Literary Cruises

This blogging gig is turning out to be a little more difficult than I thought.  You see, I may have a reading list but I'm not always good at sticking to it. There are so many books to distract me, so many books to take me places I've never been and meet people I've never met before.  And that's what happened this summer.  While I have slogged through my reading list, I've also read a couple other books which I want to tell you about.

First we are going to cruise on down to the Carribean for Michael Crichton's posthumously published Pirate Latitudes.  This hardback treasure was on the Bargain Priced table at Barnes and Noble, so I picked it up for quite less than a King's ransom.  Surprisingly, this is a work of historical fiction, based on the life of Charles Hunter, real privateer, aka pirate.  It was a very riveting tale, one I could not put down, reading it in the space of about three days.  Pirates, lately, at least with the success of the Pirates of the Carribean franchise, are a hot topic and reading about the adventures of a real life one is even better.  (Rabbit Trail: It's hard to believe a little water ride about pirates at Walt Disney World turned into such a movie series!)

Michael Crichton is one of my favorite authors and producers.  You can read more about his books, tv shows and movies here.  While researching this, I learned he was the writer for Twister, a movie my family watches frequently.  State of Fear was a thorough, thoughtful and scientific response to global warming.  Crichton's works live at the intersection of science and technology with humanity.  If you haven't read anything of his, do.  He will entertain you while making you think, not always an easy task.

Now we fly to Sweden.  The next book is another one in which I've come lately to the brouhaha: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo; wow! really late! Didn't realize this book was published in 2005; better late than never.  I loved "traveling" to Sweden and trying to pronounce Swedish names in my head. I loved the snow and cold, the locations, the world traveling near the end.  I loved trying to predict whodunit but then finding the mystery solved in an unexpected way.  I do wish Mr. Larsson could have included a map or two, but then I love maps - they just help me see the action better in my head.  I was a little confused at first regarding who the story was really about but the ending cleared that up; a rather sad ending, in my opinion.

Throughout, this book has an underlying theme of violence against women.  And there is one particular brutal scene, so if you are sensitive to this, you may want to either skip the book or at least skip that part (you can message me and I'll give you page numbers in the paperback to skip if you want).  I found this book to have many, many different story lines, character relationships and themes (incest, corporate espionage, embezzlement, dysfunctional families of the highest order, Nazis to name a few) to the point where I envisioned Larsson the writer as Larsson the juggler maintaining as many balls in the air as possible.  

This book was translated from the Swedish.  It was very fascinating to read that; I found it to be noticeable, at times, especially with antecedents and pronouns, but yet it never threw me out of the story.  I admire the work of translators and ponder the difficulties inherent in their task.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is actually two movies, one that came out in 2009 and the 2011 one with Daniel Craig.  The 2009 version, according to my parents who watched it on Netflix Instant Play, is English subtitled.  My father usually doesn't like to watch subtitled movies but he said he enjoyed this one.  My mom was impacted by the aforementioned scene and the way the actress conveyed the character's pain.

So now that I've had some literary travels, it's back to the 14th century, slavery, feminism, politics and radicals.