Review: "The Girl who Kicked the Hornet's Nest" by Stieg Larsson

Finally. It's only been about 2 1/2 years, but finally! I have read and finished all three of Stieg Larsson's books. 

Let me start by stating that I am not wowed or overwhelmed with gratification. The books took on a life of their own, and I am glad to be done with them. 

Now with that stated, lest you think I only read them because everyone else had. 

...ok, maybe the first one. It took a while to get into, but once I did, I was hooked. After,

I couldn't wait to pick up The Girl who Played with Fire, if for nothing else but to see if Lisbeth Salander survived. That book left me cliffhanging too. But stubborn as I am, I withheld reading The Girl who Kicked the Hornet's Nest until it came out on paperback. I like to experience series books in all the same manner. 

Finally this Spring it came out in mass market paperback, and I preordered it. 

It, like the first, took a bit to get into. This made it easy to pick up and put down again. The first two books I read during the summer season when I could sit all day on the beach devoting 6-8 hours at time to the pages of scandal. I did not have the luxury with the last one. I needed uninterrupted, disciplined time to dive into the Hornet's nest. 

Recently, I took some days off of work with no plans - and now I've finished the book. I held episodes of "The Commish" as collateral against the end of the pages. It worked. 

But as I mentioned earlier, finishing this book, though a feat, was not as gratifying as I wanted it to be. Complete? Yes. Ready to reread? No. 

I wanted a spectacular ending. One of those endings that make you want to reexamine every word leading up to the final punctuation. One of those endings that when you finish the book, a sigh is released and the book held close for a moment. 

Instead, I got the fairy-tale ending I dimly saw coming 3/4 of the way through. I kept reading hoping for something more and it didn't happen. 

I got bored with Salander and Larsson. 

It happened during the trial. Giannini began attacking the system that so many had been blinded to and it was clear. As sensationalized the actions and consequences of the characters and plot became, the underlying theme bared itself. Salander's lawyer twisted the State prosecution's words, asked questions, and reveled their assumptions. 

It was clear how easy it and exaggerated things can become. More so, it made me wonder how often we are held to others' assumptions and never asked questions, but rather brought to trials in their minds that they've already won. Or worse, we act as the state, not asking questions of our sources, taking and assuming only what we are told or see without digging deeper. How many Lisbeth Salanders are out there because we don't look for ourselves? 

Review of Almost Moon by Alice Sebold; Back Bay Books / Little, Brown and Company, New York, NY: 2007.

My sister lent me this book as something I should read. I haven’t read any of Alice Sebold’s other books (Lovely Bones & Lucky), but now I think I shall.

Almost Moon begins relatively simple. Middle-aged single daughter, Helen, cares for her aging mother. The mother, as we learn is suffering from Dementia, and probably a host of other mental illnesses. Helen narrates through the struggles of caring for someone so close, so troubled.

She takes on this task of her mother mostly alone. She is the only child of her parents. Once a day, Mrs. Castle checked on Helen’s mother, brought her flowers from her garden and food from her kitchen. Helen makes it clear that Mrs. Castle does this only to ensure that her mother has woken each day and is still alive.

Helen finds herself going through routines with her mother, rout from a mother-daughter obligation. During these mundane visits, Helen flashes back to memories of her mother when she was a child, when her children were grandchildren, and even when her mother had the chances to interact with the great-grandchildren.

I picked the book up to read one night before bed. The pages flipped by. I thought I might get through a good chunk of it in one sitting. Then the first chapter ended. And it ended hard.

The book sat on my nightstand for quite a few nights. Alone.

Finally, I felt able to open it up again. I reread the last paragraph of the first chapter to make sure I had read it right. I did. It took a few pages into the second chapter to get back in the groove of Helen’s voice, but once I did, the pages flipped by again.

Helen takes the reader on a journey. It is a familiar journey between the intricacies of our kinship relationships and the outside world. Sebold sucks us into Helen’s vacuum in which the relationships with her daughters are all that matter, and the memories of her parents are all she can think about.

Mid-way through the book, Helen reflects on her father explaining her mother to her. He uses the moon as an example, and how it’s always there, but not always seen in full. Sebold has her title and Helen accepts that her mother will always be there, seen or unseen.

The book continues to weave Helen’s struggle with what she’s done and how to continue the life she knew. I yearned for her to make the right decisions from this point out, but Helen can’t see right from wrong anymore. Her view is jaded by her actions, her motivations, and her reasoning.

In the end, I felt like there would be more of an end. However, like her mother, and like the moon, Helen develops almost full circle. I closed the book with great satisfaction.

Review of "Room" by Emily Donoghue, Hachette Audio: 2010

Laundry. Firehouse. Email. The list of things I need to do tonight. As I repeated this list aloud, I noticed the rhythm of it. It’s simple and absolute. The process of jumping from one to the next doesn’t allow for questions of what if, how, when.

Then I realized why it seemed so familiar. The rhythm caught in my head was that of a popular cartoon character, Dora. I have watched children I babysit grow up to her. They thrive on her audience interaction. Just last week, a child I have known since his birth was answering her back and telling me all the answers she asked. At three years of age, it was the first time I have seen him so active with the show. (After the show, we even acted out parts of the episode.)

Emily Donoghue also writes about a boy in love with Dora. Her boy, Jack, is trapped in a room with his mother. He has spent his whole life here. The room measures 11’ x 11’ and has the bare necessities. Old Man Nick has kept them here Jack’s entire life. To Jack, this is the world.

Despite being surrounded by four encasing walls, Jack’s mother finds the strength to make his world all it can be and more. Old Man Nick allows them a television by which Jack watches the TV people. Through this portal Jack befriends Dora among others.

Without knowing any humans other than his mother (he hides when Old Man Nick is around), Jack relies on his television friends to carry him through. His mother relies on him to carry her through. She continues to live everyday because of Jack. They escape daily in his young, wild imagination and her want of normalcy.

They have their rituals to help knock down their walls. They eat and pray. They play physical games, like track and corpse, and read endlessly, like Alice in Wonderland again and again. His mother uses Jack’s comfort with ritual and love of Dora to aid them in their escape.

During their attempted escape, Jack constantly falls back to his repetition. One word each, one word at a time. I won’t tell you the words, nor if they escape as not to spoil it. However, the repetition, the rhythm gives him comfort. It is what holds him together when his mother can’t.

It is great for Jack, or any of us to have this abstract to fall back on. It is like having your favorite stuffed animal, blanket, or remote with you at the hardest times. When the world changes and the walls come down Jack catatonically repeats his words, counts his teeth, and takes in the stories and surroundings.

With the mind occupied the eyes can take in the necessary and leave the rest to guess. Questions don’t have time to form and we search for the familiar things, like Sunday Treat. We rely on the rhythm to keep our world absolute and simple. For it is when the repetition stops we feel like we are bumping around in the back of a pickup traveling down a country road. At any second we could fall out. Especially if the driver stops quick…

Review of "Barefoot" by Elin Hilderbrand, Hachette Audio; 2008

Shoeless and sockless is the only way to walk along the beach. These three women leave their shoes at home and head to the island of Nantucket to rediscover the sand between their toes and their spirits within their souls.

“Cancer is a journey,“ the narrator speaks in the beginning. Just is life. This is the trip that lasts a lifetime. It has its child-dug holes the size of graves lifted by dunes and maintained by the soft endless beach sand.

Elin Hilderbrand cleverly weaves the paths that Vicki, Josh, Melanie, and Brenda took to get to this summer throughout the novel. The moments they experienced separately all lead up the moments they share together. This summer is going to be different. This is the summer that will always be remembered and yearned.

This journey of three women at a beach house in Nantucket takes me back to the season we summered. The world around us was crazy and we put it on pause for a few months to walk along the shore.

Vicki has cancer. Newly diagnosed, she transcends her view of the world through the novel. At the beginning it is a poor-me attitude followed quickly by a why-should-anyone-be-any-different one, finally to an I’m-going-to-fight-this-and-live mantra. She found a new appreciation in life.

That season we did too. Surrounded by old and new friends, fresh perspectives, and the encouragement to try something new, we climbed the dunes and fell in the holes. Yet, we continued to walk along the water’s edge by day and by night.

Brenda is on a true vacation from life. She lost her promising career over a silly stipulation. She avoids the potentially haunting phone calls from her lawyer and attempts to bury herself in a screenplay. The beach becomes her muse. She closes her eyes, jumps, and flips her troubled times into something fresh and overdue.

The beach became our escape from reality. In the chairs, on the blankets, and beach-side bars we mused and wrote our own stories. We didn’t look back as we broke into the future. We turned a heat wave into a refreshing summer rainstorm.

Josh, a college student, discovers the lust of an older woman, a real woman he describes her. He knows it is just for the summer, or so he keeps telling himself. Yet, he finds himself wanting to listen and be with her more and more. But when she mentions contacting her husband, he is thrown back.

How easy it is to recognize real when you can compare two juxtaposed. Our season, as true as it felt, in retrospect we know it was just months in the twilight zone. We floated among the stars with no gravity to hold us down. The night sky was so dark we could only see the twinkling lights. We never saw the comets coming.

Melanie finds comfort and confidence in Josh. Her failed in-vitro attempts lead her to a failing marriage and this summer trip. The news of her pregnancy and the opportunity to get away lead her to Josh. She lets the salt air carry their hearts away.

When he meets her husband, he can literally feel his stomach jump to his throat. It is only quelled when the distraction of a past romance haunts him and she discovers their truth. They are not sure how it happened, it just did.

A summer romance turned into more. The white noise when we’d meet someone new. Someone we shouldn’t be meeting. Someone who should only exist in distant stories, like the fairy in Peter Pan. It made us question our views, realign our priorities, and learn what really counts.

His vision is blurry and narrow. He knows what he wants in the moment, but also realizes after the moments pass, things change. In hindsight, however, it is all so clear. Part of him wishes things ended differently, but it is probably better off that it didn’t. His heart needed to close.

In the end, Melanie, Vicki, Josh, and Brenda are transformed. Though they each made some questionable choices during their few months together, their decisions created a trail to self discovery and appreciation.

Fusion of the fairytale and real life make the trip and the summer worth every breaking wave on the shore. When the crest comes crashing down, they had the sand between their toes to ease the changing tides.

The revelation of the season wasn’t as eye-opening as a new day. Rather, it was more of just a passing cloud, the refreshing rainstorm at the end of a hot date. In the scheme of the summer events, it was just another wave in the ocean.

And, we still walk barefoot along the water’s edge.

Summer Synopsis of a Reading Recluse

Looking at the date of my most recent post on this blog, I hope you’re not thinking I gave up on reading for the summer. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. Perhaps I was bound so tight to the pages of my summer reading that I did not get the chance to write. Each time I could, I picked up a book instead. Not a bad thing, but neglectful nonetheless.

July 23rd was my last post. It was a review of my cousin’s play that we attended the reading of. I’ve debated the depth of reviewing an audio book…the stage reading was like a 2 ½ hour abridged, live audio book. I think I need to review my self-inflicted rules; namely eliminating all of them except to keep this blog about literature. Maybe that’s why it was called “Language Arts” in elementary school…

It’s like opening a can of worms now. As I mentioned earlier much of my summer free time was spent in a book, or listening to one. If I were to write a review of each one, it may come across as spam. (Nevermind the time it would take away from the books I’m into now.)

A fair warning to all or any, audio books are addicting. I would rather give up my Netflix, soymilk, and perhaps Jack, then my subscription to Audible.com. Unemployment paid me enough to do all, but Jack – he’s really not going anywhere! With each month subscription you get a free credit; it’s like having a free book (even though the subscription pays for it, it’s still cheaper than buying it outright). And you can accumulate them for a few months, so it’s kind of like a savings account too!

Audio books allow me to get stuff done around the house. Once upon a time I drove 45 minutes to work one-way. I would listen to a book a week. Now I drive 5 minutes, but still feel the need to listen to my books. The summer is perfect for this. I would sit at the beach with my headphones on and listen to Carolyn McCormick narrate. On my way home, especially if there was traffic, I’d continue to listen. But most of all, the idea that I could read and do dishes or vacuum indulged me into more James Patterson and introduced me to Stuart Neville who wrote, ‘The Ghosts of Belfast.’ It also gave me a chance to listen to other books such as, ‘Fatally Flaky’ and ‘Love & Lies’ (by Diane Mott Davidson and Kimberla Lawson Roby respectfully) that I had downloaded awhile ago. These were just the tip of the scale for my indulgent summer.

So my summer actual reading list….maybe I should work backwards, or in no order. Middle of the spring time I caught wind of Harlan Coben. I took advantage of my new library card and indulged in “Long Shot” and a Supper Murder Mystery series book, “Chile con Corpse” by J.B.Stanley. Each book burned in my hands like money in the pocket. The library gives 3 week loans; the books were returned within the week.

I was back for more. I could not find any more by Stanley but, there was another Coben on the shelf. Over the summer months, and mostly on the sand, I read at least 3 of Coben’s Myron Boliter books. Definitely not in order; the older ones are harder to come by. I’m still working on obtaining them though.

I felt like I needed to take a hiatus from the library. I didn’t want them to start to recognize me and I felt like I needed to ration my reading. It was taking control over my social life. “Hi, I’m 27 and single. I didn’t go out at all this weekend because I couldn’t put my book down to answer a text or 10.” Warning sign. Then I went to my parents’ to do laundry and my mother hands me the popular ‘A Girl With a Dragon Tattoo.’

I remember her passing it along to me the weekend after the fourth book by Stieg Larson was released on Audible.com. I commented to her about it, and she continued with the struggle to get into the first book. That’s all I needed. I am not one to read a book because everyone else does. I prefer to seek a book because of a review, an appreciation of the topic, or a fan of the author. However, the challenge was all I needed to peel the cover open and soak up the rays with the book in my hand. I gave it back the following Tuesday or Wednesday. I have yet to read the sequels (nor has anyone challenged me to), but I really enjoyed Larson’s poetic justice and creation of a place and lives seemingly so real. I look forward to picking up the next few.

Maybe I’ll get them from the library. Just recently I learned how to reserve / request books online at my local library. I guess other states (or because RI is so small, other counties) have something similar. The network of libraries in RI allows me to search the entire database, request the book online. It is pulled and sent to my local library and they leave me a message that the book will be waiting for me until a certain date. Certainly doesn’t seem like the library I grew up with! But then again, this September was the first I tried the feature.

The book I requested was ‘Nine Hills to Nambonkaha’ by Sarah Erdman. She chronicled her time with the Peace Corps in Africa. I have given much thought to this path myself and the end of August always makes me want to be smart and dive into school again. This book was my fix for the month, or really six weeks. I wasn’t sure how the whole ‘reserve’ thing worked so I browsed the library before approaching the desk. In my travels I found a Coben “Boliter series” that I hadn’t read yet. That book delayed me beginning ‘Nine Hills’ by a week and a half. Fortunately my library also allowed me to renew online. Fabulous!

I have to admit though; I did not finish ‘Nine Hills.’ The print was small and tight. The word “intrusive” comes to mind; not sure why and maybe a post to follow up those thoughts. Looking back I see it as my transition book. I love to spend my summers delving in fiction/beach-reads and during the fall/winter I find myself obsessed with the non-fiction type.

The transition allowed me to pick up a book I’ve owned for too long without reading. It was a book I bought through Amazon.com after reading a story about the author on cnn.com. (It’s not the first, and I’m sure not the last book I’ve purchased from amazon.com via cnn.com.) It is called ‘Escape’ and it’s about a woman who escaped a polygamist sect with her children in tow. I am sure there will be more to follow as I stayed up last night after leaving my date at the door to read more of her tale.

Review of "Close Up Space" by Molly Smith Metzler, playwright

Last night I attended my first stage reading. I was amazed. As a big fan of audio books and spoken word, I couldn’t believe how I haven’t been to more of these. I knew I was sold when the narrator announced the end of the first act and I wasn’t ready for intermission; I wanted more. The actors stood at podiums with few props, but they did not let that stop them from embracing their characters. The sun was set and the script came to life.

Usually at plays I get distracted by the crowd around me, the actors’ real lives, and the writing process for the playwrights; yet last night, I found myself entranced by it all. I found myself laughing with the audience and feeling for the characters. The stage came to life with the script, actions, and imagination.

Each character appealed to me. There was no villain nor nuisance, just simple-everyday-people. Their conflicts were more internal, than ex. To me represented 5 very different personalities with universal needs in a shared environment. The cynical workaholic editor who uses his work to ignore his heartache, the empathetic office manager who needs a shoulder to lean on himself, the naïve but intelligent intern who is only looking for one more credit to graduate and move on, and the heart-on-the-sleeve client whose books are top-sellers are all transformed by the passive-aggressive isolated daughter who uses her communication talents to break down the wall with her father.

Throughout the plot, the characters dealt with each situation true to form. It was exactly how I’d imagine, or expect that ‘type’ of person to react. Each situation was different, and more complicated than the last to the omniscient audience. The humor and gut-wrenching passion to fill one’s basic needs intertwined the acts. Though the story ends without any definite solutions, it provides a snapshot in the life of persons transformed by hope.

It reminded me of all the different people in my life and how important it is to be 100% just me around them. Everyone deserves honesty, even when its hard to say or admit.

I don’t want wonder if we are looking at the same snowflake because each one that falls is different.

Review of A Walk to Remember by Nicholas Sparks; Warner Books, New York, NY: 2009.

Last weekend I stayed in and did not go out as I usually do. Instead I grabbed a book. Three days later I put the book back on the shelf feeling a bit empty. A week later, I still cannot decide how I feel about it.

Generally I draw more toward memoirs, non-fiction, and mystery/suspense books, yet this was my second reading of Sparks. A few years back, I had read The Rescue mainly because the protagonist was a firefighter. The romance piece was secondary but like high school drama I got caught right up in it.

The book, A Walk to Remember, is Nicholas Sparks' 3^rd novel. Again I just got wrapped up in it. I felt guilty when I put a break in the binding, but it served as a great bookmark. Sunday morning I had to get up early, and my eyes were stinging all day. When they finally relaxed, I went right back to the book like an addict.

Nothing in particular had drawn me to the book. I picked it up at a book exchange a few years ago because I could. I didn't know much about the storyline nor characters. Last weekend I picked it up to read out of boredom; I did not expect it to consume my weekend.

It was definitely a page-turner. Landon was so relatable. Jamie was a simple mystery. The two characters together produced such a dynamic; I had to see what would happen next. I could feel the look Jamie gives Landon the first day of class together, and I could feel nervous joy during their walks.

Reading the book gave me that perfect feeling, that nothing-can-go-wrong and there-is-hope feeling. Jamie was so innocent and devout. She did not budge to ridicule, Landon, or her fate. She was someone I wish I could emulate. Instead, I feel as though I have felt Landon's internal conflict and made other choices.

Upon completing the book, I still had questions. What was the end like for Jamie? Does Landon stop by to check on Hegbert? Do either of them continue to attend the play? What was it like when a year had passed? Did Landon go to UNC?

As I mentioned earlier in the post, I am not sure how I feel about the book overall, even after it's settled in a bit. Writing helps me to work through the ambiguities. Thus, my conclusion as I write this post is that it is not the book I am feeling today. Rather it is those things that I found in the book that I could no longer find in me.

Let this day be my beginning.