Reading books by recently dead guys.
Mar. 21st, 2012 07:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
matt_doyleRead Pirate Latitudes by Michael Crichton, and finished The Girl Who Played With Fire.
Pirate Latitudes was pulp drivel, all the grunge of Pirates of the Caribbean and none of the charm. A few interesting characters, who were promptly ignored in favor of the grim, stoic, industrious Antihero With A Plan. Possibly it could have been made much better if Michael had still been alive to conspire with an editor; the world will never know.
The Girl Who Played With Fire was exactly the book Dragon Tattoo prepared me to expect. The first hundred pages were totally irrelevant; later on a whole page was spent on an IKEA shopping trip where a sentence would have sufficed (and two pages later came another shopping trip -- this one a lean and admirable example of how to handle indirect characterization. Everything Lisbeth bought said something about her state of mind. Maybe if I knew every IKEA product by name the same would be true of the first trip; I doubt it.) So the pacing is still a botch, the exposition still infodumpy, the prose still leaden in a way that may be a translation issue... but the pacing and exposition can't be, and the prose is consistent with them.
That said. More strong women with more agency, although their sex lives are still either centered around the author-insert male protagonist or used for audience titillation. To me, a slightly better emphasis on systemic violence against women -- it didn't feel as much like it was being exploited for fetish fuel at the same time it was being decried, though obviously Your Mileage May Vary. The action sequences and the suspense of the third act were superb, with a few hiccups. All in all, the last third of the book was The Empire Strikes Back, Kill Bill, and that weird bit of The Fellowship of the Ring where a fox narrates a scene all rolled into one.
I intend to read the third book as well, and I am enjoying the series, but all in all it's uneven enough that I don't really recommend it to anyone who didn't already intend to read it for their own reasons. I wish Stieg Larsson had been around longer to master his craft (and probably benefit from some therapy); I think he had interesting stories to tell and I would have been interested to see 'em.
Pirate Latitudes was pulp drivel, all the grunge of Pirates of the Caribbean and none of the charm. A few interesting characters, who were promptly ignored in favor of the grim, stoic, industrious Antihero With A Plan. Possibly it could have been made much better if Michael had still been alive to conspire with an editor; the world will never know.
The Girl Who Played With Fire was exactly the book Dragon Tattoo prepared me to expect. The first hundred pages were totally irrelevant; later on a whole page was spent on an IKEA shopping trip where a sentence would have sufficed (and two pages later came another shopping trip -- this one a lean and admirable example of how to handle indirect characterization. Everything Lisbeth bought said something about her state of mind. Maybe if I knew every IKEA product by name the same would be true of the first trip; I doubt it.) So the pacing is still a botch, the exposition still infodumpy, the prose still leaden in a way that may be a translation issue... but the pacing and exposition can't be, and the prose is consistent with them.
That said. More strong women with more agency, although their sex lives are still either centered around the author-insert male protagonist or used for audience titillation. To me, a slightly better emphasis on systemic violence against women -- it didn't feel as much like it was being exploited for fetish fuel at the same time it was being decried, though obviously Your Mileage May Vary. The action sequences and the suspense of the third act were superb, with a few hiccups. All in all, the last third of the book was The Empire Strikes Back, Kill Bill, and that weird bit of The Fellowship of the Ring where a fox narrates a scene all rolled into one.
I intend to read the third book as well, and I am enjoying the series, but all in all it's uneven enough that I don't really recommend it to anyone who didn't already intend to read it for their own reasons. I wish Stieg Larsson had been around longer to master his craft (and probably benefit from some therapy); I think he had interesting stories to tell and I would have been interested to see 'em.
