End of Watch by Stephen King
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

End of Watch is the final in the Bill Hodges trilogy by Stephen King and King finally lets us have the weirdness we've been waiting.

Brady Hartsfield has been physically depleted since his attempt to set off a bomb at a concert full of young girls. He's been stuck in his useless body for years since and while his brain function improves so does his ability to manipulate. Obsessed with revenge and suicide, Brady finds out that he has new powers of persuasion through telepathy and telekinesis. He finds a way to not only hypnotize others, but use their bodies in order to set a larger scale murder into motion.

Hodges and Holly are called in to assist on a murder-suicide where everything is not as it seems. From here, the cat and mouse game between Hodges and Brady is amplified until the climatic conclusion.

Unfortunately this book is the last in the series. It's done so with definite finality. This is a shame, because I could read the adventures of Hodges, Holly, and Jerome for a lot longer.

I thought I had the ending figured out. I didn't. I was moderately disappointed in the way that it ended, I felt it would have been more dynamic to have Brady "die" by having to inhabit Hodges and there being an internal struggle. Instead, King goes for the no guts, no glory approach.


As a whole trilogy I found the series to have been wonderful. From start to finish I was entrenched in this world with Hodges, Holly, and Jerome. I'm glad I've gone back to King after all these years away. I'm looking forward to whatever comes next.

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Pawnee: The Greatest Town in America by Leslie Knope
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I consider myself to be a Parks and Recreation super fan. I've watched the series from start to finish an embarrassing number of times. I know more trivia about it than anyone should. I'm an avid meme collector and I participate in numerous Facebook groups so that I can discuss my love of the show. How it took me until now to read the book about Pawnee as a show tie-in, I do not know.

I finally picked up the book this year from Amazon from a birthday gift card. I have to say that I was both over and underwhelmed. The book is definitely a history of Pawnee as written through the voices of the stars of the show. Unfortunately, a lot of the charm is lost in the over-explanation of things and countless anecdotal footnotes. I was also a little disappointed to find that there wasn't a list of the names of the parks in Pawnee. Unless there was…and I missed it.

I don't know what I expected of this book. I anticipated laughing out loud at the silliness of Leslie and her friends I guess. One incredibly creative thing were the ads at the end of the book. "Real" ads for Pawnee businesses take up the last twenty to thirty pages of the book and showcase the talent of the writing team.

While I didn't enjoy the book as much as I wanted to, it did make me miss Pawnee and the Parks and Rec gang. I think it might be time from another re-watch.


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Finders Keepers by Stephen King
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

If you ever want to guarantee that I will read a book, put another book on the cover. Write about an author or a love of books. Now, I was already going to read this book because it's part of the Bill Hodges Trilogy. Honestly, I picked this one up before Mr. Mercedes and didn't realize it was part of a series. I had to set it aside and come back to it. I'm glad that I did.

This book follows the theft of a famous writer's notebooks obtained during a burglary gone bad. The notebooks contain the unpublished sequels to his novels. The thief buries the loot and then promptly goes to jail for something completely unrelated. Years later, a young boy whose family is down on their luck due to his father being injured by Mr. Mercedes, finds the notebooks and a stash of cash. All hell breaks loose once the thief is finally released from prison and goes in search of what he buried all those years later.

Hodges and his team don't show up until much later in the book but Holly and Jerome are back in action with him, trying to track down the bad guy before he can do worse.

As always, King weaves an intricate web of cause and effect. He connects his characters in a way that makes sense and never feels forced. Again, if you didn't pick this one up because it wasn't "weird" enough, I highly recommend it anyway. The payoff comes in the next book and this one is just more world building.


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A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

If you've followed me for any amount of time, at this point you know that whenever I can, I try and read a book prior to the movie's release. This book is a classic for kids all over the world. It's won multiple awards and seems to be something everyone has read. Except, somehow, me. Maybe I was too deep into my Babysitter's Club and Nancy drew to ever have picked this one up. Or maybe it was read to me as a small child. I honestly don't know. When I heard they were making a movie (again) I figured I had to pick up the book and get into it.

Meg Murry is struggling in life. Her father has gone missing and her mother continues to try and locate him, but the worst is feared. Meg and her brother and the neighbor Calvin together with Mrs. Who, Mrs. Which, and Mrs. Whatsit, journey to the nether regions of space in order to find Mr. Murry. There are some relatively high concepts at play in this children's book.

I anticipated this being a fantasy movie, full of magic and weird creatures. What I got was a book about the love of family and wormholes and space. There's also body snatching involved.

Since this was geared towards children, the plot and the setting were kept as simple as possible to accommodate. While I enjoyed it, my adult brain kept wanting all the blanks to be filled in. While the world was described in detail, I felt like I wanted more. After watching the trailer for the movie, I'm sure I'll get what I need there. I enjoyed the book overall. I've got the entire set so I am looking forward to reading the others.


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Mr. Mercedes by Stephen King
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Mr. Mercedes is Stephen King's first main forray into the world of a standard detective novel. As a master storyteller, King is more than capable of diving into this genre head first. Where he differs from many is in his inclusion of the killer's thoughts and feelings. Most murder mystery novels tend to focus solely on the perspective of the people attempting to solve the crime. King ensures that we understand the motivations of the killer from the onset.

The plot starts with the murders that Mr. Mercedes commits. It then jumps to the life of the retired detective Bill Hodges who is leading a newly mundane life. He has found a life of frozen dinners and daytime TV. The Mercedes murders are one of the few unsolved cases from his tenure as a detective. One day, the killer reached out to Hodges in an attempt to manipulate him into killing himself. The taunting has the opposite effect and it spurs Hodges into motion.

I was not surprised at how much I enjoyed King's foray into the world of the standard murder mystery genre. It's Stephen King. He's good at what he does, whatever it is. My only real complaint is so completely minor that it's not even a thing. Hodges repeatedly talks about when he was "on the cops". Unless that's a specific colloquialism to New England, I kept correcting it to "on the force" in my head. Who says "when I was on the cops"?

This was a classic cat and mouse novel with an excellent ending. Because it's King, I was left unsure of the final outcome until the very end, which I greatly enjoy. If you decided not to read this one because it didn't contain typical King weirdness, I would encourage you to do so anyway. It pays off when you get to book three in the Hodges trilogy.


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Along the Way: The Journey of a Father and Son by Martin Sheen
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I bought this audiobook forever ago. Seriously, it's been sitting in the queue for at least a year now. It was in the wish list probably about a year before that. I'm not sure what took me so long to get through it. Even once I started, it took nearly a month and a half to get through it. Again, I couldn't tell you why. It's completely engaging and earnest and should have captured my attention.

Along the Way is a story told in two parts. Written by the father/son team of Martin Sheen and Emilio Estevez it chronicles not only their time together making the movie the Way, but also stories of their lives growing up.
 
The memoir starts out discussing the movie that they made in Spain together but quickly morphs into Sheen telling you about his life growing up and the start of his career. They then start to intertwine their stories as one can only do when discussing lives that overlap like this. Their dueling perspectives become readily apparent when they start to discuss Apocalypse Now and the drama that surrounded that production. Sheen tells you his version and Estevez feeds off that and provides you with his interpretation of events.
 
The memoir moves along mostly chronologically, with the exception of the chapters about the filming of the movie the Way. These pieces are distributed throughout the memoir at times when the stories they’ve told you about their lives relate to the struggles they were going through during the filming. They discuss the parallels that their life paths took as well as insights into trying to make ends meet. Sheen himself offers the major of the wisdom given in this book, however, it’s clear that Estevez was never a “normal kid” and could very well be considered an “old soul”.
 
Going through this one as an audiobook once again proved to be the best way to get through an autobiographical memoir. The alternating voices of Sheen and Estevez provide you with an odd sensation of listening as though you’re sitting on the porch with them, silently listening to their stories as they recall turning points in their lives. It is clear that the two have a special relationship and bond. The only other duel memoir I've ever listened to was the Rainbow Comes and Goes by Anderson Cooper and his mother. This was not like that one, which was a conversation between the two. This one was simply the memoirs of two men whose lives are intertwined.


I definitely recommend this book for fellow memoir lovers.

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