I remember being 12 and looking at the "Also by Stephen King" list in the front of Tommyknockers and thinking, 'holy cow! I can never read all of those!' Then again, at 12, I never thought I would be 30, either. Yet, here I am, 18 years later not just having read most of those books, but having read most of them 3 or 4 times.

I am not a creature of habit, at least not on a frontal lobe level. I don't suppose birds fly south as a result of a logical process, either - the weather changes and they begin to move. It seems I mark the summer seasons by plucking King's books off of my shelves and working through 5 or so in the hottest months of the year. A copy of The Dark Half stashed at work, Needful Things at my bedside, Thinner on the back seat of the car . . . .

Reading all those books in a yearly rotation makes them new again. This year I am reading books I haven't read since my early 20's. Of coarse, I remember the plots (somewhat) but I forget the names and details. My father died when I was 12 and recently a friend asked how long it took to get over it. I replied that you don't 'get over it' - not if you keep growing and learning and becoming a different and new person. In such a circumstance as that your father keeps dying, over and over, as you re-understand the things you have lost and the person he was. The same sort of theory applies to books, I believe. Should you keep growing the books keep changing and different messages and details begin to stand out in bold print each time you read them. As well the years of reading compound themselves so you also begin to appreciate the craft of writing better.

All this leads me to Hearts in Atlantis. There is a passage where Ted, in effect, says there are books with great stories and there are books with great words. Every now again there is a book that has both and those are the books you treasure. To me, there is a third element - the art of storytelling. Watching some plots unfold is very much like watching a flower bloom in time lapse footage - graceful, beautiful, and natural.

Hearts in Atlantis is one of those flowers.

The mastery of the art is so complete its almost a display of raw power - if not for its most important element. You forget that these stories actually have an author. It's amazing. Sometimes you read something and you wonder if the author is a writer - or just a medium? How could one so completely remove themselves from the act of writing that they become invisable to the reader? There is nothing that can be technically noted in that transmutation - it just ****ing is. Not once in the reading of this did my brain stop and question the authors word choice, plot movement, or general believability.

When reading Cannery Row, by John Stienbeck, the final paragraph of the introduction has always stood as a benchmark for defining what it means to write. It captures, far better than I can, what Stephen King did in Hearts in Atlantis:

"When you collect marine animals there are certain flat worms so delicate that they are almost impossible to capture whole, for they break and tatter under the touch. You must let them ooze and crawl of their own will onto a knife blade and then lift them gently into your bottle of sea water. And perhaps that might be the way to write this book--to open the page and to let the stories crawl in by themselves.”

Its how all books should be written - but only the masters have the patience and talent for it.