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!

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole (4 stars)

Another pulitzer prize winner, this one awarded in 1981 posthumously after the author's suicide in 1969. It is a very difficult book to describe, and has characters unlike any I can remember from other books. Ignatius is fat, extremely lazy, overly educated, and in an almost constant state of moral outrage. He rails against everything, popular movies are one of his favourite targets, prompting screaming in theatres:

What degenerate produced this abortion?

Although Ignatius was an amazing character, my favourite was Burma Jones. Jones gives Lana Lee a tough time about suspicious packages she claims are for orphans, and the dismal state of Lee's bar the Night of Joy:

The only thing you ever be givin the orphan is siphlus.

I feel sorry for them po peoples comin in here thinkin they gonna have theirself some fun, probly gettin knockout drop in they drink, catchin the clap off the ice cube.

This book made me laugh out loud quite a few times, and produced plenty of smiles. It really is an amazing piece of work.

Quite a number of attempts have been made to convert the book into a movie, but with no results. Ignatius is such a formidable character I could see how representing him in a movie would be difficult, although I think Will Ferrell would have had a pretty good crack at it.

4 stars.

On the Road by Jack Kerouac (2 stars)

This book is solidly cemented as an absolute classic. It essentially inspired a whole Beatnik generation, of which Kerouac claims naming rights. It has countless accolades and appears on literature lists like Time's 100 best English-language novels 1923-2005. Legend has it that Kerouac wrote it as a single paragraph on eight sheets of paper taped together to make a 120 foot scroll. This I can believe because the book feels exactly like a really long stream of consciousness blurted onto the page:

And for just a moment I had reached the point of ecstasy that I always wanted to reach, which was the complete step across chronological time into timeless shadows, and wonderment in the bleakness of the mortal realm, and the sensation of death kicking at my heels to move on, with a phantom dogging its own heels, and myself hurrying to a plank where all the angels dove off and flew into the holy void of uncreated emptiness...

*yawn*. This book was lots of rushing from New York to Denver to LA to San Fran to New York to Denver to San Fran to New York, without any time to really develop characters or get a deep appreciation for anywhere. For all the talk of 'digging', I don't think Sal or Dean ever really 'dug' anything properly, they were always too frantic to get somewhere else. Although some interesting adventures are had, the book is full of a lot of incidental boring stories about the mechanics of travel; hitched a ride to here, caught a bus to there etc.

For its time I imagine the modes of travel, and the free-spirit thinking, were revolutionary so I should cut it some slack. An interesting journey, but not life-changing.

2 stars.

So Brave, Young, and Handsome by Leif Enger (3 stars)

Not a bad western, although severely lacking in the grit department compared to True Grit. I found Monte Becket really annoying at times, like when Siringo dislocates Becket's hand and breaks his collarbone for no particular reason and Becket just takes it, even sticks with Siringo. Becket had so many opportunities to escape, and yet took none of them. The coolest character in the book is Hood, it is such a shame his tenure is so short.

I have reservations about how practical it is to row standing up.

Despite all this I found the book to be reasonably enjoyable.

3 stars.