Sunday, August 23, 2009

Blogging again with a reading update

I've been blogging since March 4, 2005. Looking at my archives, I see that I have blogged less and less as the years have passed. For 1.5 of those years, I can blame grad school while being an English teacher work for keeping me from being a regular blogger. Since the fall of 2007, I've been a junior high librarian, so I really have no excuse for not blogging more. I do have a work blog too, but I don't really post much there since my students are not allowed to access it at school. (Yeah, I just love Internet filters and adult paranoia. Don't you?)

Recently Valerie said that she had reviewed some of my old posts and that I should get back to it. She said that I write good/interesting posts. I know that she's biased, but I also know that she doesn't lie. In telling me this, she reminded me of how much I enjoyed blogging in the past. Well, I've decided that I'm going to blog more regularly. Starting with this post.

I finished reading The Girl Who Played with Fire by Stieg Larsson yesterday morning. I love Lisbeth Salander! She is a unique character, but I find her very believable. I really enjoyed Larsson's first novel, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. I thought all the information about Sweden's economy and financial sector was interesting, probably because it reflected well real life events in America and the world. Then the mysteries that make up the main plot were also interesting. I felt like Larsson was using his first book to say something about out of control greed on a grand scale. The Girl Who Played with Fire is a more straightforward mystery/thriller. Although some of the revelations of Lisbeth's secrets do cross the line into social commentary. When it's revealed that Lisbeth's father was a Russian hit man who had defected to Sweden and been allowed to break laws and be a monster for the sake of national security, I can hear Larsson sneering at that rationalization. But in this book, those moments are few and far between. This book is a page-turner! It has real excitement and quite a lot of violence, but I never felt the violence was gratuitous. I was able to figure out much of the mysteries before they were revealed in the narrative, but I still enjoyed the reading. After being left with Lisbeth's life hanging in the balance, I can't wait for the trilogy's finale The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, which comes out October 31, 2009. It should be interesting to see how Larsson ends the series.

In other reading news, my book club's current selection is The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary. Yes, my book club is made up of a bunch of nerds. Actually, this is the nerdiest book that we have chosen in our over two years of existing. I'm not much of a nonfiction fan, but I do like words, and this book has a definition at the beginning of each chapter. Woohoo! ;-)

Okay, I think that's enough blabbing blogging for now. Later.

1 comment:

Kim said...

Justin, thanks for dropping by. My other posts are here at Breathing Space.

My work blog is geared toward the junior high students at the school where I'm a librarian, so I don't think you would want that link, but just in case, it's here.