Brad Marley's Blog

Books I Love: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

The best books are always the ones that come out of left field and grab you by the collar and force you to sit down and devote all your free time to until you've turned the last page.

Then, and only then, can you catch your breath and truly appreciate the ride. 

As you can judge by the title of this blog post, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is one of those books.

My brother recommended it to me last year, so, at his suggestion, I took it with me to jury duty.

Due to a glitch in the system, my name was never entered into the pool of potential jurors, so I sat and read until they released us.

And that's probably a good thing, because I was prepared to be held in contempt of court if that meant I could keep reading.

The book, which takes place in Sweden and is presented in the classic "closed-room"style made famous by so many other authors, follows the story of former reporter, Mikael Blomkvist, and superhacker, Lisbeth Salander, as they are hired by a Swedish industrialist to determine what happened to his great-niece, who disappeared decades ago.

What appears on the surface to be just another cold case, the books seeks to exploit some of the less-than-favorable attitudes about the treatment of women in this Nordic country. But if you think the story is just a thinly-veiled attempt to rail against current practices, you're dead wrong.

There is a depth to the main characters and story that you don't often get in your run-of-the-mill thrillers. And, rightfully so, since the late author, Stieg Larrson, had originally planned to write at least eight books in this series. Sadly, he died of a heart attack after he turned in the first manuscript.

The only drawback is that the first 60 pages, or so, can be kind of a bear to get through, what with the somewhat dry talk of the financial scandal that ultimately lands Blomkvist in jail. 

If you can get through that (and I strongly suggest that you do) the rest of the book more than makes up for it.

This book as become my go-to book recommendation for anybody in search of a good read. If you're looking for one, you'd be hard-pressed to find something better.

 

Books I Kinda Like: The Ruins

 

There may not be a book premise more ridiculous than one involving super smart vines with the ability to perfectly mimic a chirping cell phone, for instance, in order to lure unsuspecting adventure hunters to their gory deaths. But try reading this book two weeks after a newborn arrives on little to no sleep, and then tell me how ridiculous it sounds.

Terrifyingly ridiculous, that's how.

Scott Smith's The Ruins tells the story of a group of young adults on vacation in Mexico who follow a German man they've recently become acquainted with into the jungle to help find his brother who was supposed to meet a woman on an architectural dig, but failed to return.

Armed with only limited food, some hard liquor, and their wits, they soon find themselves terribly unprepared to face the most terrifying literary situation I've ever read (and I've read Gerald's Game.) And, as any group of well-fed, privileged human beings would do when faced with scorching heat and maniacal foliage, this one deteriorates quickly, but not in a way you would readily imagine, or else you would be writing horror novels.

I won't go into great detail in case you want to scare yourself silly, but a large chunk of the survival situation involves one character's hands-on quest to find the sickness that has invaded his body.

If I have not yet completely scared you away from reading this book, here are a couple things that will enhance your experience:

1. Only read in the daytime.

2. Make sure you have had ample sleep (i.e. wait until your kids have gotten past the newborn stage.)

3. Remember it's just a book.

But I suppose if you're into reading horror novels, the horror is the best part, and this book certainly delivers. 

Books I Love: In Cold Blood

 

In 1959, two ex-convicts traveled to Kansas for what they were led to believe was an easy score.

According to one of their former cell mates, a wealthy farmer from Kansas hid a large amount of cash on his property, and it was ripe for the picking.

The plan was simple: steal the cash, kill the family, and escape to Mexico. But only two parts of the plan came to fruition. They never found any money.

A brief about the unsolved murders in The New York Times captured enough of author Truman Capote's attention to cause him to convince fellow author Harper Lee to accompany him to Kansas so he could write about the crime before any arrests had been made. He spent six years on it -- including interviews with the suspects -- before it was published in four parts by The New Yorker.

Six years. That's equivalent to six decades in today's tweet-it-before-you-prove-it news cycle.

If Capote spent six years on a story today, the publisher would laugh him out of the building when he turned in his manuscript.

But Capote worked in a time when there wasn't as much urgency; you could let a story simmer before serving it to the public. You could make sure every word was accurate without somebody breathing down your neck to throw up something half-assed because they didn't want to be the last to file the report.

Obviously, those days are history, which makes this book somewhat of a recent relic.

I highly recommend it.

Book Review: The Girl Who Played With Fire

If The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo was a surprisingly delectable, medium-rare filet mignon that got better with each bite devoured, then the The Girl Who Played With Fire was the chef's attempt to replicate the original experience.

Unfortunately for chefs and authors alike, the anticipation of a repeat performance is rarely, if ever, surpassed by the second helping.

That is not to say, however, that The Girl Who Played With Fire was a terrible book.  Quite the contrary.  But when the book that introduced me to a character as complex and intriguing as Lisbeth Salander forced me to remain on the couch until I plowed through to the end, well, the sequel definitely had its work cut out for it.

The second installment of the late Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy takes place roughly two years after the events of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.

When Millennium magazine is approached by a freelance writer to publish a book on Sweden's underground sex trade industry that will implicate some of the country's top officials for their participation in this horrific past time, the editorial staff thinks they have another piece of investigative work on their hands comparable to the success of their fictional Wennerstrom affair coverage. 

But, as is often the case in the world of fiction, something goes wrong, and newly renowned Millennium reporter, Michael Blomquist, feels it is his journalistic duty to skirt the police investigation to solve a crime that Salander, and other characters from the first book, figure prominently in.

I usually judge books on how easy they are to walk away from mid-read, and it was not difficult to put this one aside for a day before returning to the story.

Unlike the first installment, where the story revved up about forty pages in and never stopped escalating, the second seemed to stay stuck in neutral, with an occasional uptick in gear that hinted at a top speed that never materialized.

Luckily for those of us reading the series, the third and final book, The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest, is scheduled to be released in October, and I hold out hope that the plodding pace of the middle entry was a necessity, because the first one was too good and showed too much promise to be an anomaly.

But who am I kidding?  Even if this book was the literary equivalent of an overcooked, dried out T-bone, I would still line up for thirds, come October. 

My Summer Reading List

Since it's nearly August, I thought now would be a good time to share my summer reading list before it becomes my winter reading list.  A book in bold is a book I've already read.

You can see all of the books I've read at my Goodreads account. 

• The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane by Katharine Howe - Using the Salem Witch Trials as the background, and approaching the idea that witches actually did exist, Howe's debut novel centers around the story of a graduate student who is tasked with renovating her grandmother's house in New England, only to happen upon a surprising discovery.

• Cemetery Dance by Lincoln Child and Douglas Preston - Eccentric (and clearly fictional) Special Agent Aloysius Pendergrast returns to help solve a crime where the main suspect appears to be a member of the walking dead.  I love Child and Preston's work even though their books tend to contain outrageous, yet technically feasible, plots.

• Scarecrow by Michael Connelly - You know the newspapers are in trouble when their potential demise becomes one of the stories in a popular fiction novel, but that is how Connelly (a former reporter himself) frames the follow-up to "The Poet."  A victim of the digitization of news, a laid-off reporter for the Los Angeles Times finds himself the target of a serial killer, which could turn into the story that saves his career. 

• Roadside Crosses by Jeffrey Deaver - Deaver has always been at the forefront when it comes to his subject matter, including his 2002 novel, The Blue Nowhere, where his protagonist was a computer hacker searching for a serial killer who was intruding on his victim's personal computers to gain access to them.  In this new book, a killer's victims are the commentors who have attacked him on a popular blog.  

• The Girl Who Played With Fire by Stieg Larsson - The late Stieg Larsson's debut novel, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, was my favorite book of 2008, so needless to say, I have high hopes for the second book in the Millennium trilogy.  This book follows the two main characters from the first book as they are hot on the trail of a sinister corporation.  If it's anything at all like 'Tattoo' it will be my favorite book of 2009.  

• The Lost City of Z by David Grann - This is the nonfiction account of David Grann's trip into the Amazon rain forest to determine what became of legendary explorer, Percy Fawcett, who entered the forest looking for a lost civilization and never returned.

• Fever Pitch by Nick Hornby - This is High Fidelityauthor Nick Hornby's autobiographical account of his life, using Arsenal soccer as the background.  In lieu of chapters, Hornby separates his life by match, sharing stories that revolve around time he spent watching the beautiful game. 

• The Tourist by Olen Steinhauer - I think it was Stephen King who listed this book on his reading list, so I thought I'd add it to the list.  It's about an ex-tourist (a CIA agent without a home or name) who is forced back into the field.  I hear they're turning it into a movie, so I have that going for me.

• Shatter by Michael Robotham - My wife just finished reading this book and she said it's so disturbing that she had trouble reading it by herself in the bedroom with the lights on. Another book on Stephen King's list, this one finds a clinical psychologist trying to determine a suicide victim's motives, only to come to the conclusion that there is something way worse at work.

• The Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mezrich - This is the glorified story of the founders of Facebook, albeit with no input from Mark Zuckerburg.  Still, it should be fascinating to read about how a Web site originally created for Harvard students has blown up the point where my Dad is considering joining.

• Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal by Christopher Moore - I don't normally go out of my way to read a novel that uses humor as its base, but I've heard great things about this book, so I put it on the list.  I hope it comes through.

What are you reading this summer?