The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

I didn't have any expectations when I picked this library book off Amy's table, I thought, but I did.

Such as (SPOILER ALERT):

• the dragon tattoo would have meaning or at least the girl with the tattoo was a most central character.  Instead, we're left to wonder about her and her mysteries, making it clear this was a first of a series
• there wouldn't be extreme sexual sadism.  But there was, twice.  Almost gratuitous but not quite.  Shocking and disturbing nonetheless.
• that the author wouldn't sometimes give extremely specific details - fixating on software descriptions, sandwich descriptions, etc.  And his settings?  Glossed over all those details indeed.  

When I was young I went through a mystery novel phase ... sometime after my Louis L'amour and Zane Gray phase, and before my foreign classics phase.  And in that phase, this book would be pretty good.  But now?  Meh.  I find fiction pretty darn boring, even when it compels me to read further.  It was a pretty good story with surprising twists and turns, and few too extreme to dash my willing suspension of disbelief.

And I don't want to be a conspiracy theorist, but the author died at 50 of a massive coronary?  Seems suspicious indeed, especially after his extremely clear descriptions of poisons and other murder possibilities.  He was a journalist, extremely vocal against the extreme right, and it doesn't seem that unlikely that they would have eliminated him.

OK.  Maybe i don't care if I'm a conspiracy theorist.

Anyhoo, this is a pretty good vacation read and it's a fun ride.  Just not earth shattering.

Manchild in the Promised Land by Claude Brown

I'm reading this book because once I got in a spat with Virginia Sheriff, back when we were still speaking to each other. He got a little self-righteous when I gave him a hard time for being a former English teacher and not knowing who Cyrano de Bergerac was. He gave a list of books that he taught to bash my Euro-centric ideology.

Of course I'd read most of the books on the list, only this one not - and when I asked him for more books he blew me off. Oh, so maybe I'm at least as well-read on African and African-American literature? Not so self-righteous now, mister?

So, I finally started this book while on the plane and I really like it. It's thinly fictionalized autobiography - I don't know the fiction and the bio, so it flows together seamlessly.

Claude Brown, born in 1937, grew up in Harlem with parents from the South. What I know about Harlem about that time was the Harlem Renaissance, especially Langston Hughes, which painted a beautiful, interesting picture. Brown paints a different picture altogether - of violence and desperation and criminality and torn social fabric and survival. It's fascinating.

But a few points I especially note (I'm maybe halfway through).

• His views on homosexuality, how people just are and he has no problem with it, are refreshing indeed.
• He seems pretty conflicted about women and I find his thoughts fascinating. He may have been intolerable as a young playa but I get the feeling he still treated most women as people.
• I'd be very interested to know about birth control used then - or not. Especially all the prostitutes - how did they avoid pregnancy?
• The devastation of the community wrought by heroin is really well-developed and makes a lot of sense. It seems to parallel what I hear from people remembering the height of the crack epidemic in New Orleans.
• He didn't really embellish what made him decide to get out, what made prison not seem inevitable after his hard living. I think this illustrates how usually it's not one thing or one person that makes another person decide to get out, but a confluence of factors making it a reality.

Well, much more to say, but I want to go back to reading while waiting for Gail! (Oh, and for some reason I can't access the blog from M's computer - it's blocked for some reason. I can see there are comments but I can't read them! I'm not ignoring commenters - I'll get to them as soon as I can.)