CBRIII #2: The History of Love by Nicole Krauss

How does one describe The History of Love? It's one of those post-modern, hipster-favorite books that starts out with two different threads of narratives with an adjoining element until the tendrils end up meeting. Here, the two stories seemed so random that the beginning of the book kind of threw me off. What kept me interested was Krauss' writing - she really has a very beautiful way of putting emotions into words - and though the payoff by the way wasn't as monumental as I was hoping, I am still very happy that I read it.

The two main stories are shown from the points of view of Leo Gursky, an old Jewish man who escaped the Holocaust when he immigrated from Poland, and Alma Singer, a 14-year-old girl who was named after every female character in the book, "The History of Love," which was given to her mother by her father. Alma's father passed away many years ago and her mother's been hiding under her grief ever since. One day, her mother, a book translator, received a letter requesting her to translate "The History of Love." Of course she accepts, and Alma plots to find the writer of the letter for her mother; she is trying to cure her mother's sadness.

I mentioned earlier Krauss' way with words. To describe Alma's mother's sadness, she wrote:

Once Uncle Julian told me how the sculptor and painter Alberto Giacometti said that sometimes just to paint a head you have to give up the whole figure. To paint a leaf, you have to sacrifice the whole landscape. It might seem like you're limiting yourself at first, but after a while you realize that having a quarter-of-an-inch of something you have a better chance of holding on to a certain feeling of the universe than if you pretended to be doing the whole sky.

My mother did not choose a leaf or a head. She chose my father and to hold on to a certain feeling, she sacrificed the world.

See what I mean?

As for Leo Gursky, he is an old man who has basically ghost-walked through life because he lost his only love. He's a real odd ball. His only friend is Bruno, he likes creating diversions in public just so that he can feel like he's not forgotten and he stalks his son that was conceived with his lost love, who does not know his real father. He is also working on a book, though it's not clear why except that he wants to be writing.

I'm not sure what else I can say without giving anything away. Admittedly, I was a little slow on the uptake while reading it, but I enjoyed the careful unraveling of narratives. Though I was hoping for some outpouring of happiness or some sort of emotional catharsis from these very sad characters, it didn't happen.

As a final note, I want to add that the reason why I picked up this book was because her husband is Jonathan Franzen Foer and I've heard say that Krauss is actually the stronger writer. Comparing them, I definitely like her writing better, but I think I prefer Foer's plotting. I know we shouldn't compare writers just because they are married to each other, but it's kind of difficult because The History of Love was really, really similar to Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. In both books, there is a young protagonist who is introverted and precocious looking for a lost parent and there is an older character trying to find his lost love. This similarity wasn't only caught by me, and when asked about it, both Krauss and Foer said that they worked on their novels separately and were actually done with it before they met.

CBRIII #1: War by Sebastian Junger

Sebastian Junger (left) and Tim Hetherington in eastern Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley.
(Credit: Courtesy of Tim Hetherington)

Right around the time that Restrepo was released in selected New York City theaters, Sebastian Junger's book, War, was published. No doubt this book is the literary companion to its cinematic counterpart, directed by both Junger and Tim Hetherington, a videographer and photojournalist (and the movie is now available to watch instantly on Netflix). However, with War, Junger is not just looking at a platoon stationed in the most dangerous outpost in Afghanistan, the Korengal Valley. He is also exploring the nature of combat warfare and has divided his compelling account of the months he spent embedded with the second platoon of Battle Company (part of the 173rd Airborne Brigade) into three parts: Fear; Killing; and Love.

Though the book is very expansive and I took my time reading it, I've decided to distill my review to what was most memorable to me in each section. These are not necessarily specific to the Second Platoon's combat experience, but is more often a general look at a soldier's mentality.

For example, in Fear, Junger describes some of the studies done to combat soldiers to figure out what goes on in a human being's body when he is in a high-stress situation, as combat soldiers are apt to be in. A study involved measuring the amount of cortisol – a hormone secreted from the adrenal gland during stressful times that sharpens a person's mind and concentration – in soldiers' blood and urine several times a day during a period which the platoon braced themselves for an expected attack. They had received intel that the overwhelming force would likely lead to their base being overran by the enemy. As the fateful day of the attack drew closer, the study found that the men's cortisol levels dropped. This was surprising as one would expect that their adrenaline levels would be higher as they anticipate this attack. However, when the supposed day of the attack passed without an incident, the cortisol levels started rising rapidly. As it turns out, these men were more at ease facing a known threat than facing an unknown one.

I found this interesting, since behind this is a concept of courage. Being highly-trained individuals whose sole purpose is to kill, these men are able to push aside their fear when they know that there is a fight coming, even if it is highly probable that they would be defeated. A mark of a good combat soldier is not about being unafraid in the face of danger, but being able to still function like a combat soldier despite feeling scared to death. "There are different kinds of strengths," wrote Junger "And containing fear may be the most profound, the one without which armies couldn't function and wars couldn't be fought (God forbid.)"

In Killing, Junger confesses one aspect of war rarely talked about: War is exciting. Soldiers and journalists don't want to play up that part of it because of the horrors it visits upon nations, men and families, but there is no thrill or high quite like it for combat soldiers. Many of the men in the Second Platoon talk about how they are not sure they will be able to return to civilian life after their deployment is up because there is a great disconnect between being caught in an enemy's crossfire and doing something mundane like balancing your check book. Thriving on the constant adrenaline rush, it would be difficult for them to find a normal day-to-day job that sates the need of feeling accomplished. There were many questions raised about a combat soldier's future after the war, but really no answers.

It is also in this section that Junger highlights the bravery of Sergeant Salvatore Guinta, the recipient of the Medal of Honor, which is the military's highest decoration for valor. In 2007, Guinta was patrolling at night in the Korengal Valley with his platoon, about 18 people, and they were ambushed by insurgents. The ambush is known as an "L-shaped ambush" and can result in a handful of men wiping out an entire platoon if done effectively. However, under intense gunfire, Guinta was able to properly assess the situation to save his platoon mates and prevent one of them from being taken by a Taliban fighter. Below is a 60 minute interview with Lara Logan after Guinta received the Medal of Honor:



And here is an interview with Stephen Colbert for some levity.

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Salvatore Giunta
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog March to Keep Fear Alive

Though the platoon suffered casualties – the man that Guinta saved from the insurgent died shortly after – this was considered a victory because no one was taken during this ambush.

Stripped to its essence, combat is a series of qick decisions and rather precise actions carried out in concert with ten or twelve other men. In that sense it's much more like football than, say, like a gang fight.

Which leads me to the final section, Love. As brutal and destructive combat warfare is, it is also impossible for a platoon to succeed if the men are not ready to pledge their lives for one another. Throughout the book, Junger describes some of the physical tussles that these men get into (for example, a way to welcome a soldier into the platoon is by ganging up on him and beating him to a bloody pulp) and the insults they toss at each other. But at the end of the day, when faced with the pressures of an insurgent attack, these men are ready to put themselves in danger if only to stop the enemy from shooting at their friends. This paragraph will explain it better:

Combat fog obscures your fate – obscures when and where you might die – and from that unknown is born a desperate bond between the men. That bond is the core experience of combat and the only thing you can absolutely count on. The Army might screw you and your girlfriend might dump you and the enemy might kill you, but the shared commitment to safeguard one another's lives is unnegotiable and only deepens with time. The willingness to die for another person is a form of love that even religions fail to inspire, and the experience of it changes a person profoundly. What the Army sociologists, with their clipboards and their questions and their endless meta-analyses, slowly came to understand was that courage was love. In war, neither could exist without the other, and that in a sense they were just different ways of saying the same thing.

I'm really glad I read this book, if only because now I have more of an insight into a combat soldier's mind. Compared to The Forever War by Dexter Filkins, Junger focuses more on the soldier and the ins and outs of combat warfare. There are some tidbits of how his role as a reporter plays in the platoon (such as when they offer him a gun to use for protection or when he wrestles with the notion that whether or not helping to throw a grenade means a line has been crossed) but overall, Junger does not dwell on his personal introspection. He also does not bother with the politics of the war, be them American or Afghan, and his storytelling does not wander far from the Korengal Valley. In this narrow, tightly-paced account, Junger is not only able to show these young men as ruthless, cussing, killing machines, he is able to to connect all the terrible parts of this war to love. And that really is something.

The photo above shows an American bunker in the Korangal Valley, June 2008.
(Credit: Courtesy of Tim Hetherington)

In This Post, I Talk Aimlessly About Books

I started a draft about my D.C./Texas trip back in the first week of November. I had images of tour groups on segways alongside all the marbled monuments and wrote briefly about how I thought segways were lazy and that no tour guide in New York would be caught dead in it (Seriously. The pedestrians would trample 'em – we stroll faster than segways on full speed.) I put quite a bit of effort into it and considered publishing the part I wrote but decided against it.

Truthfully, I've been very deflated lately. Cannonball Read 2 is over – it ended on November 1 – and I no longer have to read and write reviews on a deadline, so my blog now seems to lack purpose. The Pajiba staff highlighted the end of CBR2 and I was happy for everyone who made it to their 52nd book, and even to those who got close. Hell, I'm happy for anyone who tried (writing reviews is fucking hard.) But it made me sad that I couldn't bring myself to really care considering how excited I was about it in the beginning.

I have continued reading though. At first, I thought I would continue the Read until I reach the 52nd. But I prefer reading without pressure and reading without keeping track of what number that book is, so I threw that idea out.

Though I've mentioned that writing reviews are tough, I do enjoy them because sometimes I might not discover I have a certain thought about a book until after I've teased it out Blogger's blank space. So as much as I can (as much as I am motivated to), I think I should try and review the books I want to review, and even those that I don't necessarily want to review, but that I think might be interesting to others.

You know what I hate about writing blogs? How many times I say the word "I." It's incredibly self-indulgent and I often find myself trying to think up of synonyms for "I" without the sentence sounding awkward.

This digression aside, here are the books that have been keeping me preoccupied the past month:

Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
Obama's Wars by Bob Woodward
The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

I don't remember Cat's Cradle; the only thing that saved Woodward's book from his bone-dry writing is the interesting insight we get to the White House on Afghanistan; and The Hunger Games was good and fun, but no Golden Compass. I will, however, still give the other two books in the trilogy a chance – I love Young Adult books (thanks for recommending them, Blakspring and Jen. K!)

Currently, I am reading War by Sebastian Junger. I am enjoying it immensely and I can't wait to write a review of it (this is where the reader says, "Hah, if that happens.") Junger was one of the directors of Restrepo, a documentary he directed with Tim Hetherington about a platoon of American soldiers on an outpost in the Korengal Valley in Afghanistan. I have yet to see the documentary, and the book is giving me serious regret for missing it when it came out during the summer.

There's not much else I can or will say about my life. I don't write about it here a lot - really, there's not much to write about. You know why I enjoy reading? Because, in most books, there is often a sense of purpose with each character, be they fictional or non-. That's why there are whole chapters written about them, about their adventures and failures. The characters may have failed, but they failed so spectacularly because they cared so much. If they win, or if there is a favorable conclusion, then more power to them.

Cannonball Read #36: Freedom by Jonathan Franzen

There's been so much written about "Freedom" that I feel like quite an amateur putting my two cents into the cacophony of opinions (" ... a work of total genius," "A book people are eager to love or hate for reasons mostly unrelated to the words on the pages," "This is his glory and his curse.") I had read "The Corrections" about three years ago and found myself blown away by how amazing it was ... and then I promptly forgot about it. No, seriously, ask me about the plot and characters and I draw a blank except for the general gist: Dad has Alzheimer's; Mom's kind of a bitch and is possibly on speed; sister is a lesbian/home-wrecker; brother is over-educated, flaky and he travels to some country for money. (A giant "Maybe?" to what I just typed because I am not going to look it up.)

That's not to say that I think Franzen isn't an effective writer. I remember getting really invested in his book while reading it - I just read it so quickly that I failed, over time, to really retain any of it. And I think the same thing happened with "Freedom." As usual, I decided that typing the review a month after I've read the book is the smartest thing to do, especially when the book clocks in at 500+ pages (No, it's not the smartest thing to do.) However, my spotty memory after this short delay best illustrates why I consider Franzen to be both a great and a pulp-y writer. The man writes literal page-turners and I devour his words so quickly and urgently - not unlike the way I read Dan Brown (don't judge). I don't read Franzen the way I read Steinbeck or Vonnegut, where I chew over the words and meaning and nuance, which isn't to say that there aren't any. I just can't seem to stop myself from flying over his words.

He also excels at characters. They are neurotic and compelling, simultaneously appealing and appalling because I can see so much of myself (and people I know) in them. Moreover, plot is so minute that I am constantly amazed that he had managed to interest me in a run-of-a-mill wife-cheats-on-husband story. Really, the general plot is not that intricate, but the characters' roles in their very painfully ordinary lives suffuse the clichés with newness.

Unless you've been steadfastly ignoring every magazine/website for the past three months, chances are you already know the plot. But if not, you're going to be surprised by how boring it sounds. Walter and Patty Berglund are a long-suffering married couple with two children. Walter is the rock of family, trying to keep the neuroses and unhappiness of his stay-at-home wife in check while working a full-time job to keep his family happy. But the family isn't happy – not really. The son, Joey, is a cocky know-it-all who wants to have-it-all, cake-candles-icing-whole-nine-yards; the daughter, Jessica, is the only sane person in the household, but the inattention the family gives her makes me think there can be a sequel coming from Franzen focused on her titled "The Therapy Sessions." Patty has been harboring a crush on Walter's best friend, Richard, for years, and finally consummates her desires when Walter leaves the two of them in his cabin home.

As I said, it is not the most earth-shattering concept ever, but it really is very, very good. Sometimes, people like to gush about the It Books because it's trendy to do so – and I think they like feeling smart too. "Freedom" may be an It Book but I do think Franzen's talents are worthy of all the praise because it can definitely stand up to – and even exceed – expectations.

Cannonball Read #35: Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett

(I've decided to create a "Neil Gaiman" tag for my posts since I've read so much of his work.)

I read "Good Omens" close to about a month ago, and the details are a little hazy in my brain. I am, however, really glad that I actually bought the book, because I can go back and reread it. This book was so much fun to read, and parts of it had me guffawing on my morning subway ride to work. "Good Omens" is definitely my favorite Gaiman so far, and the fact that it is a collaboration with Terry Pratchett is not lost on me.

The story is about an on-coming apocalypse brought upon by the Anti-Christ, who was raised as a human boy on Earth by human parents, and an angel and demon's race to stop it. No, not really - it's more than that.

It's also about the prophecies of a crazy-accurate witch, Agnes, from the 1655 and her descendant, Anathema, trying to interpret the crazy babble about the circumstances of the apocalypse. She meets the descendant to the witch-hunter who killed Agnes, and (as it is already written in Agnes' prophecies) starts developing fuzzy feelings for him. But it's not just that.

It's about the friendship between an angel and a demon who actually both quite like the world they live in, and do not wish for it to be destroyed. So they start giving the young Anti-Christ a balanced education of both good and evil, so that he will be persuaded to not destroy the Earth. Too bad they got the wrong boy - he's as normal as can be, except for the fact that he can probably now recite some really strange nursery rhymes. Aziraphale and Crowley's friendship was some of my favorite parts of the book. They were sarcastic and acerbic and wonderfully real to each other.

It's about a young boy named Adam who loves the town he has grown up in and loves his friends, family and life - that when given the chance to taste enormous power, he decides to do the very grown-up thing of just sitting back and letting his parents ground him.

Finally, it's about never being able to plan something as specific as life and death, especially if it's for the decimation of an entire world. Something/demon/angel/child is always going to come along and fuck up the plans for boom-boom wars.

As you can see, it is very difficult for me to write a coherent synopsis of this book (and not just because I waited a month to write it). It's mostly hilarious and partly sad, and there are also some very interesting ideas about fate here that would probably only give me a headache if I think too hard about it. This is definitely one to reread, if only just to see if I caught all the jokes and details.

Doomed Lovers At The Train Station

Last Saturday, a friend gave me tickets to see the Broadway play, Brief Encounter. I knew nothing about it and went into the Studio 54 theater completely blind. My initial judgment of it was that it was very British and far too quirkiwhimsilicious (that's on the bad side of quirky where the whimsy feels forced).

By the end of the hour and a half, I was completely sold. Most plays try to transport you to a different time and place with the costumes and appropriate props, and director Emma Rice certainly had the stage decked out with pre-World War II nostagia. But it was really the intensity of the emotions portrayed by the actors and the literal interpretation of two lovers getting caught up in a torrent of emotions that left my insides feeling strangely raw.

For those who do not know, Brief Encounter is based on a Noel Coward and David Lean film from 1945 of the same name. Laura, a housewife, meets Alec, a young doctor who is married as well, by chance and they fall in love. The story is incredibly simply, but this does not diminish its tragic end. It's strange that in today's films we have to have something huge and substantial happen to the characters - someone's dying of cancer or there's a huge betrayal or there is a great sacrifice - for us to feel like it was something worth crying over.

With Laura and Alec, it was simply that they fell in love but could not be together because both had their own families. In the end, they had to "be sensible" – keeping their feelings buttoned up in their stiff period costumes, yet knowing that their hearts were irrevocably broken. I left the darkened theater feeling both alive and numbed by the sheer onslaught of emotions, and was astonished that I could feel these things after having initially felt disdain for the two lovers.

It was such a pleasant coincidence then that this week's New York Magazine did an article on the design of the play. The piece included this sketch below, which was created by Neil Murray, the scene-and costume designer. I think it perfectly encapsulates the tragic romance.

The Food They Carry

This post is dedicated to Jen K. Stay safe in Iraq.

Ashley Gilbertson – a war photographer who I recognized as Dexter Filkin's colleague in his book, The Forever War (BEST BOOK EVER) – recently wrote an interesting article in The New York Times about the types of food that the troops in Iraq carry. Each country's combat ration hold practical items, but there are also foods that serve to remind a soldier of his home. The American Meals Ready to Eat (M.R.E.) include peanut butter and tortillas; the Swedes and Norwegians have cod stew with sour cream and potato; the Germans have goulash.

Gilbertson also put together a neat interactive where he photographed each country's combat ration and their foods against a lighted-up surface.* I included some of my favorites below. If you have some time, you should take a look at the article and click through the interactive.

United States - I love that they get skittles.

South Korea - Of course there's kimchi.

Ukraine - I really liked how bland and drab this country's food looked compared to all the other countries.

Ashley Gilbertson wrote:

In combat, eating is often the only good thing about a day. When a soldier or marine sits down to warm up his M.R.E., he’s not being shot at, he’s not losing friends. It’s almost a ritual, and the very act of opening one of these packages suggests safety, however brief it may be.

*It's sort of reminiscent of what David Littschwager did with his One Cubic Foot project in National Geographic - where he went to different locations and stuck an alloted space of about cubic foot, then took living organism out to photograph them and made it into a photo collage.

All photos by Ashley Gilbertson/VII Network, For The New York Times.

Cannonball Read #34: Up In The Air by Walter Kirn

I finished Walter Kirn's Up In The Air in a day and a half. Just zoomed right through, and I felt like I was speed-reading at times. Kirn's writing style made me want to gobble up each following sentence, because all the observations of his protagonist, Ryan Bingham, were sharp and hilarious. I felt like I was getting a peek at 50 different stereotypes in a single paragraph, and I really enjoyed it.

If you've seen the movie, toss it out. The movie is great in its own right (I love the movie even though it depresses me), but the book that it was adapted from is very different. Ryan Bingham is a constantly air-bound corporate flack who is in "Career Transitions" (a euphemism for "He fires people for companies") obsessed with reaching the millionth-mile mark on his frequent flyer miles - that much is the same. However, he has already decided in the beginning that he wants to quit his job and is just using his company to get his last remaining miles in to hit his goal.

Much of the novel deals with his perfect schedule getting messed up or the general feeling that he is being messed with. You don't really sympathize with his frustrations so much as you laugh at them, and then cheer as he adapts to them (either with a swig of liquor or by popping pills). He spouts generalisms and platitudes throughout the book, but does not see that he himself is a stereotype. His fear of commitment and the way he keeps track of his miles only serve to remind us that he is running away from something. Ryan reveals a lot of information about himself, but only a few of them are valuable. It is our job to guess whether if he is sharing or if he is about to throw us a curve ball.

I'm not sure how Kirn managed to get me to root for such a jerk, but he did it. The only person Ryan was nice to (without an ulterior motive) was his screw-up kid sister who was about to get married for the third time. With everyone else, he calculates his advantage, their disadvantage, the possible outcomes - much like he does with his miles and his credit card rewards. Though he is completely screwed up, he knows it. It only took a million miles to figure it out.

Cannonball Read #33: When We Were Orphans by Kazuo Ishiguro

Like Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Isihiguro infuses When We Were Orphans with a sense of measured nonchalance. While reading, I could imagine Christopher Banks sitting across from me and just talking his thoughts out, just him and I having an easy conversation. But his words, the events that he speaks of, are a slow, gradual build up - like he is carefully trying to tiptoe around the real point of his story.

In the beginning, Christopher leads us through his high-society life in London and early success as a detective. He befriends a young lady, Sarah, who is also an orphan. He never talks about the cases that he is solving - there is almost a sense of, "But you already know, so why should I boast about my achievements?" - but fills us in on his childhood in Shanghai. He had moved to England after his father and mother disappeared, and in the second half of the book, he travels back to his old home country, now changed irrevocably by the Sino-Japanese War, to try and find out how he became an orphan.

It certainly says something about Ishiguro's craft that I can simultaneously be bored by his words and intrigued by the meaning behind his writing. I was curious about Christopher throughout the book. He may present himself as a very adaptable and intelligent person, but there are hints offered that this is not a universal perception. Early in the book, an old classmate referred to him as an "odd bird," while another later said that he was a "miserable loner." Christopher took offense to these characterizations because he felt that he had always been able to mimic his classmates in their normalcy.

There was also the impression that if he solved the case of his missing parents, the Sino-Japanese War would stop raging. At certain points, I wondered if we were in some alternate universe and that Christopher was being an unreliable narrator by neglecting to tell his that he was the Prince of England or something. Other times, I thought the other British expatriates were making fun of him and his self-importance by fawning over him and the extremely unlikely return of his parents.

In the end, I'm not sure these things matter. At first, I saw the story as a mystery with the discovery of Christopher's parents to be the end point. Throughout the book, I was disturbed by how his perception of himself and the perception that people had of him seemed incongruent. How could we trust his memories of his childhood and of his parents' disappearance? What is ironic is that his profession brings to mind an image of objectivity; the man has solved many difficult cases and been lauded as one of the brightest minds in London society. Yet his existence - the way he sees himself and sees the world around him - is such a fragment to me. Though I trust that he thinks his version is the truth, I do not believe it is the truth.

Does that even make sense? All I know is that after I finished the book, I was left feeling sad for Christopher. Not because of his parents or his missed chances with Sarah, but because he still managed to hold us at arm's length even after revealing the saddest events in his life. Is this the result of having lost his parents and never quite being able to come to terms with their disappearance? There are no answers about that, and Christopher is more than happy to ignore his unhappiness. However, for me, there remains a sense of a wasted life.

Cannonball Read #32: The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

Everyone's been raving about this book and I've been seeing it all over the subway, so when my friend lent it to me, I figured, why not?

Well, let me count the reasons why (not):

1) It is slow. I was promised a thrilling ride of mystery and intrigue. What I got was 200-plus pages of exposition before it actually got good.

2) I know that this book was translated from Swedish, but they really should have gotten a second English-speaking editor to look over the translated text. Because it just read so awkwardly - like it's been translated. (An example: "...kicked his backside" instead of "kick his ass/butt." Anything would have been better than "backside.")

3) I was at my local bar chatting with random people and mentioned that I was reading the book. They asked me which part I was at, I told 'em, and they said that I haven't gotten into the weird sexual parts yet and that it gets really good. I got to the weird sexual parts and I thought, "It took him 200-plus pages to get to this?" To say I was disappointed is a big understatement.

4) I wanted to know more about Lisbeth, and less about Mikael. Mikael annoyed me, and Lisbeth intrigued me. However, by the end, they had both aggravated me so thoroughly that I can safely say that I do not care about the rest of the trilogy.

For those who don't know the plot: This rich old man wants Mikael Blomkvist to study his huge household and find out what happened to his niece, who disappeared years and years ago. Mikael takes way too long to learn all the relatives' names and a couple months into his "investigation" (I call what he did in the first part of his year "crammed reading." I did it in college... during a weekend before finals) he makes some breakthrough and decides to hire Lisbeth Salander, a skilled researcher, to help him solve the mystery of the Missing Niece. Because obviously he realizes he did not have the skills to move ahead since it took him so effing long to get to a plot development.

Lisbeth is some enigma because she has lots of tattoos and doesn't like smiling or talking (Swedish people should come to New York. We are full of "enigmas" here). She has a checkered past and there are things referred to as The Bad Time. I assume this will be explored in the next two books but I honestly do not care. (Swedish readers, did Larsson really call it "The Bad Time" in Swedish? Seriously?) Lisbeth also freelances for some company that basically does background checks on people and her boss thinks of her as a friend/daughter/lusty object - but that's only because of her lack of talking/smiling and lots of tattoos.

During the course of this book, Mikael gets laid by three different women. I simply do not get it - he was a bore.

Look, I know this isn't supposed to be a great, important novel. But the plot dragged, and by the time I was ready to give up on it, it got exciting, so of course - since I had invested all that time on it - I had to finish it. And when I finished it, I was just annoyed. Because the payoff was really not worth it. Everyone disses Dan Brown books because they are stupidly written (they are) and there are some plot holes (oh God, so many) but at least his books are fast-paced and it gets into the action immediately.

Anyway, I just do not get the craze over this. However, I can see how it would make a great movie because they would (hopefully) gloss over all that BLAH BLAH BLAH SHOOT ME THIS IS SO BORING and get straight into the action.

Note: I am so annoyed at this book that I will not give it a header picture.