Summer Reading

 

I read a decent amount of books over the summer, thanks to a few long plane rides.  I never made it past the first 50 pages of the Proust book despite many valiant efforts; it was just way too sloooooow for my tastes.  I am a fast reader and anything that requires me to read slowly where nothing much happens soon exhausts my patience.  I did manage to actually finish several books including "Water for Elephants" by Sara Gruen, "Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet" by Jamie Ford, "The Kite Runner" and "A Thousand Splendid Suns" by Khaled Hosseini, "Tinkers" by Paul Harding, "Icy Sparks" by Gwyn Hyman Rubio, and finally the "Millennium Trilogy" by Stieg Larsson: "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo," "The Girl Who Played with Fire," and "The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets Nest."  Aside from the Millennium Trilogy, I enjoyed all the books; they were all well-written and transported me to vividly different worlds and really captured my imagination.  I wouldn't say I loved any of the books, but they were all good.

I just finished "The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets Nest" last night, completing the Millennium Trilogy.  The series has been much hyped; all three books have topped the best sellers list and several people have personally recommended the books to me.  The series is going to be made into an American movie (there's already a Swedish version), starring Daniel Craig, Robin Wright and relative newcomer, Rooney Mara, directed by David Fincher.  To be honest, I didn't care for the entire series.  I just didn't find the attraction of any of the characters, in fact I downright disliked a few of them, and I found a lot of the plotlines to be unnecessarily salacious and violent.  All three of the books had very slow beginnings and it took a long time to get the plot moving, and even once moving, I didn't get that engrossed.  Maybe it's because it was set in Sweden and all the characters had jarring Swedish names (no offense) and the geography was unfamiliar, or maybe because I don't care much for Swedish politics and general conspiracy theory plotlines involving the secret police, but I just couldn't get into the books.  Case in point; the only reason that I finished "The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets Nest" last night was because I had to return the library book today; normally I can finish books that I'm really into within one sitting, not 2 weeks.  I persisted and didn't give up on the books to keep up with pop culture and in the hopes that I would finally come across that "a ha!" moment when I would get all the hype was all about.  Similar to why I read the entire Twilight Saga, and similar to the Twilight Saga, the "a ha!" moment never came.  Oh well, on to the next book, any recommendations?