Month: November 2010

A while back Jon Stewart and the other writers from the popular The Daily Show with Jon Stewart wrote a parody of high school Social Studies textbooks called America (The Book): A Guide to Democracy Inaction. That was a great piece of satire because it lambasted something most Americans were familiar with and it had a structurally solid skeleton on which to drape its parody. We all knew what he was talking about, or at least we knew we should know, which was often kind of the point. It had a target that was specific enough to structure a book around, but multifaceted enough to offer plenty of material. Earth (The Book) is also pretty funny in places, but not quite as much so as its predecessor, partially owing to the fact that it’s kind of a mess and doesn’t have much of a structure.

Stewart et al. cast Earth (The Book) as a guide for the benefit of alien visitors who arrive on our 3rd planet from the Sun after the human race has managed to annihilate itself in one way or another. Kind of a friendly guide book aiming to hit the highlights. None of us will be here to explain all the stuff they’ll find in the ruins, so it falls to this tome to explain not only the basics like Earth’s geology and weather, but also such inexplicable nonsense (to an outsider, anyway) like commerce, culture, religion, art, and science. Rather than large paragraphs of text, the book relies on a lot of gags derived from pictures, fake newsclippings, charts, photographs, and other visual aids with scattershots of text to go along with them. This being a Daily Show production, every page oozes irony, sarcasm, and humorous self-deprecation, and it often works. Noting on the page about film that “We called Hollywood the Dream Factory; unfortunately most people who went to work there ended up working at the Cheesecake Factory” is pretty witty, as is crediting Alexander Graham Bell as the inventor of “The Watson Summoner.” And there’s lots of stuff like that spread throughout the book.

Unfortunately, Earth (The Book) is fairly uneven, with a few too many of the jokes falling flat or relying too much on the same gag that you had just read a dozen pages earlier. The graphic-heavy nature of the pages also make the book tiring to read in long sittings, but you may get much better experiences out of it by just reading it a page or three at a time when you find yourself with a few spare moments. Whenever that might be. I’m not judging.

In the end, Earth (The Book) is worth reading if you’re a fan of Stewart’s (and probably more to the point, his writers’) brand of irony comedic self immolation. America (The Book) worked much better both as a concept and in execution, though, so if you haven’t read that one yet I’d start there.

I was originally going to wait and read all three of the books in the “Millennium Trilogy” before writing any reviews, but I’m honestly not sure if I’ll ever get around to reading the rest. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is the first in Stieg Larsson’s series, published posthumously and taking airport bookstores everywhere by storm. Really, people seem to love it, but I don’t understand why.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo largely follows the story of Mikael Blomkvist, a disgraced magazine editor in need of a long holiday. Blomkvist takes on a weird job of trying to solve a decades-old murder mystery in a remote village, but the twist is that the job is being done for a wealthy industrialist who asks Blomkvist to keep things quiet and pretend like he’s writing a family history. In exchange, he’ll get the dirt he needs for a career-making story. Also in the mix is Lisbeth Salander, a mentally unhinged but brilliant hacker and “researcher” who takes an interest in Blomkvist and the mystery he’s trying to solve. As far as a murder mystery slash thriller goes, the book is fine. There’s danger, sex, intrigue, excitement, sex, a serial killer, sex, and also sex. Did I mention sex? Seriously, Blomkvist sleeps with every female character under the age of 60 in the book in a very James Bond-ish fashion.

The shortcoming of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, though, is that it seems a little amateurish. Maybe it’s an artifact of it’s being translated from Swedish, but I frequently found weird repetitions of words and phrases along the lines of “he walked to the door and stood in the doorway” that seem like an editor should have caught. Larsson also has this odd predilection for detailing every street and neighborhood in Stolkholm that his character walk down, regaling us with their proper Swedish names. I completely understand that in the author’s native language the effect is simply banal, but for the rest of us it keep sounding like some 14 year old trying to make his fantasy world sound exotic by throwing in the elvish or dwarfish names of everything. Entirely my fault for speaking the wrong language and never having been to Sweden, for sure, but I nonetheless couldn’t escape the effect.

The book is also oddly paced. Large chunks of it are spent hearing about the characters clomp around Stolkholm or the tiny village of Hedeby, else we’re hearing about the sausage and liverwurst sandwiches Blomkvist had for lunch. It’s really boring exposition that seems to serve no purpose. There’s also one sequence where Larsson goes into excruciating detail about the laptop computer Salander buys, providing breathless details about processor speed, hard drive space, and RAM that serve only to make the device seem laughably outdated by the time someone from six months in the future reads it. Sequences of action or insight –OR SEX– punctuate the story, but it’s really uneven. There’s also the problem that Lisbeth Salander is a way more interesting character than Mary Sue Blomkvist, yet she disappears entirely from the tale for huge swaths of time. I think Larsson corrects this some in later books, but it accentuates the dull bits here and makes a long novel seem even longer.

So, not sure if I’ll continue on to the other books or not. I’ve got them, though, so maybe I’ll plod on. Does it get better?