The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

This has been on my want to read list for about a year, and I'm glad I could finally track it down at the library. The novel, set in Sweden, starts slow. It took me some time to get used to the Swedish names, especially the place names given that I have zero knowledge of Swedish geography. But once the story begins to shift from financial reporting and background checks to that of a disappearing heiress things really pick up and it's hard to put the book down. I won't give any of the plot points away, but I really like how complex this story is, both in terms of the number of elements and people in play to what they've all been hiding. I can't wait to get a hold of the sequel.

The Sweetness At The Bottom Of The Pie

A delightful debut mystery in the vein of a Miss Marple, well if Miss Marple were only eleven years old. Set in the 1950s Sweetness has all the hallmarks of a good suspense story complete with unexplained deaths, but with none of the grit that infests most modern mysteries. Nancy Pearl put it perfectly, " it's gore-free, very funny in places, nicely written, not too sweet (despite the title) and narrated by a real charmer."

Sacred Games

Whew! What an epic. I started this book in late May or so, then put it down in late June and then started back up with it after getting home from the beach. It was 947 pages crammed full of true writing. I'm glad I picked it back up.

This complex tale centers mainly around a Sikh police detective, but he is merely a jumping off point for many, many more well-drawn, thoroughly three-dimensional characters. The novel is mainly one of character and place rather than plot, though plenty happens too. Dickens has nothing on Chandra in terms of interweaving the stories of these many and varied people that populate the novel. It's a sometimes taxing read, but the book was well worth the effort, and I could easily go another 300 pages with these characters.

An Arsonist's Guide to Guide to Writers' Homes in New England

Now with a title like this your imagination can go to all sorts of places. But essentially this is the story of a family and a boy/man and his two families, the one in which he is the son and the other in which he is the husband and secondarily the father.

Nevertheless the author also explores our relationship with books and authors, both living and dead and how they affect those of us who read. Like several characters in the novel, several times this week I didn't enjoy a book because I was afraid I was becoming the character I was reading. It raises the interesting and personal question, do we read to escape, to identify, or something else, or all of the above?

Until The Real Thing Comes Along

Okay, it's time to go home (or the book store) because I've scraped the bottom of the condo barrel. This is the kind of "women's book" I hate, namely a women's book that tries to be more in this case by making the love interest gay and by doing something to the mom that was so obvious it was painful. Okay, maybe back when it came out it was more meaningful or something. On the plus side it was less than 250 pages. I won't be seeking out any more of Ms. Berg's apparently plentiful work.

The Other Woman

More chick lit from the condo. I read one Jane Green book ages ago, but didn't like her as much as I like Sophie Kinsella, so I had not read any more. And while I liked this one more than I remember liking the other, there were things about this book -- namely the charcterizations rather than characters -- that annoyed me. None of the characters were particularly relatible or worthy of our sympathy. I know she was going for ambiguity, but it failed to pull it off in a more than skin deep level. Still, I might look for Swapping Lives at the library. Sounds intersting in that whole Trading Places sort of way.

Fishbowl

So at the beach I ran out of reading material that I had brought, and I didn't want to go to the bookstore all greasy, so I ransacked the condo looking for something that would keep me going, and the first thing I found was Fishbowl. That little red dress on the top of the cover let me know exactly what I was getting into, chick lit through and through, but overall I enjoyed it.

The author tells the story of three 20-something Toronto "roomies" by alternating through the various roommates, switching POV with each chapter, and even resorting at times to omniscient narrator to cover all three at once. It does make me wonder which of the three is most closely the author herself. I'm guessing Jodine with a dash of Allie. While not the greatest book I ever read, the author does a fine job of keeping me entertained on the beach.