BOOK REPORT: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

Title:       The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Author:                           Stieg Larsson

Original Copyright Date:     2008

Translated to English by:   Reg Keeland

My Rating:         2 out of 5 stars  ( meh )

Would Recommend to a friend?: not really

Back Cover Description:

A spellbinding amalgam of murder mystery, family saga, love story, and financial intrigue.

It is about the disappearance forty years ago of Harriet Vanger, a young scion of one of the wealthiest families in Sweden . . . and about her octogenarian uncle, determined to know the truth about what he believes was her murder. 

It s about Mikael Blomkvist, a crusading journalist recently at the wrong end of a libel case, hired to get to the bottom of Harriet s disappearance . . . and about Lisbeth Salander, a twenty-four-year-old pierced and tattooed genius hacker possessed of the hard-earned wisdom of someone twice her age who assists Blomkvist with the investigation. This unlikely team discovers a vein of nearly unfathomable iniquity running through the Vanger family, astonishing corruption in the highest echelons of Swedish industrialism, and an unexpected connection between themselves.

My Thoughts:

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This was a crime drama that fell a bit flat.  It was a quick read, and had the potential to be a gripping thriller, but it  never materialized as well as I thought it could. It was fairly predictable, with a couple of decent twists.  Was I entertained?  Mostly. But I can't say I would recommend it without reservations. The crimes committed were gruesome, although most happened well before the two intrepid heroes are on the case.  The suspense doesn't really start until well over 100 pages in the book and the climax occurs with about 80 pages remaining and the denouement was cliche.  The whole thing came across as a episode of scooby-doo directed by Quentin Tarantino.  

On a side note, I was very annoyed with the product placement in the book.  It was like watching a movie where you can obviously see that Coke is the primary sponsor with the product placed conspicuously throughout scenes and the label always facing the camera. My ebook copy had to be returned to the library, so I can't dig up quotes to demonstrate it, but to paraphrase, "She stole his Dell pc laptop and copied the hard drive to her Macbook pro.  Salander then turned on her iPod, an mp3 player the size of a matchbook, and went to work on the images from the night in Photoshop, played with the contrast settings until she could make out the "Visit some place in Sweden" bumper sticker on the blue Volvo S90 Hatchback"

A few character questions remain, to be answered in the remaining books of the series.  I don't know if I will read them.  Maybe I will once I separate my self a bit from this one.  Like I said, it is a quick read and I was mostly entertained.  If I am getting close to the deadline, with my book count a bit low, I might consider it.

BOOK REPORT: Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

Title:                    Huckleberry Finn

Author:                Mark Twain (Samual Clemens)

Original Copyright Date:         1885

Would Recommend to a friend?: Yes

Back Cover Description: 

Floating down the Mississippi on their raft, Huckleberry Finn and Jim, a runaway slave, find life filled with excitement and the spirit of adventure. Join Huck and Jim and their old friend Tom Sawyer as they come up against low-down thieves and murderers, whilst being chased by Huck's evil, drunken father who is after Huck's treasure. It is a trip that you will never tire of.

My Thoughts:

I was amazed at the complexity of Huckleberry Finn; it went well beyond my expectations. I was expecting an adventure story following a boy riding down the Mississippi River, getting into all sorts of scrapes and near-misses caused by Huck's "boys will be boys" attitude;  I was expecting Treasure Island or King Soloman's Mines. What I got was literature in every sense of the word.  Slavery, Race, Religion, are just some of the themes that even a non-english major can pick out.

I was shell-shocked by the bluntness of language used by Mark Twain when I read some of the passages. For example, the following occurs when Jim (the runaway slave) and Huck have been on the river for a few days is as simple of an explanation of how Huck saw slavery that is, to me, completely unfathomable today:

"Jim Talked out loud all the time while I was talking to myself. He was saying how the first thing he would do when he got to a free State he would go to saving up money and never spend a single cent, and when he got enough he would buy his wife, which was owned on a farm close to where Miss Watson lived; and then they would both work to buy the two children, and if their master wouldn't sell them, they'd get an Ab'litionist to go and steal them.

    It most froze me to hear such talk. He wouldn't ever dared to talk such talk in his life before. Just see what a difference it made in him the minute he judged he was about free. It was according to the old saying, 'give a nigger an inch and he'll take and ell.' Thinks I, this is what comes of my not thinking. Here was this nigger which I had as good as helped to run away, coming right out flat-footed and saying he would steal his children -- children that belonged to a man I didn't even know; a man that hadn't ever done me no harm."

The passage also demonstrates one of the themes that struck me the most. that despite being an orphan most of his life, an outsider who doesn't want to fit into Miss Watson's normal life with schoolin' and churchin', with a drunk abusive father showing up to take advantage of  Huck's fortune outlined in Tom Sayer, he still thinks about slavery as just the way things were, and asks himself why he is helping Jim. Huck wrestles with what is deemed to be normal and right throughout the book. It doesn't take Huck long to realize that the right thing to do is to help Jim, even though his reasoning isn't quite as strong as, "Slavery is bad and I should do what I can to stop it."

"... and I see it warn't no use for me to try to learn to do right; a body that don't get started right when he's little, ain't got no show -- when the pinch comes there ain't nothing to back him up and keep him to his work, and so he gets beat. Then I thought a minute, and says to myself, hold on, --s'pose you'd a done right and give Jim up; would you feel better than what you do now? No, says I, I'd feel bad --I'd feel just the same way I do now. Well, then, says I, what's the use you learning to do right, when it's troublesome to do right and ain't  no trouble to do wrong, and the wages is just the same?"

and further, as Huck and Jim travel on down the river a ways, we see his internal conflict grow from a selfish motivation to keep moving down the river with Jim to a religious one as things get a bit more difficult.
The following quote has Huck praying to "quit being the kind of boy he was, and be better".  Better in terms of what was again, deemed to be normal and right...

"So I kneeled down. But the words wouldn't come. Why wouldn't they? It warn't no use to try and hide it from Him. Nor from me, neither. I knowed very well why they wouldn't come. It was because my heart warn't right; it was because I warn't square; it was because I was playing double. I was letting on to give up sin but away inside of me I was holding on to the biggest one of all. I was trying to make my mouth say I would do the right thing and the clean thing, and go and write to that nigger's owner and tell where he was; but deep down in me I knowed it was a lie-- and He knowed it. You can't pray a lie-- I found that out."

He thinks that by not turning in Jim, people would consider it a sin; that to not live "right", he was committing a sin. But the bigger sin to Huck is not being honest and true to himself.

A few years from now, I would like to read Huckleberry Finn again to try and get more from it.  I have no doubt that this book will offer me something more.

I've Finished Huckleberry Finn

Look for a book report sometime soon; alas, I don't have the time to sit down and do it today.
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is my next book and I have 7 days to read it. No time to waste!

Well, It looks like my next book will be....

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, by Stieg Larsson.

I had this book on hold at the library and wasn't expecting it this soon.  I have about one-hundred pages left in Huckleberry Finn, then I'm off to the Swedish Mystery...

Hopefully it isn't a 7 day rental...

BOOK REPORT: The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Title:                    The Shadow of the Wind 

Author:                Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Original Copyright Date:        2001

Translation to english:          Lucia Graves 2004

My Rating:    4 out of 5 stars  (highly enjoyable)

Would Recommend to a friend?: Yes

Back Cover Description: 

"Hidden in the heart of the old city of Barcelona is the 'Cemetery of Forgotten Books', a labyrinthine library of obscure and forgotten titles. To this library, a man brings his ten-year-old son, Daniel, one cold morning in 1945. Daniel is allowed to choose one book and from the dusty shelves he pulls The Shadow of the Wind by Julian Carax. But as Daniel grows up, several people seem inordinately interested in his find. What begins as a case of literary curiosity turns into a race to find out the truth behind the life and death of Julian Carax and to save those he left behind."

My Thoughts:

Maggie read this book a few years ago after receiving it as a present from my sister Tina.  While she was reading it, she couldn't put it down and she instantly recommend that I read it next.  I admit that it took me a while to get around to it, but once I did, I was hooked.

The book is very well written, with a twisting/turning plot full of intrigue, suspense, murder, and love with a few "DON"T GO IN THERE GIRL!" moments for good measure.  It reminded me of a more literary version of a Dan Brown novel.  The characters were complex and interesting; Barcelona provides a mysterious and rich backdrop for the story. 

At the core of the The Shadow of the Wind is a book, called, The Shadow of the Wind, by Julian Carax.  As I read the novel, one of the major recurring themes I noticed was about the power and importance of books and storytelling.  The books themselves are revered by the main characters, especially the ones which are rare or forgotten.  

Television is severely panned only once and rarely mentioned again.  This was the dawning of the age of the television, but the characters in the novel had no use for it.  In my own life, television has fallen far down on my priority list, mainly because I want to spend more time with Sims.  I find I don't miss it that much.  I think the following quote from the book, given the current state of television, (Jersey Shore anyone?) is quite fitting:

"Television, my dear Daniel, is the Antichrist, and I can assure you that after only three or four generations, people will no longer even know how to fart on their own. Humans will return to living in caves, to medieval savagery, and to the general state of imbecility that slugs overcame back in the Pleistocene era. Our world will not die as a result of the bomb, as the papers say -- it will die of laughter, of banality, of making a joke of everything, and a lousy joke at that"   -- Fermin Romera de Torres, upon the television set becoming more common in Barcelona in 1954. 

Contrast that statement with this:

"Bea says the art of reading is slowly dying, that it's an intimate ritual, that a book is a mirror that offers us only what we already carry inside us, that when we read, we do it with all our heart and mind, and great readers are becoming more scarce by the day."

Now that I think about it, maybe it was this book which subconsciously inspired me to start the Olio-Scholar Project in the first place.

Official Book Recommendation Post

Hi,

This post is intended to give people a place to recommend books to me for this project.  Just post in the comments or send me an email and I will update it so everyone can see it.

Recommendations so far:

Rebecca by Daphne De Maurier (Maggie)
The Death Gate Cycle by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman (Nick)
The Belgariad and The Mallorean by David Eddings (Nick)
Incarnations of Immortality by Piers Anthony (Nick)
The Chronicles of Amber by Roger Zelazny (Nick)
The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck (Mom)
A Prayer for Owen Meaney by John Irving (Tripp)
The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe (Tripp)
The Infinite Jest  by David Foster Wallace (Chris G.)
Cryptomonicon by Neal Stevenson (Chris G.)
The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker (Chris G.)
The John Dortmunder Series by Donald E. Westlake (Dad)
The Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins. (Jana) 
The Leopard (Italian: Il Gattopardo) by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa 

Recommendations which I've already read:

• Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss (Jason)
•  (11/21/2011)
• One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Chris G.)
• I read this book as part of this project (9/24/2011)
• The Things they Carried by Tim O'Brien (Tripp)
• I read this book as part of this project (8/26/2011)
• Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut (Tripp)
• I read this book as part of this project (6/13/2011)
• The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell (Jackie)
• I read this book as part of this project (4/25/2011)
• Never Let Me Go by Kazou Ishiguru (Chris S.)
• I read this book as part of this project (3/20/2011)
• The Book Thief  by Markus Zusak  (Chris G.)
• I read this book as part of this project (2/24/2011)
• The Professor and the Madman  by Simon Winchestor (Tripp)
• I read this book as part of this project (12/17/2010)
• Life of Pi by Yann Martel (Rhonda)
• I read this book as part of this project (12/7/2010)
• Feed by M.T. Anderson (Tripp/Jana)
• I read this book as part of this project. (11/29/2010)
• The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemmingway (Dad) 
• I read this back in high school and would like to read it again one day
• Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (Tripp)
• I read this a few years ago and loved it.

The Classics and my Reading Queue

Several years ago I had a desire to start reading  many of the classic adventure books I was supposed to have read growing up, but never got around to it. (Dracula, Treasure Island, etc... ) After reading few of those, I wanted to grow up a bit and read more of the standard classics.  I took on some hefty titles, not finishing most of them.  I made it through part one of Henry James' Sons and Lovers, two-hundred pages of Jane Eyre, half-way through Catch-22. Most of the time, I put the book down one night and unforseen circumstances would keep me away for an extended period of time and I would have difficultly getting back into the story. 


My breakthrough novel was Crime and Punishment.  I LOVED that book and it renewed my interest in reading the classics.  Since then I've finished Catch-22 and plan on tackling Jane Eyre again.   I don't think Sons and Lovers will make it back onto my queue anytime soon, but weirder things have happened.


Many books I read during this project will fit into the "classic" category; my desire hasn't waned a bit for the great ones, but I plan to read more newly acclaimed fiction, classic childhood adveture novels, a touch of  easy beach/plane/silly reads, and a few non-fiction historical type books.

I've been overwhelmed with book recommendations from people as I mention this project.  I love it; please keep it coming.

Jason

The BBC Reading List

A friend of mine posted a list of 100 famous books of which the BBC thinks most people would have read only six. The list is very UK centric, but has spawned many great discussions amongst my family and friends.  

Here is the list in its full glory.  The bold titles with the 'X' are one which I have read.  I will try to keep this list current (Last updated 7/31/2012)

How many have you read?

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen X

2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien X

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte X

4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling X

5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee X

6 The Bible (The entire thing!)

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell X

9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman X

10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens X

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller X

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien X

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger X

19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell

22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald X

23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky X * my personal favorite...

28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll X

30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame X 

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis 

34 Emma-Jane Austen

35 Persuasion - Jane Austen

36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis X

37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres

39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden

40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne X

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell X

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown X

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez X

44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving

45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery

47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood

49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding

50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel X

52 Dune - Frank Herbert X

53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen

55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon X

57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley X

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck X

62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov X

63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

65 Count of Monte Cristo - AleXandre Dumas

66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac

67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding

69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie

70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

72 Dracula - Bram Stoker X

73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett

74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses - James Joyce

76 The Inferno – Dante

77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal - Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

80 Possession - AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens X

82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker

84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White X

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle X

90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad X

92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Eupery X

93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks

94 Watership Down - Richard Adams

95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers - Aleandre Dumas

98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare X

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Grand Total I've read: 33

Welcome to the Olio Scholar Project

I was strolling around the twitter-sphere the other day when I found a link to the New York Review Books page.  More specifically, a person was taking a challenge to read 50 of the world classics from that list and 25 from the Oxford World Classics. IN ONE YEAR!

I like to read, but I don't do it very often.  I'm one of those who needs to know how many pages are left until the next chapter and how many are left in the book. I've always admired avid readers, wonder how they made time to read so many books, and how fast they must read to get it all done. I read about 4-5 books a year on average and I thought this sort of self challenge is what I needed to do to keep me motivated and turn me into an official avid reader (as recognized by the Active Reader's Guild)

My goal is to read 25 books in 1 year, starting from my birthday of this year.   That is almost a book every two weeks... I don't know if I will make it, but I will give the ol' college try.

As I read books, I will update this blog with my random thoughts from the book, maybe add quotes that I liked, etc... I don't quite know yet. I plan on reading a wide variety of books, from classics to science fiction/fantasy to mystery, to whatever piques my interest; actually, that is how I came up with the name of the blog:

From the Merriam-Webster Dictionary:

Definition of OLIO

1

: olla podrida 1

2

a : a miscellaneous mixture : hodgepodgeb : a miscellaneous collection (as of literary or musical selections)

I hope you enjoy this as much as I do!