Book: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

Author: Stieg Larsson

Type of Book: Fiction, thriller, mystery

Why Did I Read This Book: I read this book because I am a narcissist. You see, while I am not THE girl with the dragon tattoo, I am A girl with a dragon tattoo. The title sucked me in. Then I flipped through the pages and saw that a character had my own name. I have not read a book with an Anita in it since the book Anita and Me by Meera Syal. Those reasons were reason enough for the likes of me.

Availability: Published by Vintage Crime, is is widely available. You can get a copy here:

Comments: It’s been a while since I have been this enthralled by a best-seller. This is a seriously good book on many levels and I think that you should read it. I feel this way for a variety of reasons.

Larsson’s ability to write a multi-layered mystery with so many characters is in itself amazing. Generally, books with more than one sub-plot can become tiresome, with too much competing for the reader’s attention. Larsson’s tale has several sub-plots neatly woven together so tightly and interdependent on one another that the book is near seamless.

I will not attempt to summarize the plots more than this: Disgraced journalist Mikael Blomkvist is hired by wealthy man to try to solve the decades-old mystery of his niece’s disappearance. He meets Lisabeth Salander, the girl with the dragon tattoo, because she had been hired by a security company to investigate Blomkvist. When he reads her dossier on him, her abilities as an investigator and a hacker impress him and he engages her to work with him to find the missing heiress. Together they uncover far more than just a missing girl, but rather many missing and dead girls, whose disappearances all lead to a shocking and dreadful conclusion.

The carefully laid plot is worth the price of admission, so to speak, but really, the reason this book is so captivating is because of the girl with the dragon tattoo, Lisabeth, and her intriguing, sad, maddening life.

I read some reviews of this book after I finished it and was puzzled by some of the words people used to describe Lisabeth Salander. Words like spunky. Fiesty. She is not fiesty. She is not spunky. She is not plucky. Those words describe a character in a Reese Witherspoon movie. There were those who think she is a deliberate outsider, choosing to live as she does because she’s some sort of personal agent provocateur. She is not a charming loser, a female Cool Hand Luke. Then there was a discussion online as to whether or not she had Asperger’s Syndrome, which does not even seem reasonable to me, but several felt that she did have the condition. It beggars belief that people found her personality spanning so many characterizations, from a plucky heroine who lives by her wits to a funky anarchist whose tattoos and hacking are a rage against the machine to a computer savant whose interpersonal relationships are limited because she has a psychological or behavioral condition.

How could so many people leave this book with such different conclusions about Lisabeth, though wrong most of them are in my eyes? Because in Lisabeth, Stieg Larsson managed to create a character wholly unique. So unique in fact that she is hard to pin down and even my attempt may be a shoddy representation of her. But I think I got her right and I think she is one of the most interesting and complex anti-heroines I have read in mainstream literature.

Title: Last Night at the Lobster

Author: Stewart O’Nan

Type of Book: Fiction

Why Did I Read This Book: I read O’Nan’s The Night Country twice and loved it immoderately. When I saw Last Night at the Lobster on clearance, I snapped it up. I prefer not to buy remaindered books as I like for authors to make money off the books I buy, but I was a very impecunious reader for about a year. But given the blue-collar atmosphere described in the book, I’m sure O’Nan would understand.

Availability: Published by Viking, you can get a copy here:

Comments: This book was the perfect palate cleanser after reading Mary Gordon’s Pearl. Word economy, action, people behaving in a manner that made sense… I discuss a comparison between the two IN A COMPLETELY UNRELATED REVIEW over at I Read Odd Books, making it clear that perhaps I identify more with working class characters. This book was the perfect hot dog and beer after the salty steak and red wine offered in Pearl.

Last Night at the Lobster is a day in the life of Manny DeLeon, the manager of a Red Lobster that is being closed down days before Christmas. Manny’s life is that of a hard-working man, a man who does a very difficult job (god bless and overtip every person who ever waits in you in a restaurant) and wants to do it well. He is a man who hates to see others lose their job when the restaurant closes, even employees whose work ethic may not merit such loyalty.

But Manny is not a caricature of a virtuous Working Everyman, for despite his work ethic, loyalty and his sense of pride in a job well-done, Manny is all too human. He has a pregnant girlfriend but also carried on an affair with a coworker, Jacquie, a girl who also had a boyfriend. When the Red Lobster closed, Manny was offered an assistant manager job at an Olive Garden and can take five employees with him and wanted to take Jacquie. But Jacquie has a better sense of reality – Manny has a pregnant girlfriend and she can see that their love affair has no future. But Manny pines for her anyway, service-sector star-crossed lovers that they are.

It is very easy to get lost in a book of fantasy, or a book about the rich. Intoxicating other worlds have fueled certain genres for a long while and Danielle Steel would not be one of the best selling authors of all time if tales of money, sex, and intrigue did not serve as excellent escapism from the daily grind. Even Stephen King, who writes of blue collar people more than most authors, has them often set against a backdrop of horror or intensity that makes you forget that his characters don’t have a key to the executive washroom.

Last Night at the Lobster is also no epic tale of poverty, with no Steinbeckian-overtones to give extra-special nobility to Manny. Manny is just an American guy who works his ass off, whose personal life is messy, who is probably going to marry a woman he doesn’t love because she is carrying his child, and who will never be rich, famous or otherwise renown. So why care about him? Well, for me, it is because the stories of people like Manny so seldom get told outside of Barbara Ehrenreich exposés. I like reading about working class people. So often, people who are not rich in novels, who occupy a sort of underclass like Manny, are criminals or addicts or both. I like reading about people whose lives and work I can relate to so easily but whose stories are not told with sentimentality about the “working man.” Whose stories are important and amazing in their own right without needing the sanctification of people romanticizing what it is like to be young, hardworking and broke.

But if you are not me, if you could care less about the working man who brings you your meals when you eat at chain restaurants, then you should read this book because of the writing. The characterization is spot on and even wrestling with salting the snow seems interesting. As Manny hopes and prays his staff comes in for their last day of work and struggles with a terrible snow storm, the minutia of his day is never boring. O’Nan really is a fabulous writer.

Book: Candy from Strangers

Author: Mark Coggins

Type of Book: Fiction, Mystery

Why Did I Read This Book: A couple of reasons. One, the cover is sexy, featuring the torso and neck of a shapely woman in various poses. Second, the premise of the book – women getting harmed as a result of “cam-whoring” (my term, not the author’s) – was a new one, something I could imagine Andrew Vachss writing about, and it intrigued me.

Availability: Published by Bleak House Books in 2007, you can get a copy here:

Comments: I am a voracious and indiscriminate reader, and buy books for a variety of reasons and seldom think twice when the urge to buy a book hits me, so were I less a book whore, I would have read the blurbs closer and realized I was reading the third book in a series. August Riordan, the private investigator in this book, is featured in two other other books by Coggins, but thankfully, the plot for the third novel stands independently from the other two. There are small elements that clearly are set up in previous novels, like Riordan’s relationships with women, his friendship with an old jazz and blues performer, and similar, but ultimately, no one would get lost reading this book before the others.

This book is a bag of potato chips. It really offers nothing new, but as you eat, you don’t really think, “My god, I am eating potato chips for the thousandth time in my life. I really need to get some of those wasabi rice crackers and mix it up a little.” For snack food is snack food and regardless of the form it takes, you enjoy it and sort of forget about it until the next time you need a snack. This is no slam of this book, calling it snack food. I would never turn up my nose at a competent mystery, and this is a competent mystery. There is a lot going on in this book, so much that it is almost impossible for me to give one of my regular, encompassing synopses, but here’s the lowdown:

A disgraced cop’s daughter goes missing. Her mother contacts Riordan to find her, and in the process of the investigation, he discovers the girl has a shared camgirl site with another girl, a fellow art school student. Much happens and Riordan solves the case, and in the process, plays a jazz gig or two, finds a dead body, annoys the denizens of an art school, interacts with and punishes a skeevy psychiatrist (best scenes of the book, in my opinion) and engages in pulp detective clichés that I ordinarily would snert at, but he does it competently enough that I don’t in this case.

Here’s one of the clichés in the book: In one of the side stories, the grandson of a famous but impecunious musician steals his grandfather’s bass, an instrument that has a lot of sentimental value. Riordan helps get the bass back and in the process finds out the grandson has musical talent and is a hoot on the old horn. So Riordan gets him a place in a gig and the misunderstood, strung out youth accepts and BOOM! It all seems right in the world. Jazz gigs, not drugs, kids. Just say blow (on the horn, not up your nose, yo!).

But this snert aside, a book doesn’t have to necessarily have something new under the sun. It is, at times, enough for a book to be entertaining. This book was entertaining. The characters, though at times caricatures (like the flamboyant cross-dressing Chris), engage the reader. At no point did any character bore me or alienate me and sometimes this is all I need from a good thriller. Patricia Cornwell’s Scarpetta series used to be a lot of fun until Scarpetta became more strident, brittle and preachy as the plots became more and more outrageous. Neither of these are problems with Candy from Strangers. The plot makes sense, the characters are believable and likable, even Riordan’s snaptastic sarcastic rejoinders ring true when you read them. Riordan also has a good sense of humor, or at least his sense of humor resonated with me.

The only real unrealistic plot element in the book was this: The book involves female characters getting huge tattoos on their bodies. One of the women is an art model and when the photographer for whom she is a muse discovers she got the tattoo, he asks her to remove it and she does. The way the tattoo is described is that it is very large. Not only would it take several sessions to get such a tattoo, to remove it would be expensive as well and would take a long, long time and would leave scarring, even with the best laser technology. The time frame in the book does not allow this character the time she would need to get the tattoo and to later get it removed. One wonders where she, a struggling camgirl and student, would get the money for the extremely expensive laser treatments. And even if all of that were not problematic, traces of the original tattoo or the resulting scarring would remain and mar her nude photographs. Laser removal does not work like an eraser on the flesh. Small plot point but the only real issue I had with the book.

So know this book for what it is, common snack food for the mystery reader, and you’ll enjoy it well enough. If I ever see any of Coggins’ other works, I would be tempted to buy them. I might not seek him out actively, but I would definitely buy the two preceding August Riordan books if I stumble across them in a book store.

Title: A Whisper of Blood: A Collection of Modern Vampire Stories

Author: Edited by Ellen Datlow

Type of Book: Fiction, short story collection

Why Did I Read This Book: I love short stories. I love short stories about vampires. I love Ellen Datlow. I saw this in the bargain section at Barnes & Noble and I love cheap books. (It seems like I love a lot of things, doesn’t it?) It’s actually a book that contains two books of vampire fiction Ellen Datlow edited, Blood is Not Enough and a Whisper of Blood. So really it was a two for one bargain book. How could I lose? So I grabbed it and saved it so I could read it close to Halloween.

Availability: Released by Fall River Press in 2008, it no longer appears to be in print, but you can get a used copy here:

Comments: This is a hard one because overall most of these stories were entertaining and well-written. Yet many missed the point entirely or I am being too strict in what I consider a modern vampire story. I tend to think it is the former. Many of the stories really pushed the boundary of what it means to be a modern vampire story and not in a good way. In a “this really has nothing to do with vampires in any way, shape or form unless one redefines the notion of vampire to have nothing to do with the concept of a vampire in a context in which vampires are recognizable” sort of way. Yeah. Seriously, that mangled sentence is the mental gymnastics one must go through to find vampires in some of these stories.

A vampire does not have to suck blood to be a vampire. Most vampire fans also do not demand a strict adherence to vampire canon in order to find worth and entertainment in a vampire story. But on some level, the vampirism cannot be so postmodern in its interpretation of vampires that an audience has to analyze the story to the point of banality to find the vampiric element and too many stories in this collection demanded that sort of analysis.

I’m not going to discuss every story in the book but I’ll hit what I consider the high lights and low lights.

The ones that did not work for me:

“The Pool People” by Melissa Mia Hall uses rape as a metaphor for vampirism and while the story is intriguing, the fact of the matter is, this is one of the stories that stretches the notion of being a vampire. A teacher being assaulted by students is horrific, not vampiric. This story stretches vampirism into a metaphor for all modern violence and in so doing, stretches the concept of the “modern” vampire to the breaking point.

“Dirty Work” by Pat Cadigan flat out is not a vampire story. Period. Full stop. It’s an interesting science fiction tale but it has no place in a modern vampire anthology. I did my best, I questioned myself and asked if I was being too literal in my interpretation and came to the conclusion that asking for some form of vampiric behavior in a story included in a vampire anthology is not too much to ask. It’s a story of a “pathosfinder” who is overwhelmed mentally by an empath in a futuristic world. This was possibly the most tiresome story in the book for me, 35 pages of not very much happening at all, just… I think the issue is that I am not a fan of this sort of sci-fi, especially when I encounter it in a book ostensibly about vampires.

Interestingly, one of the other stories that did not hit me right was also a Pat Cadigan tale called “Home by the Sea,” wherein people are dead in a sort of post-apocalyptic world but still move around. They’re not really vampires so much as they are sentient zombies. A wife has sex with a man who is ostensibly still alive and he gives her the gift of life. Again, sort of entertaining, but also again, not really vampires in any sense, even modern. Vampires take life, they don’t give it, and given the zombie-like nature of the characters, it was hard to see what the point was of the story exactly other than just existing as a horror tale. It works as a horror tale. It does not work as a vampire story.

The last story I speak of in the “do not want” camp comes from Edward Bryant, “Good Kids.” This one I just plain didn’t like. In it, four girls in night-time child care facility discover their caretaker is a vampire. They turn the table of violence on him when they encourage the rest of the kids in care to act with them in an ending with a TWIST. Bleah to red herring endings and double bleah to precocious kids who as a group don’t speak or act as any kids I have ever known.

Now with the complaints out of the way, here are some stories that were really quite good and met the criteria, at least in my mind, of a modern vampire story:

Book: Pearl

Author: Mary Gordon

Type of Work: Fiction

Why Did I Read This Book: I have no idea where I initially heard about this book. Likely a radio program back when I worked in cubicle hell and listened to public radio on a constant stream. Like many inveterate bibliophiles, I will hear about a book that I think sounds interesting and write it down on a master list of books I wish to read. Sometimes I write down where I heard about it, sometimes I forget. I forgot on this one, but I know that if I wrote it on the list, I was impressed enough that even if I have forgotten the recommendation source, I will still want to read it. And such was the case with Pearl. I saw it on my list and bought it when I had the chance.

Availability: Published by Anchor Press in 2006, you can get a copy here:

Comments: Okay, aspiring writers who may read this, please know this novel stands in violent contradiction to all the writing standards students have beaten into their heads. This novel is rife with telling and not showing, which is not problematic to me, per se. We spend a lot of time in the heads of the characters in Min Jin Lee’s Free Food for Millionaires and the passivity of the experience actually made me feel very close to the protagonist. Sometimes, with friends, you can loll about, talking and feel as if you have done something. But this is not the case with Pearl. The telling is alienating. Pearl also has an often condescending omniscient narrator, forcing the reader to experience the book in the manner Gordon sees fit, wedging the reader into a stiff “we” formation that spoils much of the narrative. Pearl uses nothing approaching word conservation, overstating, restating, then overstating points yet again with the end result being that the reader’s mind begins to wander.

Many of some of the most acclaimed writers break every writing rule and god bless them because rules are just to get people started, a means of learning. So write ye merry unpublished and know that all those rules used to reject your manuscript will not matter once you reach the right audience, once you hit the right formula. For much can be forgiven if a book is good enough in the right places and Pearl was just good enough when Pearl was its actual focus. But Pearl was not focused on enough, sadly, for me to like this book very much. (A book can also be forgiven if the intelligentsia has decided that writer is a worthy writer no matter what but best not to get too bogged down in details like that.)

Here is Pearl‘s plot synopsis: Pearl, the daughter of an areligious woman, whose Jewish father converted to Catholicism, and a Cambodian freedom fighter who died without her ever knowing him, goes to Ireland to study the Irish language. She is 20, very naive, has spent her life in her mother’s shadow, and becomes involved with people associated with the IRA. A misjudged overreaction on her part and on the part of another woman lead Pearl to think she is responsible for a teenage boy’s death.

Her response is to starve herself for six weeks, deprive herself of water for 4 days, and then chain herself to a post on the American Embassy in Ireland in witness to what she calls “the will to harm.” She wants for her death to be the witness to the boy’s death. But Pearl miscalculates and does not die as quickly as she thought she would and is eventually overpowered and taken to the hospital. Her mother and her mother’s life long friend Joseph hasten to Ireland to be by Pearl’s side. Joseph was raised with Pearl’s mother Maria. His mother was the family maid and Joseph went on to run Maria’s father’s business. The relationships in this novel are fraught with endless difficulty, as they so often are in novels and in real life, but the relationships are believable and overall, the book works on that level.

The best parts for me were when Pearl was still so weak from hunger because in those scenes, the action and thought were more immediate. There was far less dithering in the narrative. The other characters did not mean as much to me and their presence in the book do not show as clearly how Pearl came to be Pearl as one would hope. Maria, a former 1960s radical, is a strident, difficult woman used to getting her way, but as Gordon shows, she is also a woman you want in your corner when you are sick, scared or downtrodden. Maria is a loud mouth pain in the ass but mostly she means well. Joseph is a resentful, but loving man, a man whose destiny in life has been thwarted because of his role as Maria’s financial caretaker, ensuring she and Pearl have enough money in life, rather than pursuing the work that would have made him happy. He has Maria’s number, though she does not have his, and he is overly sensitive and at times, a bit crazed.

But it is Pearl I found the most interesting and I wish so much more attention had been paid to her in this novel of an atypical family gathering together in the face of a bizarre crisis.

Book: The Shroud of the Thwacker

Author: Chris Elliott

Type of Work: Fiction, Parody

Why Did I Read This Book: Back when the Cassie Edwards Black Ferret plagiarism mess hit (yeah, read that hot mess when you’ve got some time on your hands because it is hilarious as all get out), I found myself reading sites about plagiarism because I was working a miserable cube job and wasted every possible minute I could of The Man’s time. I was shocked and appalled to see Cabin Boy listed as a plagiarist and made a mental note to buy the book and find out what was what.

After reading the book, I thought, “Aha! Morons don’t understand them some parody, represent!” Then I went back to reread the site referencing Elliott’s supposed act of plagiarism and I’ll be damned if I truly understand what happened. Referenced a robot that didn’t exist, a robot that was a hoax and violated copyright? What? You read it and tell me. All I can safely say is that I consider this less plagiarism and really more a mild publicity stunt amongst tricksters, but then again, I refuse to admit that the man who stole my heart as Larry in Groundhog Day would steal anything else.

Availability: Published by Hyperion in 2005, you can get a copy here:

Comments: It’s gonna be hard to give two craps about this book and review if the following do not apply to you:

–You have a mild crush on a balding man who used to write jokes for David Letterman.
–You read and had a violent reaction to Patricia Cornwell’s Portrait Of A Killer: Jack The Ripper — Case Closed, in which she pins the Whitechapel murders on a famous painter, using less hard proof than I use when I look at my nine cats, the hairball befouling the living room carpet and decide Wooster did it on the basis of his twitchy whiskers (actually, this is a mildly unfair assessment – if the wad of wet fur is white, it was undoubtedly Wooster).
–You read and found interminable Caleb Carr’s The Alienist.
–You read and were largely ambivalent about The Da Vinci Code.
–You find puerile humor as hi-larious as I do.
–You embrace the ridiculous more than anyone else you know.

This book is a murder mystery in which an intrepid police chief, his spunky ex-girlfriend and mayor Teddy Roosevelt try to solve a series of prostitute murders in New York, wherein the time-tripping Chris Elliott plays no small role. Really, this is the only way to recount the intricate, insane plot. It is laugh-out-loud funny, witty, and surreal, and like the best parody, shows zero love for the sources it takes to task. In the book, Elliott calls out Patricia Cornwell’s grandiose and bumbling attempts to call case closed on a murder that has stumped experts, uses most of Carr’s set up in The Alienist to frame this book, and exposes a massive, historical cabal, but unlike the sinister Opus Dei of The DaVinci Code, we’ve got the Mummers and a very hungry dinner date willing to decipher for his supper.

Oh, what a silly book this is. Delightful. Full of gross and insane jokes. So of course I think I may be the only person on the planet who loves it. Seriously, who could not love the following passage:

“What can we get you to drink?” inquired Teddy.

“Maybe something light. Caleb, dear, what was that delightful drink we used to order at Hurley’s?” She was looking directly at the police chief, but he wasn’t looking back. “Oh yes, I remember. I will have a powered opium and liquid ether frappe, with a shot of pure laudanum.”

“Waiter!” cried the mayor, “One God’s Own Enema!”

If you don’t find the above quite amusing, this is not the book for you,as the entire book is more or less the above quote. It has no redeeming value other than comedic entertainment. Period. End stop. So if you are pretty serious about your reading materials, read something else. Something by Tolstoy. Or maybe Agatha Christie. Perhaps Audrey Niffenegger. Yeah. Her. That woman who wrote about the time traveler’s wife and no one cared about her plot holes, did they? DID THEY? Just please don’t read my guy Chris and bitch because it made no sense to you and because he covers the inevitable plot issues caused by intense lunacy with even more lunacy.

Book: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

Author: Mark Haddon

Type of work: Fiction

Why Did I Read This Book: I worked briefly at a used bookstore (waves to all my awesome coworkers at the Half-Price Books in Round Rock, if any of them ever find this review site) and a woman told me she had read it for her book club and wanted a copy for her daughter because she liked it so much. Her daughter worked with special needs children and despite the number of times I had seen copies of the book in new stores, I had no idea the book revolved around a “special needs” kid. On the basis of that woman’s like of the book and tantalizing premise of an autistic teenager writing a book, I decided to give it a try.

Availability: Published in 2003 by Vintage Books, this book is still widely available. You can get a copy here:

Comments: I do my best not to be an armchair psychiatrist because invariably such endeavors show my utter ignorance in the realm of psychiatry and the workings of the human brain, but I wonder what my extreme love of the spare style used to write this book says about me. The trope of the book is that Christopher Boone, a 15-year-old autistic savant, discovered a neighbor’s dead dog, stabbed to death with a pitchfork, and decided to write a book about his attempts to solve the dog’s murder. As he writes his book, Christopher uncovers a shocking family secret and is forced to crawl outside the extreme limits his autism place upon him. Of course, I won’t spoil the ending but the plot, while at times a little obvious, is overshadowed by the experience of spending time in Christopher’s head, a time that is nerve-wracking, saddening, frustrating and amazing.

Read the rest of the review.