Books what you is reading: Page 5 - The Arsenal discussion community: One More in the Tolly

Books what you is reading

Pepe LeFrits

I got A Visit From the Goon Squad yesterday. Anyone read it? I'm guessing it's not Arsenal related...

Biggus

😆

Was given Malcolm Gladwell's What the dog saw as a prezzy, don't know what it's about, has anyone read it?

Klaus

Been reading the first movement (that is to say, the first three books) of Anthony Powell's dodecalogue A Dance to the Music of Time. Love it. I'll have to buy the rest of them when I get a chance.

RocktheCasbah

Having wanted to read Heart of Darkness for ages, but not actually got around to buying it, I was delighted to spot it on my mum's bookshelves the other day. Haven't started it yet, but looking forward to doing so.

Biggus

Pepe LeFrits wrote:
RocktheCasbah wrote:
I started reading Chuck Palahniuk's Lullaby but stopped after our cat pissed on the bag it was in. Not that the book itself was damaged, I just don't know where it's gone.
hah. That's been sitting on my bedside table for about 6 months. I don't know why I buy books; I'm an unsophisticated cretin. Must have about 20 in my room that I haven't read.

😆 It's like when you wear glasses or use big words, it looks impressive and people think you're intelligent.

flobaba

Just finished The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Steig Larsson. I've had it, (and the entire Millennium Trilogy collection) on my ipad for a while now, and plan to get through them all over the holidays. Really enjoyable book. Haven't seen the movie though. Downloaded it yesterday and might watch it sometime next year. Hope it's nearly as engrossing as the book is.

Ivansen

flobaba wrote:
Just finished The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Steig Larsson. I've had it, (and the entire Millennium Trilogy collection) on my ipad for a while now, and plan to get through them all over the holidays. Really enjoyable book. Haven't seen the movie though. Downloaded it yesterday and might watch it sometime next year. Hope it's nearly as engrossing as the book is.

It has come to the point where its popularity keeps me away from it. Same feeling of snobbery that's kept me away from Harry Potter, Dan Brown, Lord of the Rings and The Bible.

Rex

I enjoyed reading the Millennium books a lot. Read them all in about a week a think. Difficult to stop reading!

Gurgen

Yeah they were enjoyable. Much better than Dan Brown's pulp.

Klaus

Humble Rex wrote:
I enjoyed reading the Millennium books a lot. Read them all in about a week a think. Difficult to stop reading!

I read the first one but didn't really get what people liked so much about it. Didn't you find it poorly written, though? Not sure how the English translations come across but Larsson's native language is poor. It shows that he was a journalist by trade.

Rex

I didn´t really mind that. The trilogy is all about the plot and the characters. Wanting to know more is what made it difficult for me to put the books down.

I also happen to enjoy Guillou and Sem Sandberg who are both journalists. Got used to it perhaps?

Klaus

I don't know. Maybe. I'm not a fan of Guillou either to be honest, but I think Sem-Sandberg is pretty decent.

And yeah, fair enough. Some parts of the book were very entertaining. Where it fell flat for me was when Larsson tried to slow down the pacing in order to flesh out the characters. For instance, there's an entire chapter where he delves into some long explanation of how Michael Blomkvist used to be called Kalle Blomkvist (I think the character is called Bill Bergson in English) when he was younger. The plot sort of faded away in the background and I got frustrated. The book suffered a bit from a lack of direction to begin with too. I think I might have been reading it with too high expectations in mind though.

Gurgen

I read it with zero expectations and found it to be quite decent. It's not Nabokov but entertaining nonetheless.

y va marquer

Gurgen wrote:
Yeah they were enjoyable. Much better than Dan Brown's pulp.

I Just skipped from clue reveal clue reveal when speed reading The Da Vinci Code.
Had no interest whatsoever in the characters or what happened to them, just wanted to see the mystery solved.
Never bothered with any of his other books after that.

Rex

My God that seems like a boring way to read a book Y va!

y va marquer

It was a boring book apart from the locating and the revealing of the clues.
I wouldn't normally read a book in that way.

Rex

How would you know that unless you had read it before though...

asajoseph

I really liked Millenium. Thought the back-story and characters were great, only thing that really bothered me was that the first third of the first book was pretty boring, before it got going. After that, couldn't put it down.

flobaba

Yeah, like Klaus mentioned, he did spend (waste?) quite a bit of time fleshing out the characters in the initial parts of the book, but afterwards it was really good reading.

Burnwinter

I've read the first one, didn't like it much. The Salander character is exploitative, and I guessed the villain way too far ahead of time (there weren't many credible options!).

The Lundqvist character seemed was a blatant wish-fulfilling self-insertion, which was highly irritating.

Finally, after the killer is revealed, the lengthy coda about Lundqvist retrieving his reputation in business journalism is a dreary load of shite, isn't it?

Did anyone else notice Larsson's peculiar use of brand names and specific technical details throughout? I was wondering if it was an artefact of the translation.

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