The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo & Sequels by Stieg Larsson

After an almost all-night reading session and with a bit of sadness, I wrapped up the final novel in Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest. The book is, of course, a sequel to The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played With Fire, all set in Sweden and all dealing with corruption and crimes against women, especially one tattooed, anti-social computer hacker named Lisbeth Salander.

I say I concluded the series with some sadness because I know there will be no other sequel -- at least not one by the Swedish author. He suffered a fatal heart attack after climbing seven flights of stairs shortly after he turned the trilogy into a publisher and never got to see his books hit the bestseller lists and stay there. Already, the first novel has been made into two movies, one Swedish and one American. Another movie is planned.

While the third novel's ending is such that I doubt Larsson planned another sequel, he clearly could have written another one if he had wanted. It would be nice, after all, to know how Sander -- aka the girl with the dragon tattoo, the one who could defend herself quite well with a gun, a golf club or a carpenter's nail gun -- adapted to society among other things. It would also have been nice to know the whereabouts of her twin sister -- a major detail Larsson never addressed. It seems odd he would have repeatedly mentioned the sister if he never meant to let the reader meet her or even know if she is alive or dead.

I immensely enjoyed all three books, and I don't usually read crime fiction. I am fully aware of the criticism that Larsson's books are packed with graphic violence, especially sexual violence mainly against women but also the reverse in a couple cases. Yet the novels never condone or glamorize the sexual violence. The rape scenes comes across as twisted violence, not sex. And that is to Larsson's credit.

Larsson also includes statistical information on violence against women in Sweden and refers to other gender discrimination, albeit less violent. Near the end of the final novel, the lead male character, investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist, tells his sister, "When it comes down to it, this story is not primarily about spies and secret government agencies; it's about violence against women, and the men who enable it." Indeed, that theme seems to permeate all three books.

The trilogy also abounds with consensual sex -- of various flavors. Blomkvist is a bit of a 21st Century James Bond. Perhaps not coincidentally, Daniel Craig, who portrays Blomkvist in the American movie version of Dragon Tattoo, is also Hollywood's latest Bond.

The books depict Salander as far more than a sexual victim. Though seriously lacking in social skills, she is a survivor not to mention a genius. The daughter of a not-so-nice Russian defector, Salander is prone to violence herself when she's provoked. She's also equipped with a photographic memory, computer skills that would make Microsoft and Apple look like newbies, and an ability to plot her every word and action, even in a crisis.

Larsson's books reflect significant research and a talent for creating intricate plot lines with countless subplots. While his occasional plot summaries are at times helpful, they more often are annoying and unnecessarily repetitive. The first and third books also take more than a few pages to gain the reader's interest. Larsson could have written more concisely, and his editor should have done more editing.

Still, anyone with the talent, the drive and the ability to write three novels that have captivated so many diverse readers around the world deserves applause. I just wish Larsson could have lived to hear it.

Turn of Mind by Alice LaPlante

Imagine a murder mystery narrated by the chief suspect. Imagine the suspect is a Dr. Jennifer White, once an expert hand surgeon in Chicago, now a retired surgeon suffering from Alzheimer's. There lies the basic plot of Alice LaPlante's first novel, Turn of Mind.

White, the main character, has good days and bad ones. She cannot remember from one day to the next, though, that her longtime friend and neighbor Amanda is dead. Nor can she remember if she killed Anna.

The book is appropriately not divided into chapters but into four distinct parts of White's life after the killing in an upscale neighborhood near Lake Michigan. After, all Jennifer White's life is no longer clearly divided. At times, she thinks she is a teenager; at other times, a new mother eager to give up breastfeeding and return to her surgical work.

At one point, she vividly recalls her late husband James' shady financial dealings as a lawyer for the richest white-collar criminals. At other times, she believes her 30ish son Mark to be James. And there are the many times she believes James is once again late, a no-show. She must grieve her husband's death over and over -- each time she is told anew that he has died.

LaPlante takes care not to paint any of the characters -- the key suspect or the victim -- as all good or all bad. The same goes for the supporting cast -- the less-than-successful Mark and his younger sister Fiona (the one who so often covers for others' misdeeds).

Could one of White's adult children have been the killer? Might Fiona have covered for her mother? Might Mark have killed for the money he's always needing? Or did the chief suspect, Dr. Jennifer White, commit the crime but face no fate worse than the one she already faces in the few remaining years of her life?

The book is far more than a murder mystery. It also is a virtual diary of a brilliant surgeon's deteriorating mind as well as the story of a woman who learned early on to adapt, whether to a marriage gone awry, to a lavish lifestyle unjustly earned, to a friend's betrayal and finally to the betrayal of her own mind.

Oldies But Goodies -- Alice, Let's Eat & Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Only recently did I get around to reading Calvin Trillin's Alice, Let's Eat and Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. The book by Trillin, who still writes for The New Yorker, was published in 1978, four years after Dillard's collection of nature essays came out.

Both authors were ahead of their time. The TV Food Network didn't exist. And except for the likes of Julia Child, food writing wasn't the big seller it is now when Trillin wrote of his adventures as a "Happy Eater" -- adventures that took him from Paris to Kansas City.

When Dillard's book was published, DDT was fortunately a thing of the past, albeit only recently, and global warming wasn't even a part of our vocabulary yet. It would be a long time before Americans once again focused on nature, from tiny insects to tall mountains. But Dillard was already there with the essays in her Pulitzer Prize-winning book -- works that explores such oddities as the sex life of a praying mantis, the eating habits of a honey-loving wasp and the art of a snowflake.

I liked Dillard's book but found it tedious at times.

Trillin's writing, however, is a fast and light read. His humor is self-effacing. And while he loves a good soupe de poissons de roche, rouille et croutons dores and knows what all that boils down to (fish soup), he also appreciates good barbecue, scrapple, country ham and my personal favorite: red-eye gravy. But what most shines through in this pre-Food Network book is the one thing that clearly supercedes Trillin's love of a good meal -- his wife Alice. ... But then again, she never made him choose.

11/22/63 by Stephen King

Some events are so important that we never forget where we were when we learned about them. The night Richard Nixon resigned from the presidency, I was working alone at the Little Rock AP and proceeded to get reaction for the national desk. When my Nana died, I had just arrived at Sunday evening church services. When John Kennedy was assassinated, I was sitting in Mr. Fawcett's math class. Our superintendent announced that the president had been shot. We said a silent prayer, and moments later Mr. Key told us the president had died.

So, when I read Stephen King's 11/22/63, a novel in which a time traveler sets out to prevent the Kennedy assassination outside the Texas Book Depository in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, I also did a bit of time traveling. As King mentioned things only a time traveler would notice -- no cell phones in 1963, for instance -- I, too, was transported back to that Cold War era and to my own memories of the assassination and my life then.

The book is long (849 pages), but it is an easy if at times frustrating read. King repeats sentences and even offers occasional plot summaries so to speak. "The past is obdurate," he wrote how many times? I lost count. I'm sure he did that intentionally, for effect. But the only effect it had on me was irritation.

Still, I enjoyed the book, especially fter a few hundred pages into it when King finally deals with the main plot -- you know, the part about how Lee Harvey Oswald, a Marxist and proud of it, came back to the United States after defecting to Russia. Along with Oswald, came his Russian wife Marina, their baby daughter and a death wish for Kennedy and the president's anti-Castro ways.

While the book is a novel with fantasy and fiction, King included much historical fact along the way -- so much that I found myself days later in my garage looking for the canvas-blue, three-ring notebook in which, as a child, I had cut and stored newspaper clippings from the now-defunct Memphis Press-Scimitar about the assassination. (I think such notebooks also have become part of the "obdurate" past.)

After reading the book and looking through the now-fragile clippings, I began noticing names and facts that as a 13-year-old girl I had not noticed. There was Ruth Paine, who in the book and in life had allowed allowed Marina to live with her during Marina's separation from Lee. There was Maj. Gen. Edwin Walker, who had barely missed a rifle bullet in April 1963 -- an assassination attempt Oswald reportedly boasted about to Marina that night. And I had forgotten the point to which King repeatedly alludes -- how Kennedy had begun a withdrawal from Vietnam. Of course, that all changed after his death, and Vietnam became its own nightmare in U.S. history.

But the part of the book I was most curious about was not so much a question of fact as one of portrayal. Had King accurately depicted the 24-year-old Oswald's widowed mother, Marguerite Oswald, as a self-absorbed, controlling woman who most anybody would have been better off not to have had as a parent, especially Lee -- whose first name, by the way, was given to him in honor of Robert E. Lee?

It appears King was on target. According to an old Associated Press article I found, Oswald had been diagnosed at age 13 as having schizophrenic tendencies and being potentially dangerous. Yet his mother, who had little money, had "balked at aid from welfare agencies, ignored a court order that Lee receive psychiatric treatment" and refused to consider him "anything more than a truant," the AP reported, attributing the information to Lee's probation officer in the early 1950s.

The article also related how, in the days after the assassination, reporters and three Secret Service agents were at Marguerite Oswald's home when she called to the agents and said, "You all want to see me on television? ... I'm just exhausted. I haven't even had time to read the papers."

This book was the first I have ever read by King. I'm glad I read it despite a couple problems I had with plot inconsistencies. King seemed, for example, to change the rules on traveling back and forth in time near the novel's end for convenience sake. But when an author manages to hold my interest for more than 800 pages, prompts me to rummage through my cluttered garage for an old notebook and then causes me to reread almost 50-year-old newspaper articles, he must have done something right.

Blue Nights by Joan Didion

Joan Didion's bestselling The Year of Magical Thinking focused on the unexpected death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, also a successful writer and brother-in-law of Dominick Dunne. The book was published in 2005, just weeks before another tragedy struck Didion -- the death after a lingering illness of her daughter, Quintana Roo, at age 39.

Didion quickly updated the book with her daughter's death, but now she has written another memoir, this time focusing almost entirely on the daughter she adopted as an infant, the one who died, slowly, in a New York hospital. The book is Blue Nights and is written in typical Didion style -- short sentences and terse, obvious repetition for emphasis yet still concise.

The book is more about Didion's response to Quintana Roo's death than it is about Quintana Roo. It also is a mirror of the aging author's own frailties and vanities. She was 75 when she wrote this book in 2009.

Didion writes, for example, of realizing only late in life that she would not again be wearing the red suede sandals with 4-inch heels she once adored. Or the gold hoop earrings. Or the black cashmere leggings. Or the enameled beads. And she realizes that even the mention of such concerns in a book about her daughter's death "will be construed by many as a manifestation of misplaced vanity."

And yet ... those realizations do not seem a reflection so much of vanity as a reflection of growing old -- and doing so alone, without spouse, without child, without some of the longtime friends Didion writes of having died as well.

As an aging woman myself, I know it's a lie to say I'm middle-aged unless I plan to live well past a century. When I broke my ankle and had to have surgery, I refused a walker despite the doctor's advice. I prefer not to tell my age, but my resume with the college graduation date is a dead-giveaway. I refuse to wear old women's shoes -- if you're under 50, you know the kind of shoes I mean. I toss all mail from the AARP. I'm not retired, so I surely cannot be that old, I tell myself. I do not request senior discounts at restaurants even when I qualify. I do not worry much about makeup and hairstyles. (I tell myself I am bohemian, not just too tired to fret over such things anymore.) But I do wish I could better conceal the increasingly visible veins in my hands, the scarred ankle that still hurts and becomes suddenly and dangerously stiff; the back teeth I am missing but cannot afford to replace.

So, vanity, you see, is not a quality limited to the Joan Didions and other rich and famous. Didion is just honest, candid about hers.

As an adoptive mother, I also identify with Didion's recollections of the fears regarding her daughter, adopted when Didion was 31, much younger than I was when I adopted my daughter from China.

"All adopted children, I am told, fear that they will be abandoned by their adoptive parents as they believe themselves to be abandoned by their natural," Didion writes. "All adoptive parents, I do not need to be told, fear that they do not deserve the child they were given, that the child will be taken from them."

Yes, I have feared such loss to the point that I borrowed money from someone I did not want to ask but did so because I felt my daughter's father and I needed to re-adopt her in this country and to do so very quickly -- just to be safe. My daughter has said don't leave me alone. -- Where are you? I can't find you, she has said. -- I was only in the other room or the back yard.

Didion recalls her daughter, as a child, speaking of her "other mommy," the biological mother. The same words have come from my daughter, who's even spoken of her four sets of grandparents -- if you count the ones in China, that is.

Ultimately, of course, Didion did lose her daughter, not to the biological mother, not to a court or to a foster parent, but to death -- at a far too young age.

If a memoir can be judged by believability, by truth, by remembrances of all things -- even the embarrassing -- Blue Nights certainly qualifies. It is not a depressing book, but it is a work that at times is so realistic it hurts, especially if the reader's life bears even small resemblances to Didion's.

Coming Up & What I'm Reading Now.....

will be reviews or commentary on:
by Annie Dillard.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played With Fire by Stieg Larrson. I will follow up later with an item on The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, the final book in Larrson's posthumously published and bestselling series.

Messenger of Truth, a Maisie Dobbs mystery novel set in the aftermath of World War I and the fourth in a series of Jacqueline Winspear.

And a mention of a couple books, both novels, I started but just couldn't make myself want to finish them. ... Oh, and I am now reading Alice, Let's Eat, a 1970s book by Calvin Trillin, whose name many will recognize from his articles over the decades in The New Yorker. And I just checked out Alice LaPlante's Turn of Mind.

The Reading Promise by Alice Ozma

The Reading Promise: My Father and the Books We Shared is Alice Ozma's account of her and her father's years of reading aloud to each other for 3,218 consecutive days. The commitment the two made to each other when Alice was a child in 1998 ended only when moved away to begin college.

The book is also Ozma's way of paying homage to her father, a retired elementary school librarian who raised her and her sister alone after their mother left. It evolves -- or devolves, depending on your point of view -- into one assailing the school administrators who forbade her from from reading aloud to small children. These officials become such incompetent villains that the book cries for their side of the story. Why did they get rid of so many books in the library, as Ozma says they did? Why did they want her father to focus only on computers rather than books in a library? Perhaps, the officials are the mindless demons Ozma describes, but I wonder.

Ozma, whose name comes from Lewis Carroll's Alice and from Frank Baum's Oz books, clearly grew up in a home that cherished reading. Each chapter begins with a quote from a book she and her father shared -- from Charles Dickens' Great Expectations to Lois Lowry's The Giver and A.A. Milne's The House at Pooh Corner.

At one point, I stopped reading the book because, except for those quotations, the book was dealing little with what Alice and her father read and how it changed their lives. I decided to give it a second try, though, and grew to like it the farther I got into it. Still, there was something or some things about the book I never came to like.

First, Ozma's story gets tedious, even childish, at times. Perhaps that's in part because she's young and too vividly remembering her childhood. But reading about her temper tantrums and such when they contribute nothing to the overall story is really boring, especially when I for one deal with more than enough of such behavior in my own home.

And frankly, Ozma's father seems a bit too odd. I kept thinking, in fact -- there's another reason he had trouble with school administrators. His daughter may not know it. And the reader can only suspect it.

Ozma left me wanting to know more about the reading experiences. Did she ever read to her father? That's what I thought was going to happen, but it became less clear as the book progressed. Why did they choose the books they choose? Which ones did they like, hate? Which ones helped her deal with her parents' divorce? Which ones helped her father? How did they go from Winnie the Pooh to Great Expectations -- and when? How, in other words, did their reading progress as Alice grew up?

Still, the book has some merit. It made me wish my daughter and I would read aloud more to each other. But the book could have had much more merit in the hands of a better writer.

The Magician's Assistant by Ann Patchett

Tell me to read a book, a novel per se, about a woman who is a magician's assistant -- yes, the always-pretty woman who appears to get sawed in half but comes out of the box intact with no legs or arms missing. Tell me the magician is gay, the woman is straight but in love with him, that she even marries him and lives a chaste life with him and his gay lover until they both die and leave her alone to inherit everything. Tell me she finds out -- to her dismay -- that this most cosmopolitan of men has a family in rural Nebraska -- a mom with permed hair and lots of secrets, a sister with an abusive husband, and more. And of course, they're mostly likable folks, ableit a tad strange.

Tell me I'll enjoy this book. Tell me I'll find it plausible. I'd think you were joshing or just plain clueless. But I did enjoy it. I did find it believable -- even a bit too predictable near the end. And, yes, I'd recommend it to you -- well, maybe not to my mother but to you, the people who read my blog and who find it not so incredible that a straight woman might knowingly marry a gay man -- and be happy.

Why should that premise even sound so bizarre? How many marriages between two straight people are based on convenience or need? How many start out based on love or on what the two thought was love but change in a few months or a few years? Maybe those couples are miserable. But I'd argue that not all of them are. Some of those people likely married for other reasons -- money, gratitude, need, companionship, expectations. And perhaps some married for love, but not the kind that's always consummated in the bedroom. Or maybe the reasons for the marriage changed over time with one or both spouses. I'm not saying these arrangements are ideal. But they exist and are probably more prevalent than traditionalists realize.

Patchett, also the author of the critically acclaimed Bel Canto, wrote this less well-known novel in the late 1990s. Her writing is clear, concise, lyrical. "Parsifal is dead. That is the end of the story." Well, maybe not: Those are the book's first two sentences.

This novel is about Sabine, a 40-something magician's assistant who lives in and loves Los Angeles. As the assistant, she's always been the one at the side, the one who stays out of the spotlight. But in Patchett's novel, Sabine takes the spotlight and proceeds to shine it on the other characters she comes to know through Parsifal, the man we never get to meet except through all of the other characters' shared memories.

And the fact that I loved this book, to my own surprise, perhaps speaks to the magic that literature can work in all of us.

Books About Books

Lately, I've been reading books about books. I started with Pat Conroy's excellent My Reading Life and Nina Sankovitch's Tolstoy and the Purple Chair, both reviewed earlier on this blog. Later, I read Alan Jacobs' less lively The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction. Jacobs works really hard, too hard, to tell us it's OK to read frivolous books and it's also OK to ignore all those must-read lists. The problem is, I ended up forcing myself to finish reading Jacobs' own sometimes tedious book.

Now, I'm reading Susan Hill's Howards End Is on the Landing: A Year of Reading From Home. It is absolutely delightful. It's the kind of book I grab when I wake up in the middle of the night and read another page or two. I take the light-weight paperback -- just 236 pages -- to the restroom with me. I carry it to work in the hope of a few free moments. I knew I could identify with Hill when she dared to admit she dislikes reading Jane Austen. Gasp!... At last, I realized: I am not alone among so-called educated people who struggle to enjoy Pride and Prejudice.

Somewhere in between Howards End Is on the Landing and Jacobs' book, I read and largely enjoyed Richard Horan's book, Seeds: One Man's Serendipitous Journey to Find the Trees That Inspired Famous American Writers From Faulkner to Kerouac, Welty to Wharton. Horan's book is an offbeat combination of travel writing, botany and literature. It's full of interesting facts about the writers whose homes and trees he visits while collecting seeds to start legacy trees.

We learn, for instance, that the Tree of Heaven in Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is now considered invasive. We also learn that George Washington's legendary false teeth weren't wooden but were ivory. Outside the home of Rachel Carson, author of Silent Spring, Horan gathered cherry seeds from her Pennsylvania yard, where nature thankfully is not yet silenced. At Carson McCullers' home, he collected bright-red magnolia seeds. He tells us how to transplant those seeds -- something I now hope to do with my own small magnolia tree and its seeds.

Books about books may sound like a waste of time. But I find I sometimes get other reading ideas in them, and it's also interesting to learn what others think about literary works I've sometimes loved, sometimes hated or just never got around to reading.

Dreaming in Chinese by Deborah Fallows

Deborah Fallows' book Dreaming in Chinese offers a readable look at Mandarin and the ways language and culture interact. Even neophyte students of Mandarin such as myself will recognize and appreciate some of the words and phrases in Fallows' book -- Wo ai ni (I love you) and and Ni hao (Hello), for instance. Other Chinese statements such as Ni de Zhongwen hen hao (Your Chinese is very good!) are a tad more foreign to native English speakers. (Forgive my inability to include tonal marks.)

Throughout her book, Fallows adeptly explains some of the incredible differences between Mandarin and some other languages, particularly English. Mandarin, for example, has no verb tense. So, Americans should not be surprised when Chinese speakers have trouble with English tense. Likewise, the Chinese should not be appalled when native English speakers of Mandarin might vainly grasp for a male pronoun vs. a female pronoun and never find it -- not, that is, until he or she (ta) learns to read and write in Mandarin rather than only speak it. There are different Chinese characters for he and she but only in writing.

Fallows brings a doctoral degree in linguistics and three years in China to the book. She has lived in Shanghai and Beijing, cities that we learn have been big rivals over the years, in language and culture. Her book is interesting and informative. It's humorous at times, such as when she talks about the intense yet inexplicable dislike some Beijing and Shanghai residents have for each other. It's touching when she talks about the "tender" side that emerged among the Chinese after the deadly earthquake (dizhen) in May 2008.

I heartily recommend the book, most especially to readers with a special interest in China, Mandarin and linguistics.