Girl with the Dragon Tattoo: The Movie
Mary and I went up to Seattle with some friends to see The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo early (it comes to the Grand in a few weeks). It's a great adaptation of the book, true to the spirit and the plot, with some excellent decisions made on what to cut. It's a good mystery, in either book or film form. Really well done.
Live and Let Die
Among other things I'm reading, I've been going through the James Bond books in order. Live and Let Die is, surprisingly, the 2nd book in the series. I say surprisingly because it feels later, thanks to the movies. The book and the movie actually bear a passing resemblance to each other, which is more than you can say for some of the other Roger Moore movies, and especially the later movies when they just pulled in the title and nothing more. Mr. Big is a pretty great villain, and he loves the gadgets in both the book and the movie. Read more…
George H. W. Bush
via whitehouse.gov I finished a short biography of George HW Bush over the weekend (the book I read was by Timothy Naftali and it’s part of the American Presidents series). Bush was the first President in my presidential reading list who didn’t have a wealth of biographies to choose from–my hunch is some of these presidents will get harder and harder to read up on. HW was a major inspiration behind this whole project of mine. After seeing Oliver Stone’s W. (which I didn’t like), I thought Bush Sr. was by far the most interesting character. And Obama referenced him Read more…
The Girl Who Played With Fire
I read the 2nd book in the Millenium Trilogy by Stieg Larsson. Again, I was totally hooked. It didn't have the freshness of the first book, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, but it was still very very good. Good enough I'm tempted to buy the third book from the the Amazon.co.uk site rather than waiting for it to be released in the US (which isn't until the end of May).
How to Blog a Book
“It’s a five-year process from writing to publishing,” said Llewellyn, of traditional books. “It’s incredibly frustrating. And it’s like the lottery, such a risk every step of the way. “The Tilting House” was the fourth manuscript I tried to have published – no one ever read the others. So the idea of having an immediate audience was attractive.” The result is “Letter Off Dead,” a book in blog form (letteroffdead.com) which Llewellyn’s been writing since last April. The book follows the middle-school adventures and mishaps of Trevor, who begins writing to his dead father in a desperate measure to cope Read more…
Wherein Erik heartily recommends “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo”
I stayed up late last night to finish Stieg Larsson's "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo." I feel a little late to the party with this one. I first noticed the cover at Powells when I was there in November. And then suddenly everyone seemed to be reading it. And rightly so! It was a great mystery and a great read. As I'd been warned, it starts a little slow: the mystery seems to be about financial industry shenanigans, but Larsson moves past it and explores a mystery that becomes engrossing, though also graphic and brutal. Forewarning: the original Swedish Read more…
“Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World”
Yes, that's really the title of the book by Haruki Murakami, translated from Japanese. I've read a lot by him, principally his wonderful Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and his funny A Wild Sheep Chase. Hard-Boiled Wonderland is the most fantastical of his I've read–Chinese unicorns, allegorical villages, separated shadows, fish-like people living in the Tokyo underground … the list of the bizarre goes on. Alternating chapters, Murakami flips back and forth between two fantastical stories, he eventually combines them together into one story that actually turns out to be kind of moving. If you're interested in Murakami, I'd recommend either Wind-Up Bird Read more…
1100 pages of Stephen King
Under the Dome called out from the bookshelf to me for some reason I can't quite clarify. Maybe it was the similarity of the plot to The Simpsons movie, maybe it was the beautiful cover (which, since I read the book on my Kindle, I didn't get to enjoy). Or maybe it was that it seemed like such a perfect idea for a Stephen King novel. It was just so him. In fact, you've kind of read this novel if you've read much Stephen King. In terms of plot and theme, it's right there with the novella The Mist. Isolated, a Read more…
Up in the Air, Redux
We took a family outing to see Up in the Air again, which wore well on a second viewing. Not only was it fun to see again, but seeing it in St. Louis–where most of it was filmed–was kind of a treat. There was some random hooting when someone recognized a friend, or a location passed off as Wisconsin or Omaha. We also saw it at one of the coolest theaters in town–the Moolah, a converted Shriners Temple with condos, a movie theater, a bar, and a bowling alley. In between screenings, I also read the novel by Walter Kirn that Read more…
“Master and Commander”
I do like a good sea story, and so I picked up Patrick O'Brian's "Master and Commander," the first in a series about Captain Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin, ship's doctor and naturalist. I really enjoyed the movie from a few years ago (adapted from a later book, but with elements from many of them), and the book was pretty good too. It was a pretty slow read, however. It's only 40 years old, but it feels like it was written at the time it's set (late 1700s during the Napoleonic wars). I don't mind it, but it is dense. Read more…
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