The Postcard Killers by James Patterson and Liza Marklund

I picked this book at a mom and pop trade-in paperback store. These types of stores are endlessly fascinating for me and even though I wasn't itching for a read, I picked this one up for 4 dollars.

The story centers on four characters: two killers, a brash NYPD detective abroad, and an unwillingly involved hot-to-trot journalist. The story takes place mostly in Sweden, despite the novel having an Eiffel tower on the cover.  The killers were a couple of sexually charged young adults named Syliva and Mac who bewitch other young couples into date shenanigans abroad only to leave their throats cut and bodies gruesomely posed. The killers then send a postcard to a local newspaper for press.

The NYPD detective has a hat in the ring because his own daughter was one of the victims. He flounces around all emotionally charged and making brash stupid decisions. I can tell by the end of the book that we are supposed to see him as a Captain Kirk figure, the type where they get their strength from their humanness, but I just saw him as an incredibly unethical police officer working WAY WAY out of his jurisdiction. The characterization felt forced because his personality was not consistent. The book decided that he was emotionally unattached and terrible with intimacy about 3/4ths the way through the book. He sounded incredibly emotionally open before this point.

The lady journalist, whats her name? Dessie? I think the Swedish Bestselling co-author got a chance to shine with this one, but it was really too bad that Dessie was incredibly boring. Dessie spent the whole book regretting stuff and worrying. She did nothing to drive the plot forward. She was the ambassador to Sweden, translating for the Detective, connecting him to all the right people, and eventually having sex with him when he needed to crash for the night. But I got to learn some neat little Swedish tidbits through Dessie, like about local texture of the Swedish Countryside and the international fanfare caused by the Arctic circle Ikea. (as a sidenote, it complete cracked me up that the Ikea was a central part of this book about Sweden. Its like if we went to France and everyone is eating french fries and wearing berets.)

The fun part of the novel was trying to figure out what the motive of the murders were. The book shined when we got into Syliva and Mac's back story.  The tension pacing of the book was a little thrown off because of it, but I think I understand what they were going for. You see, when they released Syliva and Mac from police interrogation because they were ruled out of the case, the story was really picking up and it was terrifying that the real killers were being set free. Then the detective drops everything and flies back home to relax with his buddies in the United States. He had to do it because Syliva and Mac were from the LA area and he needed some hometown investigation. It felt like he ducked out of harms way and took a vacation. Sure, the book still remained interesting because we learned the entire UCLA backstory at that point, but still, the pacing was chaotic. 
A key point in the novel is when the newspaper company tries to draw the killers out by offering money for an interview. The key was to entrap them into revealing thier identies so they can be arrested. Syliva and Mac do not take them up on that offer. Then they somehow make a "mistake" in their crime pattern which leads to their identities being revealed. In the book it is implied that the paper caused the break up in crime pattern, but I don't get it. Sounds like they didn't take the bait to me.

So I understand the reviews for this book were bad. I didn't think it was that terrible. It was quite entertaining I thought. All I expected was a frothy read to pass my time in incredibly short bursts. I packed this baby in my massive purse and got it read in 3 days. Perhaps all the reviewers did not like how the killers were revealed right off the bat?

Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer

I just read Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer. The book chronicles the now infamous Chris McCandless, the young man that died during a romantic extended camping trip in the Alaskan wilderness in 1992.  His life has been much considered as there have been numerous essays about his life and motivations.

Here is the plot, briefly. Chris graduates Emory college with honors and defies his parents by not continuing onto Law School.  He instead decides to travel across the United States, taking on the moniker Alex Supertramp. His transition to independence from society is a slow one, as he spends a few years taking on odd jobs under the radar and finding shelter when it comes. His ideals (and ego) are fueled by the fictional loners penned by Jack London and Henry David Thoreau. He eventually hitchhikes up to Alaska to live off the wilderness with embarrassing low provisions. He dies after an impressive 112 days.

The book is written so carefully, so respectfully. The author frequently mentions other writers and outdoorsman who bash McCandless’s inexperience and arrogance who imply that such a lack of respect for nature deserves death. Krakauer goes completely the other way asking us to remember what it was like to be young and idealistic, when we were ready to die for our beliefs. Well, this young man did.

Chris dislikes his parents. The reasoning is abstract and I’m sure the actual relationship is more complicated than the book could even describe. What is for sure is that Chris didn’t have a solid reason to not like his parents. He grew up privileged with loving parents who gave him everything he ever needed and encouraged positive behaviors and life paths. It would be nice if there were a cut and dry reason for Chris to set out on his own, but there wasn’t. If it were me and I had the inkling to do a life adventure like that, I just wouldn’t be able to take myself seriously. That is definitely something Chris could do, and that was take himself seriously.

It is sad that he died. What makes it worse is that he was ready to go back into society with renewed vigor when he realized that he couldn’t. He planned out this romantic trip because he had a problem with his world view that made relationships unbearable. He planned a trip so he could get away from it all for while. And it worked. That’s the crazy part. It worked.  He felt more grateful for the things he had, he missed his family, and he was ready to enjoy being a productive member of society.

My only qualm with the book is that the author spends a little too much time talking about other explorers that met the same fate. He takes it too far  when the author includes his own climbing adventure to the list of other great blunders. That unnecessary portion made the exactly 200 page book a little irksome, like he was rushing to meet his page quota.  It doesn’t help that the few lines of text that the author managed to scrape up from McCandless’s post cards and diaries are repeated multiple times in the book, sometimes to exhaustion. I realize this was necessary to ground the timeline in a circular plot, but after reading the same post card for the 4^th time, it felt like just poor writing.

I definitely recommend this book. In a world where life is so cut and dry, where actions and consequences rule our every decision and foresight trumps every plan, it is amazing to read about someone who rejects the worldview of the ever shrinking room. Sure he dies. I bet that gives us the affirmation we need to stay trapped in our comfort zone. 

Summer Haitus

Dear Loyal Readers,

Like the school children and teachers that have laid the foundation of book reviews, voracious reviews will take a summer haitus.

Happy summer reading!

Sincerely,

MZ

Pattern Recognition by William Gibson

Pattern Recognition touches on a number of hot button issues with me, as if it were designed to appeal to my interests:  Internet memes, international travel, solving puzzles, etc.  The main character is a marketing consultant, starting the book traveling to London to evaluate an advertising campaign for a client.  She is also active in an online community that's obsessed with a series of video clips that have appeared online, without any attribution.

Early in the book, her employer takes an interest in these same videos, giving her a chance to explore her personal obsession with the financial backing of a very rich man.  Her journey takes her to three continents, and she meets numerous colorful characters.

I enjoy how the characters throw themselves into their obsessions.  Their obsessions are what define them, and how they define themselves.  The allegiance that the main character feels for her particular corner of the internet is familiar to me.  Most of the characters embody the sort of tribal social order that seems more and more common, with people banding together around a shared interest rather than simply shared location or employment.

The book is well written and the mystery is interesting, but I was surprised to realize that there were sequels.  The mystery of the footage is neatly wrapped up at the end, and I didn't quite make the kind of connection with any of the characters to be interested in what they're doing next week.  I'll read them anyway, eventually, but I'm wary of being Ringworlded, where the sequels take the wind out of the sails of a an excellent first book.

Before I go to Sleep by S.J. Watson

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S.J Watson writes analytically, tying up loose ends and answering questions about suspicious plot holes before we can even sniff them out. This is both a good thing and a bad thing. A ludicrous plot line does not cause a lack of trust in the authors skill. On the other hand, the perfectly tied up story lines and too-sensible actions of the character make me feel trapped. She writes as if it is the real world, with gravity heavy enough to support a real life. My life is already like that, and I can not enjoy fiction that does not take risks.

Before I Go To Sleep is about a woman, Christine, that has a rather unusual form of amnesia. She can retain memories for a single day only to lose everything when she goes to sleep at night. The plot moves forward by use of a journal that she writes in and reads from start to finish every day. The book tells the story from the journal's point of view. She finds some things out about her past through selective memory recall, namely that she may not be able to trust her caretakers. Here is where I would normally give you the spoilers, but I have grown as a person and I will acknowledge that only a single tension compelled me to continue reading until the end. It sincerely took me by surprise. I only started sniffing out the twist 30 or 40 pages before it was revealed.

The landscape of the book wasn't very intriguing. It took me days of reflection to realize it. The same things happened everyday, and they weren't that interesting. I could have spent my time looking straight at the walls of my blank bedroom instead and have gotten the same amount of detail about her house and life. Watson spends lots of time reintroducing that house too. I'll give her the benefit of the doubt though, she might have been using that repetition as a illustrative device to demonstrate the tedium of the situation.

The lack of autonomy bothered me. I mean, I know she has amnesia, but she is still responsible for her actions. She has to be reintroduced to her life every single day, and yet she chooses to allow the same thing to happen the next day. She doesn't give up the security that her husband and suburban life give her and allows herself to sit helplessly at the feet of the system. I do not think she is helpless at all, but she acts it. I don't think I can pin this on poor writing. It gives Christine a personality that is completely separate from her memories. Christine is that lady that went to grad school because she couldn't find a job and got married when she wanted to start having children. She thought about it too much, and it led to a boring and too-safe life. I drove me nuts. She could have taken the bus out of there at the drop of a hat, but she was too afraid of what might happen. This is how extreme domestic abuse happens even when women aren't mentally handicapped.

Overall, read if you like amnesia stories.  This one isn't terrible, but its not great either.

The Lucky One by Nicholas Sparks

This is my first Nicholas Sparks novel, although I must admit that I cried like a baby while watching "The Notebook". (I also cried like a baby when I summarized The Notebook to my friend two days ago). I figured that I wanted to see what type of writing enchants the world population in the way that Sparks seems to do time and time again.

The book is about an ex-marine who walks across country to find a woman. This woman is special to him because she is in a lucky photograph he found in Iraq. The biggest conflict of the book is the woman's ex husband who unreasonably does not want her to date anyone else.

It was pretty enchanting. The ending was very powerful, jumping off of the page like a movie. The ending conflicted greatly with the robotic movements and flat dialog that plagued the rest of the book. It is as as if he wrote a rough draft of the book, then did a second draft of the last two chapters, then published it. 

I'm probably not the first to say that the conflict is flimsy. I will give Sparks some credit though, he certainly gives the exhausting and petty aspects of relationships the gravity that bored housewives probably want. I mean, I don't care about ex-husbands and I think Beth and Logan could have told Clayton to piss off from the beginning and live the rest of their lives in peace, but then again, I have never lived that life and I don't know how stressful that stuff can be.

I had one odd moment while reading this book. I thought "it is all a conspiracy". Sparks isn't a person, he is a program that distills field interviews from the target audience. In this case, it wrote a book that panders to single mothers who feel marginalized by their ex-husbands. What they want is to get love unconditionally without having to work for it. Preferably love will fit right into her life without her having to change anything, maybe he will work in the family business and not have any friends or family for her to deal with. Yup, Logan made a grand gesture of love before he even knew her. She doesn't have to feel good enough to deserve it, she just has to be the person in his photograph. It just seemed too perfect.

And he listened to her vent about her problems without judging her, interrupting her, or even trying to fix her. Sparks made a big point about that.


In Roger Ebert's review of the movie he writes

I've seen him in interviews where he's better-looking than some of his leading men and comes across as sincere. I think he really does believe in his stories, and I think readers sense that.

I bet Ebert got the pandering feeling that compelled him to write this. 

But it was enchanting nonetheless. Maybe robots will write all our books, and we'll be better for it.

Other Notes:
- I sensed this with the late Michael Crichton's work near the end of his career, namely Prey. Editors get insecure and don't push enough when the authors get too famous. The authors just assume that everyone will love the book and it will be turned into a movie. All this causes the books to sound like screenplays. Scenes get grander (with more water) and only actions are described. The author abandons  point of view all together.
-  One plot hole: When everyone is rushing to save the son, how did Clayton know that the tree house was dangerous? He wasn't involved in that at all. Him running out to help was also uncharacteristic. 
- I grew uncomfortable when everyone started calling Clayton simply "the ex". I doubt everyone in the entire town would call him that. It showed me that he didn't have voices ironed out. I just don't think Nana would call him that.
- the cliffhanger being resolved in the epilogue was cute, I liked that.
- This is the first review where I didn't spoil the ending. let me know if you want to know what happened.

-

The 19th Wife by David Ebershoff

Many people describe The 19th Wife as a combination of two books: a murder mystery and a historical fiction. Saying that the author completes two whole different ideas is generous. He is just trying to get all the way around the idea of polygamy. I think a more accurate thing to say is that he uses many voices to paint a vast, vague, and inconclusive picture of polygamy.

The book follows two different timelines. The first is sort of a Ann Eliza Young fanfiction based on her confusingly similar titled autobiography. The second timeline is about a young gay man, Jordan, who solves a murder mystery to get his accused mother out of jail. His mother was coincidentally a 19th wife, and through Jordan's story we get to catch an outsiders glimpse of a fictional polygamous cult.


The author often cites the historical fiction segments as primary sources from closed Mormon church archives. Ann Eliza Young's real autobiography is called Wife #19. The author cites her work as The 19th Wife.   As you are reading the book, only a few things will tip you off that these aren't actual historical excerpts. For one, the author doesn't do a good job of shifting his voice. Even though Jordan speaks modern english complete with its slangs, idioms, and profanities, you can still hear the authors voice in the historical segments. Well, you have to look past all the highfalutin, proper, turn-of-the-century speak, but he is still there. The fake Wikipedia article is a smoking gun to how fake the rest of the book is.  But the only way you know for sure is because the citations aren't in MLA format.


That concealed phoniness was my only qualm about the historical fiction excerpts. They were at least interesting and had a powerful voice. Jordan's little murder mystery, on the other hand, was pretty lame. All the background characters had motive, and reasoning was so flimsy when they revealed the killer that they could have just picked the conclusion out of a hat. Not to mention that the mystery was at a complete standstill until the last 30 pages of the book. That is 500 pages of book where the murder mystery goes no where. It doesn't help that the main character keeps saying "I feel like we are so close!". You can't fool me, Ebershoff. 

The finesse-less editing was apparent when the book ended with a whisper. Ana Eliza's story had a big fat "The End" written at the end of her chapter. I turned the page and Jordon was still undergoing the second half of all the action in his story. There was an Epilouge that had a conclusion I cared more about than the true ending of the book. The author note explaining his sources and intentions should have been the blasted preface. That simple cut and paste alone would have removed all of the phoniness of the book.

I am sorry that I didn't enjoy the book. Normally New York Times Bestsellers are like crack, even if the book isn't very good. I actually had a hard time picking it up from time to time. It didn't even satisfy my voyeuristic fascination with polygamy because it wasn't sexy enough. The only explanation I have for the inexplicable sales without any of the goods is that they must have been going for the Mormon crowd. If that is the case, then the chaste gay relationship was a thinly veiled way to keep the mainstream crowd still gawking.

Other notes:
-A Los Angeles Times blurb on the back of the book states that "The 19th Wife is a big book, in every sense of the word". See, I thought that this meant that the book was full of texture, with enough content to  occupy my thoughts for days. Instead it turned out that a "big book" just means that there was a lot the book should have left out. It was just all over the place.
- Whats the deal with dogs? The author seemed so upset when his lifetime original movie excluded the dogs. I mean, it makes sense that he could be upset that they decided to rewrite Jordan as straight. 

Adored by Tilly Bagshawe

I liked it. It is a self indulgent womens' glamorous fantasy. Who wouldn't want to feel like the most beautiful woman on earth with all the old money to be astute, all the new money to be lavish, and all the attitude to be in control? For 700 pages I experienced owning Armani suits, Louis Viutton luggage, and Hermes scarves. The plot and characterizations were at times subpar, but that didn't take away from the pleasure-of-the-flesh experiences the book so selflessly displayed.

 A short summary: Duke McMahon, the cowboy movie star and patriarch, survives the novel just long enough to demonstrate an especially glamorous form of cruelty to his wife, Minnie. He moves his mistress in much to the chagrin of his live-in adult children. Its a long book. A bunch of stuff happens and it turns out that the book is about Duke's granddaughter, Siena. She decides that she wants to be a model/actress even though her dad wants her to be a doctor. He disowns her and she flails around wildly and 300 pages go by. She eventually meets a wealthy producer that launches her career and challenges her libido. Spoiler: he beats her to a bloody pulp and it ruins her face and therefore her career, driving her back to her family. There is a poorly crafted love story in there and it ends with a wedding.

There is as lot to say if only because the sheer girth of this novel.

The Duke-Minnie relationship was gold and I wish we could have seen more of it before Duke died. I was endlessly enthralled about the thought process behind Minnie standing it. How on earth could a self respecting woman allow her husband's mistress to move in with them? That is the single defining quality differentiating a wife from a mistress. A wife takes care of house! A mistress takes care of the sex! I draw the line right there.
 
The Max-Siena relationship, not so much. Max-Siena is the poorly crafted love story that I spoke about earlier. You could tell that the Max-Siena was end game because he saved her life when they were little kids, but it wasn't believable when they were older. They just fell into eachothers arms out of convenience and began a relationship out of hate-born lust. All the sentimentality and tenderness that they reminisced about after the relationship just was never there. And Max crying endlessly afterwards? That just isn't believable.

There was an insufferable B-Story about Max's brother in England having financial troubles severe enough to "lose the farm", literally. The way it was tied up in a knot at the end, how it held an entire cast of supplementary characters, and how it only served as a place for Max to convalesce all qualified as fat that could have been cut right off the top. The book could have easily been 300 pages shorter and a lot less boring.

It is interesting how a book can be a Pulitzer Prize and not a New York Times best seller. Remember, I am reading this book directly after reading Swamplandia!, a critically acclaimed novel. Quality is such a loose word when judging books. This book isn't earth shattering, and I won't come away with it with an adjusted world view. (Although, maybe I need to buy a new purse). People buy what their friends buy, and then they go and buy what ever is on the New York Times bestsellers list. I just don't think that list is to be trusted to give good books.


Overall, read this book if you 
a) are female
b) feel like having a "light read"
c) Simultaneously want to exalt and execute the fabled 1%

Other notes: 
- Have you noticed how everyone is either tall and slender or 5'4?
- A 5'4 model? pft, maybe in SPAIN
- Is it just me, or is Max and Hunter two halves of the same person?
- Of course a book that exalts beauty to the extent that it does would have Poor Laurie die a spinster.
- Just because the second to half chapter is written in past tense doesn't mean that the book should be winding down.

Swamplandia! by Karen Russell

It is intriguing how the Pulitzer Prize in fiction was not awarded this year. I was incredibly intrigued. I followed the story on the Daily Beast and I read all the speculation on how this doesn't mean that the three contenders weren't good enough for the Pulitzer Prize. Well, if if one of them was good enough, why didn't one of them win? I think it was a publicity thing. No prize awarded is much much more interesting than a deserved prize being given. They've got to sell papers, right?


 Anyway, that's how I got suckered into reading Swamplandia! The first chapter made me immediately regret this decision and I held that disdain for three quarters of the book. It was just so damn depressing.

After the feeling of deep depression wears into a slightly bothersome but waning sadness, you realize that those feelings of unease as a child may have been founded and shared  by many forming the new american experience. Swamplandia! captures the quark and texture of offbeat americana. It was refreshing (to some extent) to relive my childhood in this way.

Swamplandia! is about Ava Bigtree, a 13 year old girl following her moms footsteps on becoming a side show act in thier sub par alligator theme park. When her mother dies, the family is torn to pieces. Without the star of the show, the theme park falls in financial ruin. Her brother, Kiwi, runs away to work on a lame rival theme park to raise money to send home. Her older sister, Osceola, dives deeper into a fantasy world where she is dating a ghost. (Here are the spoilers). Her sister casts herself away on a boat to marry one of her ghost friends like a lunatic, and Ava can't stand to be abandoned. She enlists a creepy bird contractor that she affectionately calls "Bird Man" to help her find her sister. He rapes Ava. (end spoilers) Then everything turns out okay.

Ava  is weaves in and out of innocence. Those drastic demarcations of naivity is what make this book a gem. It is hard to quantify what maturity is, what makes one act like adult. When you read those small shifts in Ava's mindset, the cross over hit you like a brick wall. She is at one point trying to save the park, then she is trying to save her sister, then she is just trying to save herself by just a small drink of water. She makes mental trade offs between drinking water and realigning with her rapist. She thinks about whether or not she believes in ghosts, and if it even matters what she thinks. I suppose that is what makes a book a "coming of age" story.

I have a theory about the red alligator. The red alligator was Ava's scheme to save the park. She found it while she was harvesting hatchlings, and kept it as a pet. For some odd reason that she can't even explain to herself, she took it with her when she went with the Bird Man to rescue Osceola. After the raping, Ava decides to run and deflects Bird Man's attention by throwing the red alligator hatchling at him. I think the red alligator represented naive hope.

It is clear how childish Ava is being when you see the hard reality at the end of the book. Osceola was sick, and they gave her drugs for it. They could never save the park, and it wasn't the end of the world.

I can see why this book was nominated for a Pulitzer. The writing is hypnotically textured like a Tom Robbins novel without the randomness, with a weighty nostalgia ala Steinbeck. It just wasn't a page turner. I didn't have the urge to come home every day and open this book like I did with The Hunger Games or even like 50 Shades of Grey.  There is some unquantifiable quality that makes a book a best seller and its not the same quality that makes it a fine piece of fiction.

Cannery Row by John Steinbeck

Its hard to say what this book is about. Laconically, group of adults throw two parties for their friend, Doc. Doc shows up to one of the parties.

The reason most people don't talk about what the book is about is because it doesn't matter what the book is about. It is not supposed to make you think. The whole book is a sensory experience. It was grand and irresponsible and tragic and it made my entire life feel fake. That is a massive feat. This piece of fiction made my real life seem fake. 

While I was sitting around thinking very seriously about whether or not I should peruse a masters degree, the people in this book were actually living. I did my nails and pondered taking a nap while the people in this book made mistakes and  had regrets and never forget this moment until they died. My life is nothing in comparison, or perhaps it is. Perhaps even the smallest things make my life real. I don't know.

What a piece of art. I feel as though my ability to review this is limited by my failure to be an expert in literature. (Disclaimer: I'm not a literary expert). Cannery Row was a fishing community with people from all walks of life. While some people sat by the bar wondering what sort of hijinks his friends are getting him into, a child fails to understand grief over this father's suicide. And its not such a big deal.  The moments of extreme happiness were punctuated by overtly simple tragedy.

All the characters had their moments. Even though Doc tolerated everyone so much, he still punched Mack when he was angry. Mack wasn't responsible enough to see through his actions, but he knew when he deserved a punch in the face. Eddie tap danced in the office alone because he was so excited about the party. The dog got tired of peeing on the floor and house broke himself. It was those little moments that built up a life.

I can't make any grand statements about recommending this book. All people could either read it or not read it. You would come away with something, though. People that read these stories share a collective history and reminisce in the same way. Reading Steinbeck is like remembering that you are apart of a family and a community where every person matters.

Other Notes
Everyone who found out I was reading Cannery Row this week asked me if I've been to the Steinbeck Museum up near Monterey.  I think its odd that people are so interested in the real lives of authors. I personally am not. I figure that even if I met Steinbeck himself I wouldn't get the awe and grandeur of reading one of his novels. Certainly I wouldn't get this elated romanticism from looking at his desk. A novel is a condensed version of all the wonderful thoughts that authors have to contribute. And that's good enough for me.

Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L James

I can't say that I enjoyed this book. That being said, I read the whole thing in 2 days.

Fifty Shades of Grey is about a young virgin new grad meeting a powerful and handsome entrepreneur. She is delighted to begin a sexual relationship with him  only to find that his BDSM sexual predilections frighten and confuse her. She is willing to partake because its the only way they can be together. At the end, she decides that she feels shortchanged and walks away.  

That was an extremely sparse summary. I have ready many other reviews about this  book and a surprising majority do not summarize the plot line. That is because one doesn't come to this book for the suspenseful plot line (except for perhaps the climax, har har). People come to this book because it is a novelty in many ways. This book represents a community people who felt overlooked by the publishing community and self published against all odds. Without the internet, fanfiction would never see the light of day. And now, with e-readers becoming a norm, a book birthed out of Twilight fandom can be a #1 New York Times Bestseller. Also, women have massive buying power, and its not common that an undiluted smutty book can be so popular.

For porn, this book is mediocre. I wouldn't say that one could throughougly enjoy this book one handed, persay. For high brow fiction, this book is just as well written as many of the other current best sellers. I was suprised. It is better than what I read of the original Twilight. Ana has a distinct personality and I can understand her actions and her rationale. She compares herself to characters in classical books. She isn't just some girl. Christian Grey is the idolized Adonis, but he is still human. He can be creepy in an old-man sort of way. The characters feel like real people that I am glad that I don't know.

The book ended awkwardly in a way that funnels me into the next book. The climax occured in the last 10 pages with her standing up to him and leaving. It doesn't feel like an end of the relationship. It felt like a brief 2 days of weeping before going back to him type of seperation.  The author didn't follow the classical 5 part plot structure, seen below

 

It was more like this

This might not be exactly fair. One can look at the local maximas and minimas of the sprawling contract negotiation as rising and falling plot line, I just do not think this is so. Once you introduce constant hedonistic sex into a story, it edges out all other emotion in a story and the plot just stops to watch the show.

Other Notes
- They are making a movie. I bet they are going to put so much vanilla frosting on this that its going to come out rated R. I say I am not going to watch it, but I probably will.

- I feel like I understand the motivations behind Twilight now that I've read this. I never understood the plight of Bella Swan before and thought she should just head out with Jacob and let herself be happy. While I think Ana may not have been better off with Jose, I can finally see why Bella was conflicted at least.

- The book ending was not satisfying, as noted in my plot structure argument above. I hate how authors are making trilogies instead of well placed and structured individual books. I noticed this about the transition between the Hunger Game novels as well. This feels like my 6th grade class when I was learning how to start and end paragraphs. We don't just start a new line and indent when the paragraph length looks good on the page, we have to finish our idea first.

I am not going to read the next novel in the trilogy, 50 Shades Darker. Not right away, at least. I am going to shift gears into Stienbeck for next week.

Mockingjay by Suzzane Colins

The third installment of the Hunger Games trilogy follows Katniss Everdeen as she is transformed from a child contestant in a macabre televised death match to a soldier and the face of a rebellion. This book takes a drastically different tone from the first two books. The Hunger Games are a romantic metaphor compared to this militaristic war drama. It gets heavy. This book was needed to spell out any lingering analogies, and the social agenda of the Hunger Games finally comes to light

The tone of this book was different from the first two of the trilogy. Katniss and Peeta are separated in the first half, and the book suffers for it. The book loses a lot of its warmth as the effervescent Peeta is held offscreen and tortured. The Gale-Katniss (Gatniss?) relationship gets room to breath, but it has surprisingly little chemistry for a book for this genre. I just don't believe the love triangle. She was never meant to be with Gale, was she?

On a lighter note, here is a photoshop powered illustration of my favorite scene. Bringing down any aircraft with a bow and arrow is ludicrous to me.

A lot of criticism I am reading about the book is how Collins is talking down to her readers in this book more than the others.  I agree with other reviewers that some of the smaller analogies were explained a little too thoroughly. The crazy cat game analogy dragged on excruciatingly long even if it was just a few paragraphs.  I had to set the book down for a breather because of that one. Also the Katniss's fathers song was brought up and re-explained time after time like a dead horse. I can see how even young adults can find that level of explanation condescending.

On the other hand, she finally reveals what the symbolism behind the Hunger Games actually are. This throws a wrench in my co-workers insight on the FEMA camps and reality television caused voyeurism.  It is about war. She drove the point home by making it clear from the beginning that not even the rebels are the good guys, that Katniss can't trust anyone  to be good and pure. President Coin was as cold and as opportunistic as President Snow. That is the whole reason the book was so unpleasant. In war, there is no good guy, and everyone suffers in the end. Collins likens war to the hunger games, in which we watch our children fight eachother to the death for pleasure, and a way to ingrain hatred into our culture.

Other Notes
- I disagree with the LA times book review about Mockingjay settling the love triangle. There was never ever any passion between Katniss, Peeta, and Gale, and Katniss just stayed with who ever stayed around the longest. They DID come to the same conclusion about the strong antiwar undercurrents of this book, however

Trilogy Reviews
Read Review for The Hunger Games (Hunger Game Series #1)
Read Review for Catching Fire (Hunger Games Series #2)
Read Review for Mockingjay (Hunger  Games Series #3)

Catching Fire by Suzanne Colins

Catching Fire is the sequel to the Hunger Games by Suzanne Colins. It was nice to read a sequel that wasn't a lame afterthought to the original. I haven't finished the third book in the series yet, but I think a trilogy is a bit of a stretch.

Catching Fire is about the fallout after Katniss and Petta's rebellious win in the 74th hunger games. To their dismay, they find that the 75th Hunger Games will draw from the existing pool of winners, and Katniss and Petta find themselves back in the arena.

The pacing was odd. More than half of the book took place in District 12 and the tension around the love triangle between Katniss, Petta, and Gale. The climax of the book didn't address the love triangle or even the tension caused by the Capitol. It simply marked the end of the second round of Hunger Games. In this respect, I suspect that the third book will act as the second half of this one. I know that there is a lot of pressure for science fiction writers to pump out trilogies, but they shouldn't let the pacing suffer like this.

Being a fan of romance, I fell head over heels by the love triangle. The thing that separates this from Twilight is that Katniss could care less about who she falls in love with. She acts like a distracted 16 year old and fails to understand herself emotionally. She just doesn't grasp the responsibility of not leading these boys on. This characterization is spot on. I am tired of reading books about kids where they act and think like short adults. Katniss will end up with who ever is alive at the end of the day, and this is quite refreshing.

What wasn't as refreshing was how acutely aware I was of the female authorship. I love and support female authors, but I felt like some of her detailing about the characters and the culture were only something women would notice. Sure she mentions food and speech, but she goes into a disproportionate amount of detail into manicures and waxing. The detailing is sparse overall, and the light hand of a female perspective was made too obvious.

I feel as though I only read half of a book this week. No one ever reads just Catching Fire, and its the trilogy or nothing. Look forward to my review next week on the final book in the trilogy, Mockingjay.


Trilogy Reviews
Read Review for The Hunger Games (Hunger Game Series #1)
Read Review for Catching Fire (Hunger Games Series #2)
Read Review for Mockingjay (Hunger  Games Series #3)

Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

I bought my copy of the Hunger Games at target for $7.19. After the first few chapters I worried I accidentally bought the dumbed-down discount version. Perhaps that acute sense of an overly pedagogic tone was my fault. I shouldn't be so quick to judge a book meant for the YA audience.  In that respect, the book performed wonderfully, almost brilliantly, as it laid out a story just gruesome enough to be fascinating, and just angsty enough to be relatable by someone who is just about to grow out of it.

 I am sure you know what the Hunger Games is about by now. The movie had the third highest grossing movie of all time. The book takes place in a far future when North America has been rearranged by a civil war into a Capitol and 12 outlying districts that support it. The districts are poor and the Capitol works hard to suppress them. One of their suppression tools is something called the Hunger Games, a romanesque game where 24 children have to fight to the death while the whole country watches.


I can see why teenagers go gaga over this stuff. Adults see the hunger games as a metaphor for the voyeurism that is our media, but I can tell the analogy hits a lot closer to home. The book is all about being watched, and the attempt to behave accordingly while you know that everyone around you is your potential enemy. That sounds a lot like MY high school, at least.

The movie missed surprisingly few things. One of which was Katniss's personal growth. She started the book with the assurance that she was a powerful young woman by the ability to support her family. She ended the book with the realization that sometimes she didn't understand her own feelings. The other thing the movie left out, quite  brilliantly I might add, was the last 40 pages of the book. The last 40 pages of the book acted as a segue to what I believe will be the drama in the second book. It would look silly in the last 10 minutes of the movie if they never made another one. The last 40 pages were about were where you realize that in the arena you at least that there were rules. There is no telling what can happen outside of the arena, when you don't have the assurance of a caring audience to keep things humane.

A notes on onw the books potential flaws. I don't understand her relationship with Cinna. That was one of the things I was looking forward to understanding after watching the movie. They seem to have such a deep and loving relationship without apparently having ever having anything to bind them together.

Overall it was quite fun to be wrapped up in the popular fiction hype. I look forward to my review of the second book in the trilogy, Catching Fire.


Trilogy Reviews
Read Review for The Hunger Games (Hunger Game Series #1)
Read Review for Catching Fire (Hunger Games Series #2)
Read Review for Mockingjay (Hunger  Games Series #3)

The Last Chinese Chef by Nicole Mones

I noticed this lovely title when perusing my local library during a Lost in Translation afterglow. I thought, what the hell, I trust this author now.  Unfortunately,  I frequently found myself forcing myself to stick with it. While the Lost In Translation was a wild ride to an exotic land, this one was as dry, banal, and stereotypical as a walk through a Chinatown souviner shop. 

The book was about a food writing widow, Maggie, who finds that her husband may have sired a child during one of his business trips to China. She then travels to China to deliver a paternity test herself in order to deny the claim. Along the way she befriends a half Chinese-American man, Sam, that is trying to keep the spirit of his ancestry and Chinese cooking alive in an upcoming banquet  competition.


The book falters technically when it comes to the ebb and flow of tensions. The three biggest tensions were 1) the results of the paternity test, 2) the results of the banquet competition and 3) the budding relationship between the Sam and Maggie. All three tensions resolved in the last two chapters of the book and occurred with quick succession. The third tension occurred almost as a consolation prize. Their friendship never hinted at sexuality, and the described event lacked chemistry.  It just didn't fit. The book built up tension then let it simmer out. This is reminiscent of the end of Lost in Translation where they found out the dumb fate of Peking man in the last paragraph. This disappointment may simply be a feature of Nicole's Mones writing ability.

I also couldn't help questioning its depth. I kept on sniffing whiffs of phony-ness. She would hint at small quirks of characters as broad generalizations of Chinese culture. In this method, she implicitly made odd assumptions about American culture in comparison. That sounds oblique, but that is the best way I can summarize how phony it felt. There was a forced foreignness to it.  For example, at one point Sam mentions, somehow condescendingly, that Maggie should take a shower. The bathroom is free because all Chinese women take showers at night. What does that mean? What does that imply? I think that it is supposed to imply that China is fantastically exotic. (Also, I take my showers at night so I had no idea where this was coming from) Another example was the translation of a Chinese expletive to "fornicators". Modern English has a VERY a similar expletive, but this awkward translation was a forced attempt at making their colloquialisms sound much more foreign. Needless to say, we should not mistake poor translations for mystique. These are only small examples to underline the overall uneasy tone of the book.

Where the book excels was its description of food and the effect of the Cultural revolution. It is a pity that the book did not focus on these things more. The food was only well featured in the final act during the banquet. The Culture revolution was just too big a topic to introduce in the final third of the book like she had. If it was only a mentioned to link the generations through its contrast with the feudal system described earlier in the book, then it was lost on me. Sorry, Nicole.

Lost in Translation by Nicole Mones

I picked up this book because I thought it was about the movie. Apparently it wasn't. I kept reading because modern day China is a fascinating backdrop for a fiction book.

The book is about a 36 year old female interpreter that gets her rocks off with Chinese men. The time frame in question encapsulates her work with an archaeologist on his search for the lost Peking Man, an early hominid that provided one of the many evolutionary links between man and ape.

As a romance, the book fell short. The long tense relationship between her and Lin ended with a bang and then came back with a whisper. It just wasn't a satisfying ending. As a thriller, the book also disappointed. I don't want to spoil the ending, but I wish they could have foreshadowed the resolution and took more than a paragraph to hand us the big reveal. The book excels almost exclusively as a portrait of China. I was exposed to new customs, people, and scenery more so than if I had actually visited china.

I was especially compelled by the plight of Alice. She seemed so real but at the end she seemed like a total fake. She had questionable motives, but they didn't seem disingenuous until the end, when she realized it herself (although I don't buy the whole scared for life by a political speech thing). Finally, a book where character growth isn't just a plot device.

The writing style threw me off. The book seemed as though it were translated directly from Chinese. Sentences were often just clauses, and most actions were described in a flowery metaphorical way. I got used to it though; I ate bitterness for only the first quarter of the book or so.

One thing that I noticed that other book reviewers didn't seem to mention: this book really sexualized the Asian male. I am glad for it. American media tends to feminize the Asian male, and I didn't realize to what extent until I read this book. That is a damn shame too. As an Asian female, I'd like to say I don't have any of those preconceived opinions about male sexuality.

Overall a great read. It wasn't necessarily a light read, but I can't say it rocked my worldview either.

Street Cred: National Best Seller, Kafka Prize, Pacific Northwest Bookseller Association’s annual five-state book award, NYT notable Book

Smart Women by Judy Blume

I feel as though something must have happened to Judy Blume to permanently scar her world view. I picked up Smart Women because I envisioned being given lessons in style and grace by the fictional stories of wonderful women that were faced with adversity. Instead, I got the fictional stories of women making bad decisions under the stress of infantile men.  By the end of the book, my own world view started to become jaded, wondering what made me think a life full of happiness with a wonderful man was probable in the first place.

The book was about a loose 40 year old divorcee, Margo, falling in love with her controlling friend's ex-husband. This book is only bearable because of the excellent character portrayals, so I'd like to further summarize the book through character snapshots.

The women
Margo: A 40 year old divorcee with 2 teenage children named Michelle and Stuart. She has a long list of lovers and flings and isn't ashamed of that. She isn't exactly glamorous, just... easy going. I don't think the author here was trying to make a loose-moraled person, but I did not like how she felt about her children. Its as if she had a little timer on both of them, counting down until the age 18 when she would finally get her freedom. I don't blame her for the events in the book because I was as charmed by Andrew as she was.

B.B/Francine: A thin, gorgeous, glamorous woman who is on the uptight side. Her daughter is Sara and her ex-husband is Andrew. Although most people would call her a maniac, I thought she was rather nuianced and believable while being out of the range of a normal personality. She absolutely could not stand her ex-husband coming to town. My word, he may want to see their child! Needless to say, she broke down and completely shirked her responsibilities by taking a long lavish visit to the psychiatric ward in a far away land. I know a snarky comment like that is probably the reasoning that caused her to break down, but there IS a middle ground between being too uptight and not giving a damn at all. Being able to go on a 6 month long picnic without even the responsibility of smiling at someone? Well, that is something we'd all like but goodness, we have to keep up appearances.

Michelle: The rude and loudmouthed 17 year old daughter of Margo. She seems kind of messed up because of the divorce, but honestly, she had some good points. She only seems uptight and particular because her mother might not in fact be giving her enough structure. I mean, I'd be pissed if my easy mother let her 3 month boyfriend move in with his 12 year old daughter. And after moving across country to get away from my dad? It doesn't seem like she thought about me at all. Michelle had a nice story arc where Eric, Margo's 21 year old ex-lover, comes to town to crash on the couch. Michelle is wooed by his youth and motorcycle and carelessly loses her virginity to him. Of course, this book begin what it is, Eric takes off at the drop of a hat, leaving Michelle in shambles. Michelle let her self go on this escapade because she wanted "experience". It sounded like she wanted experience being hurt. Reading this book is like an experience in being hurt.

Sara: The 12 year old daughter of B.B./Francine. Some reviews call her the most sympathetic character but I call her  the least controversial. She was just a young child of divorce that wanted to make everyone happy. Her mother was a little uptight and it made her a worrisome little girl.

Clare: This is a tertiary charactor if there ever was one. She is the connecting friend between Margo and B.B. It is how they met, and she is a better friend to either of them than they are to each other. Her character traits include being rich and having a daughter, Puffin. She doesn't get much play in the book, but we do see enough of  her to get into her relationship drama. She decides to end her separation by taking back her indifferent cheating husband. Its really his indifference that bothered me. I mean, he easily could have loved her and wanted to get back together with her it wouldn't have affected the book at all.

Puffin: Clare's airhead daughter and girlfriend of Stuart. She is spoiled because her mom is rich. Midway through the book she has to get an abortion because Stuart doesn't want to have a baby. I thought the whole situation was pathetic myself. She could have kept the baby. I mean, she wanted the baby, she had the means to keep the baby, but she couldn't get Stuart to want the baby. She asked Michelle to convince Stuart to marry her so the baby would be legitimate. She didn't try very hard is what I'm saying. After that brief conversation, they got in the car and got an abortion. The whole thing was unsettling. They decided to end the pregnancy because no one wanted to make a decision.

The Men:
Andrew: He seemed like a charmer. I was charmed. He came to town so he could spend a year seeing his daughter, Sara, and perhaps had an ulterior motive of getting his wife to love him again. He didn't try terribly hard except for a forced kiss in the beginning, but B.B is impossible. He falls in love with Margo, perhaps because she lived next door, but also perhaps because she falls in love so easily. I understood by the portrayal of Margo why this crazy mixed up situation would happen, but you'd think Andrew would have second guessed the idea of merging two families that weren't all that committed to eachother. When the book ended I realized that of course he wouldn't second guessed it because this book is about how men don't take responsibility for their decisions and the women do.

Stuart: Daughter of Margo. He stook up for Margo a couple of times when Michelle tried to out her, but, because he is  male, all of his positive qualities had to be flushed down the toilet when he made his girlfriend get an abortion without so much as a comforting word.

Eric: Young ex-lover of Margo. Character qualities are: 1) being horrible because he is male and 2) has a motorcycle. He could have been thrown in to show how careless men can be, but also perhaps to show how horrible a mother Margo is. Margo knew Eric would take Michelle's virginity and run, but she didn't even do so much as tell Michelle that she used to have sex with Eric. She didn't even stop them when she noticed them fooling around in her room. She decided to let Michelle make one of the biggest mistakes of her life because Margo didn't want to be bothered.

Lewis: Tertiary character that had perhaps one paragraph of dialogue through the whole book. He begged B.B./Francine to marry him because of how beautiful and in control she seemed. Ha. I suppose he was thrown in to illustrate that when men seem wonderful its because the are complete tools.

I don't think everyone should blame the women. Sure, its easy because the book was told through the eyes of women, but just because they took all the responsibility doesn't mean they should take in all the fault.

I've read other reviews saying that this book titled Smart Women sarcastically, about how the book is actually a case study in the stupid mistakes women make and how they justify them. If that is true, the act of searching for happiness is in itself a stupid mistake

Bossy Pants by Tina Fey

I wish I could have done a 24 hour rental with this book. The writing is large with perhaps 1.5" spacing. The pages are so thick and stiff that the paperbacks may last as long as the hardcovers. As you can see in the image, this 275 page book looks as thick as a copy of Moby Dick. (insert penis joke here). All of these things contributed to the psychological effect of a really-quick-read.

I loved it. Learning about her backstory helped bridge some of the gap between her 30 rock writing and her SNL jokes. It was especially funny seeing some of the same themes come up. The flat footed overeater she portrays in 30 rock was a tragic projection of one her jerk ex boyfriends. I felt her pain, I really did.

My biggest qualm, however, is too salient to ignore. I just wish she knew what she was writing about before she started writing. The book is hilarious, I give you that, but I think it would have been more powerful if she chose which story to tell. A whole book could have been written about her childhood, her rise to fame, and even how she handles being a successful woman today. Having all of that fascinating material glazed over in the book just made it a shallow read.

The lack of message was also evident in the pacing. I was sucked into her backstory for the first half, then sent into a sporadic blogpost style opinion essay about her random thoughts for the second. I was especially annoyed by her should-I-or-shouldn't-I essay about having a second child. It came off as a panicked journal entry and should have ended on the cutting room floor.

But its not often that great books are wonderful books, and this was a lovely and entertaining read. I mean, if I am going to laugh aloud in crowded coffee shops, then I should at least give the same impression of pleasure to you. Go read this book, you'll have fun.

Read the New York Times book review HERE.

Time Travelers Never Die

I picked up Time Travelers Never Die largely because of the title and the first few pages I read in the bookstore. I'd never heard of the book, nor the author. But the idea seemed like it held a lot of potential

The story starts when the main character, Shel's, father goes missing. Among his possessions, he finds a time machine.

It's a simple premise, but promises much adventure.

Lots of good science fiction changes only one thing about the world and explores the consequences. In this case, the only thing that separates the universe of the book from the one we live in is the existence of these time machines, being used by a small number of people. The setting is in the not too distant future and there's not much in the way of obvious technological progress between now and then. (Which is in itself slightly unrealistic, but it works.)

Time travel is explored in a very pragmatic way, which is unusual for these types of stories. Time is immutable, so there's no going back in time and changing the future. If a paradox is approached, unlikely events will happen to prevent it.

If there's one thing the book lacked, it would be an overarching plot or traditional story structure. The mission of finding Shel's father is accomplished well before the end of the book. The main reason for a lot of what the book does seems to be exploring the mindset of a time traveler, and it does this well. But, sometimes it just feels like the characters are screwing around, aimlessly.

Regardless, I enjoyed this book very much. Would recommend.

One Simple Idea by Stephen Key

I picked up One Simple Idea by Stephen Key because it was recommended to me by Tim Ferriss in The 4 Hour Work Week. I immediately didn't like it because the preface indicated that the author was prompted to write the book after the success that he gained after Tim Ferriss took his class. I suppose there are some people that really make a difference in this world.

Stephen Key's philosophy is that one can become rich, not by making a product, but by thinking of it then selling it. The bulk of the work is getting a company to buy it. He makes his money off of royalties and licensing.

This book made me want to do something. I wanted to go to the mall and watch people buy things, chat up store clerks and figure out what people actually want to buy. It made me want to be an inventor. I wanted to start a design company and cold call companies.

This book is equal parts encouraging and resourceful. It builds you up, telling you that anyone can do this, and then gives you the tools. The only downside is that the tools are a real bummer. Key doesn't lie, its a lot of hard work to play with the big boys and market to large companies. To be inspired you had to shift through 150 pages of procedure on the best way to protect your ideas and what items to put in your negotiation clauses. It wasn't what I bargained for. However, I was convinced at the end that it only took 150 pages of knowledge to start my new dream of being an inventor.

Overall I think this book had a rather high rate of return. I read it in a few days and in return I was empowered with entrepreneurial spirit. People on Amazon seem to think so too, so far it has been getting 100% 5 star reviews.

Women Who Love too Much by Robin Norwood

Today we are introducing an inspirational product suggestion. Women Who Love too Much is a book by Robin Norwood. Use the following  to determine if this product could be a meaningful contribution to your self help journey.

What it's about
This non-fiction is a self help by exposition. The story is driven by the tales of many women who have somehow contributed to their own demise by pursuing and falling for toxic men. The stories are dramatic, but not extraordinary. The author presents them in a way that exposes relationship follies that we make in our own, healthy relationships. We are able to make the conclusions by ourselves, but she also creates a take-away checklist at the end, giving us a few cardinal rules of relationships.

Why it inspires
Women often blame men for their crappy lives. Norwood's book tells us that perhaps it is our own toxicity that is causing our crappy lives. She does it meaningfully and gently, allowing everyone to take away a positive message. It is not just a guide on how to break up a toxic relationship, it could also inspire growth in a healthy relationship by allowing us to recognize our toxic behaviors

Who might be interested
Women in relationships. All women in relationships, especially those that use their relationships like drugs. You don't need to want the change to benefit from this book.

I found this to be an excellent read myself.

Interested in this book? Buy it online here


This is not a sponsored advertisement.

Blink by Malcom Gladwell

This nonfiction is structured as a series of anecdotes. Each anecdote is about how some snap decisions are magically and inexplicably right and how we rely on them to make the right decisions. For instance, he tells the story of a psychologist that can tell if a married couple will still be together in 15 years from a first impression. He also highlights an anecdote about how a few police officers incorrectly profiled a black man and shot him dead within 5 seconds of meeting him. His point is oblique. The book is entertaining because it frames multiple entertaining stories for us, but it is weak for the same reason. If he really knew what he was saying, he would have told us what he meant opposed to circling his idea with 200 pages of examples. He probably would have only needed one conclusion rather than the three disguised as concluding chapters and an afterward.

The author has a heart of gold, and his optimism shines through. He is telling us that our instincts are powerful and we should find out how to harness them. The anecdotes are simple examples of amazing people that have been able to use their instinct and powers of first impression like magic tricks, and also amazing people who are overconfident in their abilities to mind read. I didn't like how he told the story, but I liked what he meant. He is telling us to trust ourselves.

Who should read it.

• People who are fans of Malcom Gladwell. He is really creating a genre. 
• People who are fans of the New Yorker
• People who are fascinated with amazing people. There is a bit of hero worship with the people in the anecdotes in this book.
• People who think that there is something more than hard core facts and rational when it comes to decision making -- this book will re-enforce your beliefs
• Those left-brain people who discount thier feelings when making decisions -- this book will challenge your beliefs

Are you interested in reading this book? Buy it online here.

4 Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss

Tim Ferriss lives an awesome life. In this book he explains how we too can change our entire lives by rejecting the common path and forging our own by joining the "new rich". He inspires goals, and gives rudimentary business advice and suggestions.

Although his techniques are unorthodox, it is fun to imagine a life where we aren't stuck in a box, being forced to work until a miracle age when we can stop. You too can travel the world on all the money you need by starting a business that makes money for you. It sounds plausible, and if anything, it can convince you to do something you may never have thought of doing before.

Leadership and Self Deception

Leadership and self deception

Salary.com recommended this book as one of the 13 top business books that could change my life. I almost immediately bought it for 8 dollars from the Barnes and Nobles NookBook store. I laughed when the book described itself as "straightforward". How astute.

It wasn't a great read, persay. The charactors weren't very fleshed out and I had a strange feeling that the reactions the charactors were having were what the writers wanted the readers to be having. The writing sounded  a lot like this:

"Important sentence"

"the charactor thought about that for a moment"

However, the concepts did stick with me. I found the box idea intriguing. I immediately was able to apply the box to people I know now. A person being in a box is an analogy for someone who can't see the bigger picture. Perhaps someone's ego is hurt, or they are being corrected for something unjustly. There must be a box in play, either the other persons or my own. Interesting stuff. It was a gentle analogy that could be used as charactor correction in an office.

My only qualm is that this story about a box isn't really what I thought I was getting into. I thought it was about deciving yourself of your original intentions, say in choosing a career. Oh well. At least now I have the feeling that I can rise above interoffice politics.

Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Steig Larson

I don't know where I heard about this book. I don't think I know anyone who as read it. Despite all this, I bought this paperback copy from Target because I felt like Everyone was reading it. Four days later, I don't feel cheated. This book offered wonderfully griping suspense, damaged heroes, and despicable villains. Hundreds of pages passed seemingly with a blink of the eye.

The tale is about Mikael Blomkvist, a journalist that writes a story about a high powered CEO, and loses a trial because of it. He risks damaging the magazine of which he was a founder. A rich company owner takes advantage of his dire situation and asks him to help solve a murder that happened 40 years ago. New evidence is brought to light and events occur that lead Mikael to believe that it may not be such a cold case after all. I'm not going to spoil it for you. Besides, the plot is so intricate that explaining it might take as much space as the actual book.

What makes the book stand out aside from the compelling plot are the characters. The book offers two heroes. The girl with the dragon tattoo is Lisbeth Salander, a tough little young adult with major social disabilities. She has a stellar mind which she applies to investigative research, but she also has a repellent attitude that hints at an interesting back story. The lead male is adequately sharp when it comes to negotiations, but an idiot when it comes to women. 

I'm not saying that the book was perfect. Here are my chief complaints.

- It may be a low blow, but its awfully hard to read about something that happened in Sweden. Its unfortunate that my only experience with swedish language is from Ikea, but it has tainted my experience in ways the book can not help. Everytime I read the name of a city, I think of a delightful paper lamp.  I have no idea how to pronounce an umlaut. Its come to the point where everytime a swedish word is written, my eyes skim the word. If a reader skims words too often, their eyes will start to glaze over the page. Getting over the first 50 pages without being completely glazed over was the hardest hurdle in reading this book.

- The plot ebbed and flowed nicely, but when the mystery ended, I didn't care much about the corporate revenge. The Big Reveal should have happened at the end. As it stands now, the last 100 pages are a whisper.

- I see that the theme may have been about the hatred of women. I can't draw any conclusion about this. It seems that some women are poor murder victims and some just need to be beaten. At the end, did we find out that Mikael too hated women? I can't tell.

- Making up a situation where a forty year old murder could be so adequately documented and still solvable is brilliant. The village was isolated on an island with a blocked road, and everyone in town was photographed multiple times on a particular day. The fact that the solution lied outside of this hermetically sealed space felt cheap. How could I have guessed that?

All and all a good read. The book was 600 pages long, but I finished it casually in a couple of hours. I see amazon has copies for a 5 spot now. I can say that is an amazing value for this satisfying experience.

Scarlett by Alexandria Ripley

 I finished reading Scarlett, the Gone with the Wind sequel at 4am this morning. After that 900 page monster, I have a deep seated satisfaction knowing that love will prevail over all. I was worried at first about whether or not the book would end well, and it did, perhaps a bit too hastily.

The book starts off at Melanie's Funeral, with Scarlett making an ungraceful error that ruins her social standing in Atlanta. After moving to Charleston and failing to reconcile her marriage to Rhett Butler, she reunites with her Irish relatives in Savannah, who persuade her to visit her native land in Ireland. She is quite taken by the Irish plight and moves there, becoming the family matriarch and providing financial support to her loved ones. In Ireland, Scarlett discovers that she is pregnant with Rhett's child, but is caught offhand when Rhett divorces her and remarries before Scarlett can reveal her pregnancy. She unknowingly funds a peasent Irish uprising against the English that erupts when she begrudgingly accepts a marriage proposal from a shrewd English Earl. During the firefight, Rhett swoops in to save the day, confesses his love for Scarlett and his secret daughter, and they live happily ever after.

This book is a very good rival for the original. The tumultuous relationship defined by Scarlett's immaturity and Rhetts emotional betrayal is still true to Margrett Michell's vision. The writing style weaves a clear picture, detailing every lace collar and period mannerism, illustrating a true command of the south and the era. The book also wrapped up some of the tension that made the first one great. Scarlett grew into a mature responsible adult, learned to love her chidren, and ultimately ended up with Rhett.

The only problem was the pacing. There were about 400 pages right in the center of the book that came to a staggering halt. She was in Savannah getting to know her cousins, seeing houses.. getting to know people's names.. hanging out with her grandpa... going shopping, eating breakfast... and thats about it. I understand that this author might be an absolute authority in period lifestyle, but at the end of the day, her plight with her grandfather contributed nothing to the plot. She got nothing at ouf it and it did not fuel anything later in the book. This period also took an uneven proportion of the temporal scale. Her time in Savannah must have only been 6 weeks, enough time for her pregnancy to gestate without her knowing. The rest of the book took place over the course of 6 years.

The situation with Rhett also felt synthetically paced. He would pop in randomly in strange intervals as if the author was trying to remind us that he was still here and not to be bored by whatever is going on. This didnt seem so bad until the very end, when he sort of just showed up and wrapped up the plot in the last 20 pages. After I've been hanging on for 900 of them, I didn't want things to just start ending once the author realized that we've been doddling along.

But the bad wasn't so bad. I felt a little cheated at the end by the adrupt ending, but I was more enchanted by the outcome. I loved hearing about every piece of furniture in her house, every lace on her corset. My materialism was appaised by Scarlett's vanity. It was more about the ride than the story. And if she ends up with Rhett at the end, who cares?

The Martha Rules: 10 essentials for achieving success as you start, build, or manage a business by Martha Stewart

I am absolutely not a Martha-hater. I love her, and I see the value of homemaking and entertaining. Still, I was not happy with this book. As most people playing with the idea with entrepreneurship, I want more than anything a close friend to propell me forward towards this task. Martha is not that person. She tells us in the first chapter that she, among her entreprenural minded friends, is the naysayer. That... that just isn't want I wanted. This book was not inspiring, nor did it really have a lot of new information.

The book is organized into "10 essentials" although I could not recall what even one of those essentials was. I remember something about having a "big idea". She presents these essentials by telling stories about other start ups that reinforce her values, namely quality, hard work, doing your homework, and maintaining a pristine reputation. Man, she is the anti-Tim ferriss.

Another thing I disliked was how very small business it was. Martha always refers to the reader of the book as a her and a she, and always indicates that the business in mind was something like a nail salon or a flower shop. Although these life style businesses are the salt of the earth when it comes to women's businesses, it means nothing to the more tech minded female entrepreneur. It really doesn't matter what part of town I put my shop in the age of the global marketplace, Martha.

I have a feeling Martha would hate the likes of me. I am into taking shortcuts, making mistakes, and learning my lesson the hard way to make it into this world. I come from nothing, for goodness sake. Martha makes it sound like only someone with class and background can start a company, let alone make it in this world.