I should start by saying I hated The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Read it on a long plane trip, and the only reason I read The Girl Who Played with Fire was because I’d already bought it for the trip home. But, being the incredibly positive guy that I am, I am posting this review under the more positive headline.
I liked the second book for two reasons. One, it was much better plotted (the first book reaches it’s climax with about 150 pages to go). And two, there was a lot more of the girl, who really was the only interesting character in the book. The character has been done in genre millions of times (though I can’t think of any specific examples right now), so it was good to see her show up in mainstream.
The prose for both books was rough as cobblestones under a bicycle tire, but I don’t know whether that’s the fault of the author or the translator. And all the villains sounded exactly the same. Worst of all, the man who is actually the main protagonist is a Gary Sue if there ever was one (a journalist like the author who gets to sleep with every pretty woman in the book - hello, Ian Fleming).
But I did like the second one. A fast, simple airplane read with a couple of nice surprises. Plus Larsson writes much better fight scenes than Iain M. Banks.
I will not, however, be reading the third one. The sample chapter at the end of the second book resets that book’s victory, with villains escaping for the flimsiest of reasons. Plus I have no more long oplane rides in the near future. Pass.
Blood River is a book that describes the author’s 2004 descent of the Congo River from Lake Tangaynika to Boma following the path Stanley took 117 years before. It’s not a particularly good book (I dislike the modern journalistic technique of reporters injecting themselves into the story), but its theme is extremely interesting. Basically the author posits that the Congo is one of the few places on the planet where civilization is going backward.
Horribly so.
The conditions described are so post-apocalyptic they could almost be called SF. It’s not just that most of the Congolese have returned to pre-industrial conditions, but that they are being preyed upon by the remnants of the industrial world around them - their own elites, the various bush military organizations, and mining companies. An awful, bloody mess.
Definitely one of the better zombie pics out there. For a while, during the Bill Murray scenes in the middle, I thought the flick might transcend the genre completely. But it didn’t. Still. a fun movie.
Another book that could have fallen on either side of the ledger. I am not a Mieville fan, and the only reason I read this was because a lot of fellow travelers said it wasn’t a typical Mieville book. They’re right. It isn’t. It’s far more disciplined. By Mieville standards, there’s very little showing off.
Except for the premise, I really enjoyed it. A good detective story, well told. The ending surprised me, but only because it was the very pat ending that I’d already guessed Mieville would avoid. I was surprised when he didn’t.
But don’t get me wrong, I really hated the premise of this book. It’s the sort of premise that only a Marxist could think up. There is no humanity in it at all. The City and the City only works if you think humans can be conditioned into anything - a very Marxist belief, which devalues the individual for the sake of society as horribly as our own American society goes the other way. The whole idea that people can be conditioned into not noticing their neighbors is patently absurd. What about children? What about Alzheimer’s patients? What about dogs? What about communicable diseases? The whole idea would work wonderfully if the novel was about paranoia, but it’s not. It’s a detective story, whch assumes a certain amount of logical behavior from its characters. Yes, the characters in The City and the City behave logically within the world designed for them, but the whole things falls apart when you consider the fact that the world itself has no logic. It’s an artist’s fiat. If people can complain about the lack of logic in fantasy world-building, ie the economics don’t work, then surely the same argument can be used for SF.
Anyway, that’s my rant, and I’m sticking to it.
I loved this movie. A wonderful story, beautifully told. The writer in me was happy, the story lover in me was happy, even the movie lover in me was happy.
I don’t know why it is, but the occasional Pixar movie these days seems to do a better job of portraying the human condition than any number of flicks with real actors. Perhaps it’s because they’re unafraid of sentiment. They feel no need for irony or wallowing in misery and despair, while at the same time they manage to find depths of raw sorrow in their narratives that frequently come off as plain painful in other movies. Perhaps it’s because these movies are cartoons, and we know they’re going to have happy endings, but I do know that the five minute sequence early on that summarized Carl’s and Ellie’s sweet, sad marriage affected me about as much as anything I’ve seen in a long time.
And there were talking dogs, too.
Squirrels!
This actually fell right in the middle between Likes-Some-Things and Likes-Nothing. Being such a positive guy, I decided to give Stew the benefit of the doubt. After all, I love his discs.
The last four songs of the show were what I really liked. Stew is a great singer, larger than life personality, and very funny. All this came through in the last four songs. The first two-thirds of the show, however, were a bit too overwrought for my taste. Stew drinking, Stew crawling across the floor into a mini-fridge. And the video show playing on three screens was ho-hum at best. There is a reason I’ve never been part of the art crowd, where the banal can be worshiped every bit as much as Beethoven’s 5th. And the songs seemed overproduced, which is the musical sin I’m least likely to forgive.
Maybe it was because this was the last night of the show and Stew and the band were either trying too hard or not trying hard enough.
But the last four songs were wonderful. Am listening to some of them right now.
Chicks in chainmail and soubrettes with swords just don’t do it for me any more. I’ll take a 19th c. spinster who can do sums any time. She takes on her tradesman father, marries one of his workingmen, and gets her sisters settled into the bargain. If you can get past Charles Laughton hamming it up as a drunk, this is a very funny flick.
Boy, do I. Best book I’ve read in a long time, fiction or non-fiction. Throes of Democracy is the second book in Walter A. McDougall’s projected multivolume history of the US. The first, Freedon Just Around the Corner, took us from the European arrival in North America to Jackson’s election in 1828. The current volume continues the narrative to Rutherford B. Hayes’s disputed election in 1876. (And you thought 2000 was bad.)
The books are smetimes glib to a fault. They are surveys of their times, not in-depth analyses. McDougall’s tone is ironic and conservative, with a touch of the gleeful cynic as well. But the conservatism is not the false conservatism of the current day, which wishes to conserve nothing but ts own power. It is an older conservatism that does not believe in the perfectability of humanity, and views all such attempts as vainglorious, dictatorial, and more than a little self-serving. In short, it is a scholarly point of view that is very much out of step with mainstream progressive American scholarship (the NY Times savaged the book), or the conservative backlash that currently represents the other side of the debate.
Whatever you think of the theme, it is a great read. McDougall has no sacred cows (except maybe Lincoln), and savages everyone from the Transcendentalists to the Know-Nothings. (Having been forced to worship Emerson and the Transcendentalists at my New England college I enjoyed their skewering very much.) He views the Civil War as a disaster for all parties, with the freeing of the slaves barely making up for the century of Black American sufferng that followed. His main thesis, that the US has always been a nation of self-interested hucksters draping ourselves in moral hypocrisy in order to justify our ambition and greed is, in my opinion, completely accurate. And very appropriate, given our current natonal condition.
It’s a beutifully written and very interesting book. If you like the bashing of sacred cows, do yourself a favor and take a look.
So sad to hear she’s gone. Her cleverness, her fluid style, and above all the good humor of her books, will be missed. A wonderful writer.
I really, really liked this book by Botswana/South African writer Bessie Head - When Rain Clouds Gather. I picked it up for research purposes (didn’t help much there - the village life described is too poor for my purpose), but it really is a delightful story. Almost no conflict, and way too much telling, but a wonderful, sweet, simple, non-judgmental voice. So much more enjoyable than the world-weary dreariness of V.S. Naipaul. Some sections read almost like Trollope in Africa. And, though race was everywhere in the book, it was also nowhere. Many very interesting insights for someone like me who knows nothing about village life in Africa.
