Shakespeare's day) than what we think of as "going to the THEE-A-TAHHHH..." :p

So I'm not knocking King for being pop culture.

"You like the Shining, especially the film version, but can't name the main character? "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" is an enduring quote from it, but I understand your confusion since "Heeeeeeeeeere's Johnny!" is also an enduring quote from it...oh wait, enduring quotes from King? The hell you say. "Your money's no good here." :)"

I "like" The Shining the way that I "like" The Big Bang Theory--

Namely, if I had to pick one from it's category (for TBBT, popular sitcoms today, for Stephen King, his novels) to praise or watch, I'd pick them...but not necessarily because I am particularly enamored with them, more so just because I have to pick one and--to paraphrase Sherlock Holmes--they're "the pick of a bad lot."

That being said, I'd probably take Carrie over The Shining.

Somehow the mania of Carrie seems full of more original energy and feeling than The Shining does, which, from the text and film, really feel like a decently executed something-I've-seen-before...and seen done better, there's a sort of novel feeling--pun intended--about Carrie and the feeling and energy of that story that isn't quite there for me with The Shining, and something I didn't mention above--Carrie was his first novel. It makes sense, and fits with what I am saying of the man--THEN, in 1974, when he was young and starting out, he had the energy and drive and imagination to come up with something that I've praised time and again here for what it is...NOW, I feel he's grown stagnant, and truth be told, he grew stagnant LONG ago.

As a coda to my Shakespeare/King analysis that I have running above, since both wrote quite a few works, Shakespeare ended--for all intents and purposes, leaving Henry VIII and The Noble Kinsman alone, as the former is generally felt to have "really" been his farewell play and the latter he just came out of retirement to touch up a bit--with The Tempest, and it's a play that's ranked, if not top-tier, still reasonably up there in terms of Shakespeare plays, most have heard of it and it has its share of memorable characters and lines--including one of Shakespeare's most famous of course, "O brave new world that has sch people in't!" which, of course, was a boon for Aldous Huxley, wasn't it?--while King...well, when was his last "big" work?

Carrie was 1974.
The Shinning was 1977.
If we take your Dark Tower example, that started in 1982, so it's not exactly a "new" invention of his.

When was it?

The last "big one," one of notoriety, I can identify myself--if only from the movie--that was an original work and not a continuation of a series was "The Green Mile," and that was 1996.

We're 15+ years hence now...which is sort of my point--

He's maxed out his ability, or his potential, or just used up all the stories and energy he had...we all only have so much, and I think he used it all up long ago, and if he'd stopped and gone out on a high note like so many great authors.

Shakespeare, as I said, went out with "The Tempest," and we can mention the last "major" works of many other great authors here too that should be recognizable, including F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Tender is the Night" (not counting "The Last Tycoon," since he died before he could finish it, so not really fair to count it), D.H. Lawrence's "Lady Chatterly's Lover" (published 1928, and he died 1930), Charles Dickens (here it's a bit trickier, "The Mystery of Edwin Drood" was also unfinished, but we can find a decent success in the last completed serial of his, "Our Mutual Friend," and a major one before that, "Great Expectations," and just to come full circle, before THAT, "A Tale of Two Cities," so with at least 2/4 of his last works being among his most influential and critically acclaimed, it's safe to say he went out on top as well) and so on.

We simply cannot say the same of King, and I blame the volume of work in part--I'm sorry, but I honestly doubt that even my hero among heroes, Shakespeare himself, if he were to write full-length novels the way King does, could have written 40+ novels in 30+ years PLUS a plethora of short story collections PLUS several non-fiction books PLUS articles and STILL have some left in the tank...and none of us would begrudge him that, I think.

Same with King--I wouldn't be so hard on him and his canon of work if he'd spaced things out a bit or stopped while he was ahead or (since asking a writer to "stop writing" is unfair, I know, if I were one I'd be unhappy if I were told to stop) at the VERY LEAST do what many long-lived authors have done, and take a break for a bit, teach or travel, write a different form of literature (ie, maybe try some poetry, or stage plays, and the like) or take up writing in a new genre (all the authors I listed above either wrote novels/plays and poetry OR wrote in different genres, ie, drama and comedy and political satire and so on and so forth) or SOMETHING to break up the monotony.

But he doesn't do that--he simply churns out book after book, and simply put...

Does anyone pick up a Stephen King novel and NOT know what to expect from it? Not even in terms of style, but just in terms of all the Stephen King tropes and regular plot points and character archetypes he uses and settings and so on?

He's grown stale, and his writing shows it--I praise Carrie and The Shining because those were written when he was young and fresh and full of ideas and energy AND IT SHOWS! :) There's something about those stories that, while I don't like them nearly as much as others, I can at least acknowledge as being good and having memorable aspects to them and, again, while this must sound very overused by this point--synonyms, what are THOSE?--they have a certain ENERGY to them that is lacking from his later works.

So again--if you can honestly give me a non-series work of his after "The Green Mile," 1996, 15+ years ago, by all means.

But I think he's grown as stale as my using the words "energy" and "stale" have become.

And I was going to say something else...ah, yes!

Memorable lines--those are a few, the ones you quote, and...well...oh, hell, I already sound like a snob, may as well dive in all the way--

Those lines are memorable because of Jack Nicholson's saying them, NOT because they're intrinsically brilliant lines...

"All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" (not even an original one of his) doesn't have the same poetic quality as "To be or not to be, that is the question," or almost any line from that soliloquy.

Or, for that matter, "And my soul from out that shadow that lies flitting on the floor shall be lifted--nevermore!"

Or, for that matter, "It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done before; it is a far, far greater rest I go to, than I have ever known."

Or, for those angered I'm using dead white guys from the Elizabethan and Victorian era:

"We've got to keep living, no matter how many skies have fallen."
"All animals are equal--but some animals are more equal than others."
"April is the cruelest month, mixing memory and desire, breeding lilacs out of the dead land..."
"I saw the greatest minds of my generation destroyed..." (and that one goes on and on, and you know what it says, so I won't give the whole, page-long quote.) ;)

And so on.

Give me a King line as rich, as poignant, as poetic, as powerful...dare I say...

As PROFOUND as any of those. (See, now the white college student aspect is really showing through, I used "profound" in a sentence, I'd be about two seconds away from saying everything is "too mainstream" if I didn't hate hipsters and want to stomp on their damned pretentious glasses...) :p

"Even as I am the defender of the pop culture, allow me to say that after King had a very serious accident that hospitalized him and left him on death's door for a time...well, it definitely downgraded his ability such as it was and upgraded his desire to just churn out crap. Which he was already doing before that to some degree, admittedly. I mean, try to read Dreamcatcher sometime (but honestly save yourself from the movie at all costs, I don't hate any human being enough to willingly subject them to that) and you can see that it was the psychotic dribblings of a man who had way too many painkillers and a disturbing focus on his bowels (which were in a very sorry state after that accident)."

OK...so...that's sort of my point (though I didn't know about the accident) so...why are we at a disagreement? LOL

"God, I wish I could remember what movie it was that you likened Holmes to...it wasn't Star Wars, it was something much more in the vein of Indiana Jones, but you beleaguered the director sending the hero out into the sunset (the quote I remember from you was "He literally rode off into the sunset!") only to bring him back for another story and said he could learn from the great authors of history including Doyle...and I was just like..."Seriously, dude?" I'd always heard that he caved to fan pressure and hated himself for writing new ones. Then again, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had some pretty wacky adventures in life beyond that, like his desire to be a polar explorer...man, an interesting guy he was."

I'm a bit confused here...?

I DID compare, in style, the Indiana Jones series to the Sherlock Holmes stories...

And I said that, yes, while it was a nice ending to a trilogy to have Indy ride off into the sunset, such is the (mostly) one-off nature of the Indy and Sherlock Holmes series that you could bring them back if you wanted, it's not as if you're disrupting some pre-conceived grand story-line you had plotted out and perfectly finished.

As for Conan Doyle--

Actually, he ranked "The Empty House" (the Holmes story that brings him back after he killed him off" as his 6th favorite in a Top 12 list of his favorite stories, so clearly he had some regard for the newer ones.

There are some Sherlock Holmes fans who think the post-ressurection (as it were) Holmes stories are inferior to the ones before it...and I don't see it myself, there are different levels of storytelling brilliance all along the timeline of his short stories and the 4 Sherlock Holmes novels he wrote...if he retread things a bit, there ARE only 56 stories and 4 novels, so it's not as if he was--to bring in something EVERYONE can agree is a cash cow and well past it's expiration date--Matt Groening making the 9 millionth episode of "The Simpsons" in which Homer and Marge break up and then make up for the 200th time.

THAT is retreading...when you have a few cases that are somewhat similar, or some cases are better than others in such a small sample...meh...there are ones I like pre-death, and ones I like post-death, so for me, I don't think there's a huge quality drop.

"Anyway, that's all the pre-coffee thoughts I have, but I'll tldr it real quick for you:"

PLEASE--if you honestly trudged your way through *MY* 33-page epic, I can and SHOULD read that comparatively-short response of yours! ;)

"I find that you tend to make snap judgements of things you don't like and compare how memorable they are to how well you personally remember the things that you more or less devote your life to memorizing. I can name more individuals who have played for the Buffalo Sabres than individuals who have played for the Montreal Canadiens because I love the Sabres and don't give a shit about the Canadiens, but ultimately it says nothing about either's worth as a franchise."

That's an interesting analogy.

It's not that I'm on "Team Shakespeare" and so because of that I'm rooting "against" "Team Stephen King," as it were...

Again, it's--well, I already said why above, so I'll leave that be.

I have favorite authors, sure, but that doesn't mean I can't acknowledge the ones I like less--

As I said, I REALLY HATE Dr. Samuel Johnson's viewpoints and literary criticism, I think he was a terrible critic with some awful ideas on why we should write and how we should evaluate writings...

Nevertheless, I DO still have to acknowledge that, for as much as I hate his Shakespearean criticism, it WAS and still IS one of the major and most lasting critiques of his work ever, and most if not all further criticism of Shakespeare from the 1800s onward can be traced back to someone, at some level, either agreeing or disagreeing with at least some elements of Johnson's critique of Shakespeare.

So, while I hate his actual Shakespearean criticism, I have to acknowledge his importance in literary criticism, and again, especially Shakespearean criticism, as a whole.

For a more vivid case...everyone here knows I detest the God of the Old Testament, right? No one just gasped or fainted at my saying that? :p

For as much as I disdain religion and for as despicable a text as I find the Bible to be (and to skirt the "You haven't read all of it, how can you say--" charge, as that will make this blow up into an even longer discussion, I'll limit myself if you object to "I find the Bible despicable" to "I find Genesis/Exodus/Leviticus" despicable, those being the books I have read/am reading through at present) even still...a great many of the works I love the most don't come about without the Bible existing for the author to either draw inspiration and imagery from or else to use as a text to rail against.

So I can respect the impact of something without calling it "good" or liking it.

Likewise, I recognize the impact King has had on literature in the last 30 or so years...I just think that, after his first few novels, it was a very BAD influence, as it, along with the rise of mass-produced, publisher-mandated-book series that are manufactured more than they are written, have both had a very poor effect on the quality of literature we see today and, indeed, what literature we DO see getting printed today.

Before King/the Rise of the Mass-Produced Book Series, there were still series, of course, but less due to mandates than to authors keeping them going as long as they had ideas they could make into stories decent enough to make some money off of...

Which ultimately produces a better product, because THEN the series only keeps going so long as the author is "good," as after all, if he becomes a joke, or his stories suffer, no one buys the book, and that's the end of the series.

This is not a publishing environment that would cater to the likes of, say, a Stephenie Meyer, who has had here books completely by just about every literary critic (INCLUDING Stephen King, and you know something's bad when KING of all people attacks you, in part, for how trite and formulaic you're being) would flourish--crushing reviews, and if she somehow survives the first onslaught, she almost certainly is stopped after the second Twilight book.

But that's not the case now--a book series is now propelled by a MARKETING machine...and marketing-driven texts and films (see: the Transformers movies) can make millions of dollars DESPITE bad reviews, because marketing tailors the product so it panders to a demographic and thus ensures some success financially...pandering to a demographic gets you killed CRITICALLY, but who cares about that so long as your niche is paying off and you're making money?

THAT is how books and films now are made, and will continue to be made for a while now--not based off of quality books/films getting quality reviews and thus encouraging people to read/see them, but a marketing machine that tailors what the product is to perfectly match a marketing message that encourage people to read/see it, and that's effective enough to override negative reviews in most cases, and it cripples artistic creativity and integrity at that (if Meyer or Michael Bay actually have any, which I seriously question.)

"Oh, damn it Obi, you're THAT naive?" everyone in unison responds, "you KNOW that good books didn't always sell and shit films and books still sold before Stephenie Meyer and Michael Bay and the Marketing Machine that's evolved in the last 20-30 years."

Yes they did.
But reviews still had more of an impact.
And the marketing machine didn't tailor--as much as now--the work, or mandate it.

"But Obi, I've heard Putin33 make the same comment over and over again about 'Richard III' itself being a mandate from Queen Elizabeth I to Shakespeare for propaganda reasons..."

Yes, but Elizabeth wasn't telling Shakespeare "put in this scene, it'll really attract the 18-25 demographic...and can we add about 30 more minutes of sex and a long, pointless fight sequence in here for trailer fodder?"

After all, Shakespeare didn't NEED prodding to put in sex and violence! ;)

But in all seriousness, she would've wanted a pro-Tudor piece, sure, but the words, the complexities, the story-line, all that, that was still Shakespeare, there wasn't an emphasis on including scenes for product placement or the reasons I gave above.

What's more, once a planned series was done, as I've said--IT WAS DONE.

There's no Henry V, Part 2, because Henry V wraps up the story.
Ditto A Tale of Two Cities.
Ditto Tess of the D'Urbervilles (originally serialized.)

We now have book series (again, look at Twilight) that continue past even the hack job author's intended end point (she intended it end it after three, so I hear, the fourth was a publishing house mandate/"request" with that "request" coming with a huge, ungodly payday.)

Or Tom Clancys, who can tell the same "America, Fuck Yeah!" military story over and over for God knows how many books and still make money off them...

Are they original?
Oh, HELL NO.
Are they formulaic to fit a very specific niche who will buy the same story over and over?
Oh, HELL YES.

And that's where Stephen King comes back in, and we come full circle, as I wrap this up--

KING is who I blame for this, at least among the authors (obviously not for the movie industry, that's something entirely different.)

King was one of the first, and by far was and remains the most successful, to churn out novel after novel of the same sort of crap over and over to fit a marketing niche more than make money WHILE having an interest in telling an actual story.

King would have been CRUSHED by critics T.S. Eliot's day, when literary criticism was arguably at its height, and reviews of books and poetry and plays really mattered...the quality really DID matter in those days; yes, poor things were published, but they didn't get nearly as much critical attention as the quality works.

Stephen King gets attention for being Stephen King.

He IS the living, breathing embodiment in the authorial world of BRAND NAME RECOGNITION.

THAT is why he still gets published despite his works being largely factory churned out crap, and THAT is what I dislike about him and why I rail against him--

He's given an bad, bad example, that such a mentality can WORK, that it will not only make you money to put quantity and brand name recognition over quality and attention to detail, but that it will garner you some critical acclaim as well.

@Draug - I read Bleak House a couple years ago, I liked it fairly well. Being a Dickens fan I haven't read anything of his that has put me off. My largest problem is that I often start meshing Great Expectations in with his other books because i've read it a couple times and like it more than anything else ive read.

+1 for liking Great Expectations best!

(Estella is such a smart, cold, strong female character...I always liked her more than Pip...she's one of those "If she were real, I'd like to get to know and talk with her" characters for me--won't say date, as I've yet to meet anyone who'd compel me to date, so this is the best I can do...and don't look at me that way, we've all surely had a fictional character or two we've wished was real to an extent, even frivolously!)

:p

King has diversified into some different things...he's had fantasy works and old school detective style works...in fact, his better recent work are the ones that he's avoided abject horror with. And there's plenty of lines from Shawshank that get quoted as well...and it would be foolish to think that Shakespeare personally coined all the phrases we find in all his work (there's even examples of some of the popular ones in other places before him) so we can't hold that against King...as for marketing machine, I've pointed this out before, but I'll point it out again.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratemeyer_Syndicate

If anything, the youth market book marketing machine has gotten nicer and given out more credit than 90 years ago, back in the days where the US Supreme Court ruled that Stratemeyer didn't have to tell the court who wrote each book and therefore he couldn't be sued for copyright related things. I'd much rather King, who is actually writing his books, or Meyer (same deal), become princes of brand recognition than false identities used by groups of people for the betterment of one individual.

Also, Watchmen is a dated piece of junk written by a madman.

Get busy livin' or get busy dyin'.

Bob Genghiskhan

@Obi - I want to meet Yoda. No, seriously. Hell, I want to sit in the presence of the Jedi Council and absorb their knowledge.

As far as Earth based characters (modern and past) well Sherlock Holmes and James Bond but more specifically Dr. Watson and Major Boothroyd (Q).

Oh, also about those two lines being memorable for Jack Nicholson's delivery...

The memorable part in the movie for "All work and no play" isn't Jack delivering it, but the wife coming across the character Jack working on his novel and picking up a page that just has that sentence written over and over again...the whole tray is full of page after page of that sentence. So it is memorable for being a written word, not for anything involving Jack Nicholson.

But don't take my word for it. Here's Jack's delivery of that line.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgMdz2fe0CY

@Draug:

???

@Santa:

And the meme begins... :p

@SD:

I'll go to bullet format here:

--Yep, that's true, what you say of Shakes' lines (and there are plenty that are misattributed to him as well) but all the same, even eliminating those, Shakespeare has so many it's not even a fair fight...which is again not even to mention the many, MAN words he invented, to talk of coining phrases, he coined words! :p

--Well, you probably know King's works better than I, so I'll take your word for it...the latest King novel that I know of is 11/22/63, which involves time travel...I think you'd have to agree most people think of King and pick up his books due to brand-name recognition and what they expect from a "Stephen King novel," as it were...which isn't always a bad thing, after all, people picked up Dickens serials--this thread has somehow taken on a strong Dickensian flavor, lol--because of his fame, but he kept changing things up and didn't go out on a stale note...I still would ask you to name a recent work (I cited "The Green Mile" as the latest one, 1996) that's really gotten some attention or been "relevant" critically...I think (thankfully) King is starting to be phased out a bit by the likes of authors like Cormac McCarthy (who I DO like, the man DOES take chances with form and style and structure and content and all that good stuff, and there's a strong Hemingway tint to the man's work...it's a bit like Hemingway's minimalism and rural settings meeting with Joyce's love of experimenting with form...and see, I'd be more forgiving of King if he even did something like THAT, but he doesn't...granted I don't like mucking about with form for the mere sake of it, there needs to be a point, but after 40+ novels, you'd think King could maybe try SOME sort of innovation to push the boundaries of either content or form and structure)

--I still say that you can hold it against King, by the way; again, I think he's good for setting moods and tones and atmospheres, but when it comes to coming up with really quotable lines or having complex characters (especially the last one) Stephen King is NOT the first name that comes to mind...he's not in the Top 30 at at that.

--To be honest, I think King's approach could better be suited--to give yet another author in this thread a chance to shine--to a long, winding, many-year epic story, where the changing face of a setting is just as big a "character" as the minute characters are, something like Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Nobel Prize-winning "One Hundred Years of Solitude." There, it doesn't matter that the characters aren't Shakespeare-deep (though a decent few still are), it's more about the change over time that occurs over the many generations to this fictionalized-Colombian-town...King's good with setting atmosphere and setting, I bet he could write a decent novel telling a story over time like that (and Marquez's story even utilizes fantastical elements, too, so he could be right at home if he wanted to the Gothic route with it.)

--As t the copyright issue...yes, that's true, but that's a completely different issue, copyright licensing vs. marketing dictating what is and isn't written, which again, has always been there, but it used to be more about what "kind" of books sold or didn't sell, now it feels like they're getting more involved with being concerned with tailoring plot points or aspects to demographics and trying to extend book series and encouraging the Stephen Kings and Tom Clancys to just type-type-type to produce something as if it were just another product and not a book...and then, something King is DEFINITELY guilty of, writing the story with the screenplay in mind (as I mentioned before, Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams wrote the screenplays for their plays as well, but didn't have movies--much less a movie series--in mind when they wrote them...and for Miller, he wrote the movie version decades after his play, they just wanted to adapt it into a movie, he was still alive, and well, who better to adapt one of the most important plays in American literary history than the man who wrote it?)

--Never read Watchmen, so can't speak for it, just know a lot of folks hail it as this great piece, and I thought I'd defend against the "comic books are literature too" point preemptively before it came up.

:)

--And I think I meant the "famous for how Nicholson said the line" for one like "Here's Johnny!" but I could be wrote, I've written so much here...lol.

"Memorable lines--those are a few, the ones you quote, and...well...oh, hell, I already sound like a snob, may as well dive in all the way--

Those lines are memorable because of Jack Nicholson's saying them, NOT because they're intrinsically brilliant lines...

"All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" (not even an original one of his) doesn't have the same poetic quality as "To be or not to be, that is the question," or almost any line from that soliloquy."

Your specific reference to Jack Nicholson delivering the "All work" line...in fact, of the three I quoted, he only delivered one.

You haven't read the piece on Stratemeyer, clearly, because Stratemeyer was the birth of the young adult fiction market and it happened in the 20's. Things are actually much cleaner on the market side of it now than they were then. You should read it. He enforced basically everything you're horrified by. Everything had to be in a series, nothing could be stand-alone. Stratemeyer was essentially the marketing guy, tossed an outline out, hired some out of work newspaperman (or woman) to write it, and then years down the line would hire someone else to change essentially everything but the title to put out a new edition of it for new markets.

And I think King only wrote about 5 or so screenplays. Yes, he did it for some of his work, but not as often as you're claiming. He's also been involved in at least two major disputes involving the screenplays of his works being nothing like the actual work (like Lawnmower Man which took the name of a King story and also stuck his name on it but had maybe two references to the story in question, his name and title were just used to sell someone else's stuff).

Hmm, well, I stand corrected on the "All work" part...

@Obi - I may have fallen for Estella the first time I read the book ;) Granted that was a decade ago, and i've moved on (maybe?). . . But G.E. is possibly my favorite book, I have this thing with music and books where I have about five books, songs, and bands that cycle through being my favorite depending on what I may be reading, or how my day is going etc

Could be an interesting forum topic - What book character would you most like to meet?
I'm not sure I could pick one, there are so many!

Harry Dresden.

Who would win in a fight between Gandalf and Dumbledore?

Harry Dresden

@Obi - You mentioned fictional characters we'd like to meet. Well, being the tech geek I am, Major Boothroyd (Q in the Bond movies, but just jead of Q branch in the novels) and Dr. Watson would be the two folks I'd love to hang out with. Bond has too dangerous a life and Holmes' drug problem would annoy me. But Q and I could chat all day about the high tech toys and Watson would be great to discuss what we overlooked but Holmes saw.