Finished up two volumes on my "in progress" list - Stephen King's Everything is Eventual and Matthew Crawford's Shop Class as Soulcraft. I borrowed the former from a friend of mine after reading King's On Writing and realizing that I'd gotten fed up with Stephen King during the height of his issues with drugs and alcohol. Somehow, this makes a certain amount of sense - Cujo was not a favorite of mine (King admits to not really remembering writing that one), but it was really the sex magic scene in It that really had me closing the book and deciding enough was enough - I'd read my fill of King for a good, long while. I'm still not going to leap right into his novels - I'll stick with the short story collections until I've really started to enjoy him again.
Everything is Eventual is a good re-introduction, though - one of the stories was initially started as an exercise to demonstrate draft vs. first editing for On Writing, and it makes a good yarn once finished and polished. When King has to keep his word count down to short story format, he's very, very good - and these stories are as good as the ones I remember from Night Shift, Different Seasons, and Skeleton Crew. The short story featuring Roland the Gunslinger may eventually get me to read the Dark Tower novels...
I bought Shop Class as Soulcraft during a trip to Washington, D.C. earlier this year, and got a few chapters in before setting it aside. It's an interesting combination of philosophical exploration and discussion of educational policy, along with a spirited defense of the validity of trade work in a largely service-based economy, but it bogged down in places. I finished partly out of sheer bloody-mindedness - his opinions on current trends in gifted education don't sound like anything I experienced back in the day, so I'm guessing things have shifted too far in the other direction since I and my little brother went through very different versions of our district's "Challenge Program" - our programs had an emphasis on math and science, as well as more 'creative' endeavors, but Crawford rails (briefly) about a sort of hand-holding and ego stroking that were (perhaps mercifully) nowhere in evidence when I was in school... He does have a number of good points about the intellectual value of work that's judged largely by whether or not it works, or whether it works well, rather than on more nebulous sorts of metrics, but it wasn't quite what I'd expected when I picked it up.
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