Elizabeth Berg

I've been re-reading bits of old Elizabeth Berg books as a sort of palate cleanser from the grimness of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. 

I love Elizabeth Berg.  Her books make me happy.  I once heard her address criticism that her books are unrealistically happy and light by pointing out that the main character of her most recent book helps her friend cope with (and eventually die of) terminal cancer.  Not exactly a shallow topic.  So itt's not that she deals with frivolous matters, not at all.  It's that, despite the terrible things that sometimes happen, life is still worth it.

Her characters see the beauty in ordinary things.  They endure life's trials and never move permanently into hopelessness and despair.  When I read her books, I more easily notice the beauty of the tea pouring from my teapot, of the green and pink quilt on my lap, of my flowered aprons hanging from their nails on the wall.

Tired

This is a problem I have with good books.  I went to bed around 11pm last night, planning to read for maybe half an hour.  I was about 150 pages into The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.  But I wasn't tired.  I kept reading and eventually got tired, but at that point I was less than 100 pages from the end and had to keep going.  I was uncomfortable, exhausted, but had to finish.  And I did.  And it was great.

It turned out a little more disturbing than I initially thought - quite a bit more than a financial scandal.  But I liked the ending (particularly because I know this is the first book in a trilogy).  I liked the solution to the mystery of the missing girl.  I liked the character development.

I just need to add that YET AGAIN there is romance between a woman in her twenties and a man in his forties or fifties.  I need to start keeping track of how often this happens.  Also, mental illness is a theme that runs throughout the book, another repeat of recent books.  The mental illness bit I'm okay with, but I'm sick to death of:

"But I'm old enough to be your father!"
"I don't care!"

Otherwise, this book was great.  Should you read it? If you like mysteries and can handle things turning a little dark, yes, definitely.

Character Development

I'm warming up a bit on Lisbeth Salander.  She's legitimately troubled.  She had a state-appointed guardian she cared about who just had a stroke.  Her mother is in an institution.  And yes, she's whip-smart and attractive, but I'm willing to consider her three-dimensional, especially since the rest of the book is so good.

There's a sequel (yay!) but not much after that, as Stieg Larsson died a couple years ago (no!).

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Ah, to read a good book.  I picked up The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo at the library last week, along with a book called The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane.

I started with the latter, but gave it up almost immediately.  Life is finite, and I couldn't force myself through another crummy book.  The Physick Book... is about a PhD candidate studying the Salem witch trials, and how comes to relate to her own past, or something.  I decided not to give it a chance.  The first chapter included something about how "she made a face as if she'd bitten into an unripe persimmon," which is just not necessary.  It also included a detailed description of the main character's appearance - set off by the character regarding herself in a mirror.  I did that sort of thing in my writing when I was about thirteen.  It just looks amateurish.  And I couldn't help but notice that the character's description sure seemed to match the author photo on the book jacket...

But The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is addicting.  It's by Stieg Larsson, a Swedish author, and is translated into English.  Mikael, the main character, is a disgraced financial journalist.  An old industrialist has hired him to look into the decades-old murder of his granddaughter.  It's exciting.  It's fast-paced.  It's intriguing.  I'm happy.

One complaint - Lisbeth Salander, a private investigator.  She's mid-twenties, tiny, pretty, decked out in tattoos and piercings and punk gear.  She plays by her own rules, she's a hacker, she's a genius.  I feel like "well, of course."  Sometimes some characters seem to exist not because they are real people that make sense in the story, but because the author thinks they would be cool or fascinating.  If she weren't 90 pounds and hot, or if she weren't a genius, or something, maybe it'd be different.

So far, Lisbeth is the only note that rings untrue.  The rest of it is exciting.  I'd much rather keep reading this than teach my class this afternoon.

Scarlett Thomas news!

Oh man.  There's going to be a new Scarlett Thomas book released on May 6th.  Our Tragic Universe.  I'm so excited!  I really recommend PopCo and The End of Mr. Y, her two previous books.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Our-Tragic-Universe-Scarlett-Thomas/dp/184767089X

I've done it

I'm done with Carrion Comfort.  Not because I finished it.  I was about halfway through last night, thinking yet again "This book sucks," and I decided to make sure I'd stop reading it and wasting my time.  I flipped to the back and read the ending.  There.  Problem solved.  I'm going to the library today.

"Remedy" by Little Boots

Here's the video of the song I mentioned yesterday.  It's lots of fun, and I love the idea of dancing as a remedy.

A finished scarf

Here are some photos of the scarf I recently finished knitting (no song is associated with this one, I just made it because it's pretty).  I've been working on it verrrry slowly since November, so it's exciting to have it finished.  You can see the wavy pattern in the close-up.

The scarf becomes...

A shrug.  I've decided I'm going to make my Sleepyhead scarf into a long-sleeved shrug.  So far it is just an idea, no execution yet.

New single you ought to download: "Remedy" by Little Boots.  She's a pretty big star in England, and does catchy electropop sort of similar to Lady Gaga.  I've already been overplaying "New in Town," another single of hers.  After hearing "Remedy" at Berlin Nightclub in Chicago this weekend, I'm now super-into it as well.

Still reading Carrion Comfort.  I doubt I'll end up loving this book, or even kind of liking it, but it's hard to leave a book unfinished.

When to stop?

How do you know when to give up on reading a book? I almost never do.  But I'm tempted to quit Carrion Comfort.  It would free me to find something good to read.  Maybe I'll look for another good to book to read, and in the meantime still chip away at Carrion Comfort.

Adrift on my scarf

So my progress on my Sleepyhead scarf has stalled because of fabric issues.  Sewing the fabric to the knitted scarf has resulted in the knit part being stretched kind of strangely, plus the ribbons are rather stiff.  It's not something easy to wrap around your neck.  I'm thinking of trying to convert it into some other sort of garment, but I'm not sure what yet...

Still minimal progress on Carrion Comfort.  It hasn't gotten any better.  Saul is talking to a woman in her 20s, and let me just say, they BETTER NOT end up love interests, because he's at least 60.  Enough already.

Carrion Comfort

So I'm a little over 100 pages into Carrion Comfort, and honestly I'm having a hard time getting into it.  It's a horror novel about vampires (for lack of a better word) that control people with their minds and feed off of the deaths of others.  The main character, I guess, is Saul Laski, a Polish Jew who survived the Holocaust.  He first encountered a mind vampire in the Chelmno concentration camp, and he has been theorizing about their existence for years.  He's a psychiatrist now (another book, another psychiatrist character, right?).

But he's not really the main character, at least not yet.  Time has been split between Nina and Herod, both mind vampires, Saul, and Bobby Gentry, the Charleston sheriff investigating the string of murders that start the book off.  Nina and Herod are repugnant (enough so that I don't want to read this while eating) and Saul and Bobby haven't really been fleshed out.  Some passages are horrifying.  Some passages are boring.  Some seem kind of deliberately shocking, which irritates me.  

I don't like to give up on books.  The last book I stopped reading midway through was Snow by Orhan Pamuk.  Snow has all sorts of critical acclaim, but all I could see was a protagonist who kept getting called away from the action by his inspiration to write poetry RIGHT THEN.  It was boring as hell.  

I'm not ready to give up on Carrion Comfort yet, especially because it comes recommended by Parrish, my favorite Borders employee.  Parrish has previously recommended other good books to me, including the incredible The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway.  (Do you like sci-fi and adventure even a tiny bit? Yes?  Go buy that book right now.  Go to amazon.  Do it.  Go.  You won't regret it.)  So I'll soldier on, re-reading my favorite vegan cookbook (The Veganomicon) when I need something light and non-disturbing, and see if my opinion changes.

Healthy, less wealthy.

So while recovering from the flu I had an online mini-spending spree.  I bought a pair of Nicole shoes and a pair of Steve Madden shoes, and a pair of James Jeans.  I haven't received the jeans yet, but I've got the shoes.  Here's what they look like:

The Nicole Shoes "Behave"

The Steve Madden Shoes "Jezebell"

Here's the issue.  I bought the Steve Madden shoes because, as I said to my friends, "they look just like dance shoes!"  When I wore them out yesterday and walked down my icy, packed-snow driveway, I realized: they are dance shoes.  Jazz shoes.  They have no traction, and they're very thin.  But they're comfortable, and I love how jazz shoes look with clothes.  So what I need to do is talk to a shoemaker (cobbler?) and see if they can be re-soled for use in Wisconsin winters.

The Nicole shoes are great because I can pretend in my head that I'm in the 1890s solving mysteries, a la The Alienist by Caleb Carr.