Anybody read a good book lately?

[rjs246]

After seeing and thoroughly enjoying the Fincher Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, I decided to read the book. Lot of people I know have read it and all of them liked it, I figured it was a slam dunk that I would enjoy it.

It farging sucked.

There was very little plot. The main character is cloying and uninteresting. Lisbeth Salander, who everyone fawns over, is totally one-dimensional. And, inexplicably, everyone has sex with each other. With the exception of about 50 pages towards the climax as the mystery is being solved, I felt like my intelligence was being insulted just about from beginning to end.

A word about Lisbeth... her character read like a middle aged man's malformed impression of what a young smart goth chick would be like, if that middle aged man had never actually met a young smart goth chick. He kept pointing out that she was different by actually using the word 'different' over and over again. It was like an old man trying to explain his vision of Lisbeth to another old man without either one of them having any frame of reference for what they're talking about. If I conjured up a fantasy about a computer hacking amazonian from the Congo and tried to write a book about her I would expect that my descriptions of her behavior would be wildly unbelievable and laughably pieced together. People would laugh at how stupid my descriptions were and how off base my assumptions about her behavior are. That's basically what Larsson did here, but for some reason everyone ejaculates in their pants over how interesting Lisbeth is. Idiots.

Beyond the plot and the characters the language used is written at like a 6th grade level. This might be the fault of the translator, but over and over again the author uses idioms and then explains the idiom to the reader. What the farg is the point of using an idiom in your writing if you're just going to explain what it means in the next sentence?

This book farging blew. Don't believe the hype...

And yet I'm still going to read the second one. I absolutely cannot explain why, but I feel compelled to find out if this guy was a total hack and all of his legions of readers are farging morons, or if maybe there's something that I missed that grows on you about these characters.

[ice grillin you]

my girl reads almost a book a week....she reads EVERYTHING and always all the way to the end...but she said dragon tattoo is as close as shes ever come to not finishing a book

[PoopyfaceMcGee]

I read the Hunger Games trilogy this weekend. Excellent story, even if teen angst and the corresponding love triangle are intertwined with it.

[Diomedes]

I read all three Larsson books.  I enjoyed them, but I was underwhelmed.  His language was rudimentary, and that's not the fault of the translation.  His descriptions were stale and boring, he put dialog such as "it's just like a crime novel," in his character's mouths, he grinds and grinds and grinds the "lots of men are pigs, bullies, and thieves," axe.  The bad guys are all bigots, the good guys are all paragons of liberal morality.  Everyone has great sex.  Yawn.
I wouldn't give a shtein about any of that if I had picked up the books thinking that I would just check out for a while with a fun romp through a present day dsytopian crime novel, but I had heard so much hype that my expectations were higher.  Chandler, Hammett, Ambler, this guy is not.
Now that I've read them, I'm looking forward to watching the movies.

in the meantime, I've just discovered Evelyn Waugh.  I gobbled up The Loved One and after my demon spawn has been put to bed tonight, I'll pour out some liquor and start A Handful of Dust.  This guy could write, and holy crap, he's vicious. 

[rjs246]

Just finished Freedom. It was excellent, although I think that Franzen Hoydad out at the end and didn't punch the reader in the face the way he should have. Really good book though.

[Rome]

I have no interest in reading a novel that concerns the disintegration of yet another white bread marriage.

I picked up Seal Team Geromino at the library yesterday.  I'm not typically into that sort of book but I saw an interview with Chuck Pfarrer on that was held here in Daytona Beach and I became casually interested in the subject.

[Diomedes]

Do any of you elitist book readers know anything about Roald Amundsen?  Can you recommend a good book about him?

[Sgt PSN]

I don't, but I'd start with his biography if I were you. 

[Diomedes]

Very funny, screwball.

[PhillyPhreak54]

The Stephen King 11/22/63 book is really good. It's 800ish pages and I am about 2/3rd's of the way through it and its been hard to turn the light off at night to go to sleep.

[Sgt PSN]

Because you're scared?

[ice grillin you]

bedwetter

[Sgt PSN]

And now we've found the connection.

[PhillyPhreak54]

lol

Well maybe I would be ok if one of you heartless bastiches would come tuck me in?

[Don Ho]

J, that would be worse than any nightmare imaginable.