Dear Editor...The collected letters of Oscar Brittle by Glenn Fowler, Christoper Smyth, and Gareth Malone (2.5 stars)

Three guys invent the character of Oscar Brittle, a prolific letter writer. This is his collection of letters to the editor, many of which were published. One of my favourites was a letter published in The Canberra Times describing a drive in Canberra at sunset:

I was unprepared. The crimson sunset, the azure mountains and the verdant green hills combined, forming a rich tapestry of colour that was, quite simply, overwhelming. I wept. I wept like I used to in the '80s. Thank you.

Awesome. It's quite interesting which letters get published, and what words the editors cut out. Some of the responses to his letters are great too. In one letter Oscar makes the bold claim:

I believe that I have eaten more types of animal than anybody else on the planet.

and proceeds to list them all including gnu, elephant, mole, iguana etc. A Sydney Morning Herald reader replies with 'I too have had a Chiko roll, but not for some time'.

2.5 stars.

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson (3.5 stars)

I came pretty close to giving up on this book. It starts well, with Blomkvist's trial and conviction for libel, and introduction to Salander. I quickly became bored once Blomkvist started his investigation into Harriet due to the huge number of pages devoted to boring narrative history of a seemingly endless parade of Vanger family members:

In 1926, when he was nineteen, he was going out with a woman called Margareta, the daughter of a teacher in Falun. The met in some political context and had a relationship which resulted in a son, Gottfried, who was born in 1927. The couple married when the boy was born. During the first half of the 30s...

If this information is really important (it isn't), then why not do it in the first person as a series of flashbacks? I also found it quite disconcerting to have this mind numbing verbal family tree cut with the brutal violence of Salander's experience with Bjurman. The violence with Bjurman was extremely graphic, and seemed to be the typical setup for harsh vigilante justice - think Batman's parent's murder.

After this point the story gets much better, Blomkvist makes progress in the investigation, and Salander joins Blomkvist (albeit in a fairly contrived way). I read the second half of the novel in one sitting and thought it was great.

It was interesting to read a 'very Swedish' novel with great placenames I don't know how to type on this keyboard. I did feel the unwelcome presence of product placement - many references to 'iBook', 'Ikea', and others I can't remember. I also usually cringe at any descriptions of 'hacking' in the media, but those in this book were at least better than average.

3.5 stars.

Update: Just saw the movie, it is brilliant. I was really dreading the rape scene, and I thought they took the violence too far in the movie, it is really, really uncomfortable to watch (and should probably be R). However, the rest of the movie is great: it is entirely in Swedish, Salander is perfectly characterised, it isn't a commercial for Sweden (although there is plenty of Apple product placement), and the 'hacking' is believable, which is more than I can say for most movies. As an aside - Salander's screen shows '/var/lib/dpkg' directory listings, which indicate a linux system (probably Debian) - on a Mac 'fink' is based on dpkg but shows up in '/sw/var/lib/dpkg'. Lookie ma, I'm hacking:

$ find /var/lib/dpkg
/var/lib/dpkg
/var/lib/dpkg/alternatives
/var/lib/dpkg/alternatives/xinput-zh_SG
/var/lib/dpkg/alternatives/tclsh
/var/lib/dpkg/alternatives/wx2.5.pth
/var/lib/dpkg/alternatives/cpp
/var/lib/dpkg/alternatives/vi
/var/lib/dpkg/alternatives/xinput-zh_HK
/var/lib/dpkg/alternatives/libgksu-gconf-defaults
/var/lib/dpkg/alternatives/odt2txt
/var/lib/dpkg/alternatives/kdesu
/var/lib/dpkg/alternatives/rcp
/var/lib/dpkg/alternatives/postmaster.1.gz
/var/lib/dpkg/alternatives/locate
/var/lib/dpkg/alternatives/wish

The Host by Stephenie Meyer (4.5 stars)

This book is brilliant. Sort of a soft sci-fi, with the focus on what it is to be human. It reminded me a lot of the Tomorrow when the war began series, with a secret community hiding out from a hostile society. The writing style was simple and easy to read, similar to the Harry Potter series, and I imagine it probably would come under the same sort of literary criticism :)

The premise is great - a super-intelligent race of parasitic beings colonizing planets through secret implantation of their hosts. The 'souls' want to experience life as their host, not take over or massively change the planet, something their human hosts don't realise or appreciate.

This book was Amazon best of the month for May 2008. It is going to make an awesome movie one day.

4.5 stars.

Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry (5 stars)

Loved this book. It is an epic (858 dense-font pages), but worth every minute I spent reading it. Lonesome Dove won the Pulitzer for fiction, and has inspired a ridiculous number of movies and miniseries. My favourite part of the book is when Gus gets ambushed by 12 indians on his quest to rescue Lorie. He immediately knifes his horse to use its body as cover on the open plain, and singlehandedly kills six indian warriors. Gus is a hardass, he breaks a bartender's nose because he isn't quick enough about serving him.

The characters in the book are brilliant, and by the end of the book I felt like I had known them for many years. Because of the books length there is quite of cast of characters you get to know who die before the end of the book. I really liked Janey, who could keep up with a trotting horse and throw deadly rocks like a ninja, and Po Campo who was the American version of the bush tucker man. The journey from the Texas-Mexico border to Montana is full of adventure, and death lurks everywhere.

5 stars!