A Life Spent Reading

I liked this movie. Everyone seems to be wanting all the subsequent Terminator sequels to be T2 all over again, and, well, it ain’t gonna happen. But this is a good movie in its own right, and if you don’t try to compare it to an all-time classic, you’ll like it too.

The story takes place after Judgment Day but before the events of the first Terminator movie. As such, we get to see a young Kyle Reese and an older John Conner. I thought Christian Bale did an okay job with the Connor role (a little too much pathos for my reading of the character), but Anton Yelchin was superb as Reese. I also liked Sam Worthington in his role as the prototype for the T-800 series terminators. (As I was watching the movie I kept thinking that they’d picked someone who, at times and from certain angles, reminded me a heck of a lot of Arnold…)

There are lots of homages to the original two movies, so the cognoscenti will be happy. The geek-tech factor is also satisfyingly high. Recommended for anyone who likes the series and wants to see how it will fare without Arnold Himself.

As you can see, the cover is emo teen girl stuck in barren, spooky forest, and that would work pretty well as a one-line summary of the plot itself. But as one might suspect from the title, the level of writing is a cut above average, and that saves this book.

Mary lives in a post-apocalyptic world, a member of a village in the middle of a forest cut off from the rest of humanity – if the rest of humanity still even exists – by the presence of hordes of zombies. The village is run by a matriarchal sisterhood who cling to their secrets and time-worn methods of keeping everyone safe from said zombies. Naturally, this means sticking mainly to the village. But there’s a problem: Mary wants to see the ocean.

There isn’t really much plot here, just a girl turning into a woman and desiring more from her life than to be stuck in a zombie-surrounded village, married off to an eligible boy who she doesn’t really want. When the village is finally overrun one day, she gets her chance. She and a small group of friends survive and escape into the forest, and the second half of the book is about their attempts to stay alive.

There are plenty of chances for an unskilled writer to founder, but Ryan pulls this rather lackluster concept off quite well… remarkably well, in fact, for a first-timer. There isn’t a lot of horror, despite the concept, and there isn’t any sex, and the whole thing could easily have been a YA version of The Handmaid’s Tale gone very very wrong. But I found the book enjoyable, and will read the sequel when it comes out this March.

Dane Kennedy’s quick-sketch biography of Richard Burton takes an unusual, but ultimately very fruitful, approach. Instead of concentrating like so many of Burton’s biographers on the man and his many accomplishments, Kennedy locates Burton firmly within the Victorian world, using Burton’s multi-faceted life to illustrate and probe into that world. While Kennedy is first and foremost an academic, the book is highly readable, and in fact makes many of the more conventional Burton biographies (Edward Rice’s, for example) seem dry by comparison.

Even someone who is reasonably familiar with Burton’s life should find quite a bit that is new here. Certainly, the most familiar parts – the search for the source of the White Nile, the disguised entry into Mecca, the Arabian Nights translation – when held up against the backdrop of Victorian England and the British Empire, acquire new life and serve to stimulate thought beyond simple awe at the man himself. Kennedy also does a good job of showing Burton’s weak points (his unsuitability for politics, etc.), presenting a more balanced picture of the man than some of the more hagiographic efforts.

All in all, this is an excellent book. It is a fairly quick read, but nonetheless well researched and copiously end-noted, with enough in the notes to satisfy anyone who wishes to delve further into any of the many, many fascinating topics that are broached. I recommend it to anyone with an interest in Burton, history, the British Empire or Victorian England.

This is the first Scandinavian novel I’ve read since Smila’s Sense of Snow (which was superb) a decade or two back, and I have to say that I should probably read more. Stieg Larsson has concocted a slow-starting but ultimately very satisfying novel.

There are some oddities here for a reader who has been raised on get-to-it-do-it-and-tie-it-up American offerings. For one thing, it takes a hundred pages or so to set everything up. For another, the main mystery is resolved a good 150 pages before the end of the book…and yet the plot has enough threads and steam left in it to carry you the rest of the way without any problem at all. Stylistically there isn’t really anything to say one way or another – Larsson (in translation, at least) tells his story with a minimum of theatrics, but there is enough detail provided to keep things engaging.

One particular aspect stood out: I very much liked the way that Salander was more than able to physically hold her own against the men in the book. Too often writers try to make their female characters tough and it just seems implausible, if not downright silly. But Salander’s scrapes against men (and there are a few; the original Swedish title was Men Who Hate Women) come across as very believable. I can think of several movie directors who could learn something here.

As with any book that was written in a language other than English, the quality of translation is a question. In this case, Reg Keeland has done a good job, although there are some interesting (well, if you’re into linguistics) usages here and there. The English is really neither British nor American, but a sort of far-north amalgam that had me smiling at times. But the meaning is always clear and the peculiarities never really get in the way; rather they lend a little bit of extra exoticness to the book, and I count them as a plus.

Summary: Not for the GiveItToMeNow crowd, but for anyone else The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is definitely recommended. I’ll be reading the sequels.