Books you wasted money on

At least 3 times I've unintentionally bought a copy of a book I already had. Just this week I went to the used bookstore and bought a bunch of books. When I got home I found a book I don't remember picking up, much less putting it in my basket. It'll be going back.

sTORItelling.


god, who should be shot: tori, her mother, the editor [if there was one] or the publisher....

Atlas Shrugged

I just never got into A Confederacy of Dunces. I donated it to a library.

that sequel to THE SHINING. DR SLEEP or whatever. god painful.

So 'fess up. Did you?

sure. you know what continuation book is REALLY GOOD? VC ANDREWS [not her since she's dead but they have people writing in her style under her name] SECRET BROTHER...

He's admitted in past interviews that he's recycled scenes from other works in books of his own, though he's usually played this off as 'subconscious plagiarism'; i.e., he'd read something years back, it lodged in his memory, and he later fed it back into a work without really recollecting having encountered the material previously. Could be true, but I'm leery of that explanation. One example that really stands out for me is a scene in Pet Sematary that's way too close in detail and description from a scene in Leonid Andreyev's existentialist short story 'Lazarus' for it to be a coincidence, and seems to be too close in resemblance for it to be simply something that was read ages ago and then regurgitated into King's own work.

That won't satisfy you as an example, in all likelihood;I can only say that, as a pretty well-read person, I've encountered enough incidents of the 'Lazarus' sort in King's work to really believe he doesn't sometimes knowingly lift from elsewhere to adapt to his own use. I enjoy much of his earlier writing, but my own feeling his that at least some of his plagiarisms are not nearly so subconscious as he'd have the reader believe.