I haven’t posted much about books lately, which isn’t surprising–I don’t have the time to read that I once did. But I am enjoying Stieg Larsson’s books; I read The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo before Baguette was born, and now I’m reading The Girl Who Played With Fire.
It took me a while to get into the first one; the language is a bit stilted (I suspect this is a function of translation, if not of Swedish itself), and the male protagonist is somewhat passive. There’s also a lot of exposition, which sometimes gets clumsy. But once the story gets going, it really gets going–and the female protagonist (the eponymous Girl) is a compelling character. Don’t ask me how Larsson decided to write “Pippi Longstocking gone wrong,” but these books are making me think about re-reading Pippi Longstocking.
That probably won’t happen any time soon, though. I’ve been working my way through the collected works of Jane Austen (99 cents for the Kindle!) since long before I stopped work at the end of February, and am only part of the way through Emma. And Sandwich Pere keeps sending me books that he enjoys; the most recent was Lost to the West, Lars Brownworth’s galloping overview of the Byzantine Empire (quite good, although I’d have liked a little more cultural discussion to go with the politics and wars). Add to that the half dozen or so Georgette Heyer novels that I re-read in the first few weeks after bringing Baguette home (lovely to re-discover some old favorites and others that I read decades ago but didn’t have clear memories of) and I guess it’s not that I haven’t had time to read.
It’s just that I haven’t had time to post.