Dragon be gone

I finished the first book in Swedish author Stieg Larsson’s thriller series, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, during my family’s annual beach week. I won’t be reading any more.

And it’s not that he doesn’t write a well-constructed, well-plotted thriller. I was even drawn to his odd main character, Lisbeth Salander, the girl with the tattoo. She wasn’t always believable, but she was intriguing and kept me wanting to know about her history.

But I’m sick and tired of books that depend on cruelty and depravity to women for their plots. This book was no exception, and it gravely disappointed me. Too much of what I see on TV and in the movies and in some books depends way too much on depicting women being raped, murdered, dismembered, humiliated, and tortured. And the people who produce these shows, movies, and books believe that we, their viewers and readers, find it entertaining, possibly titillating. More disturbing is that too many of us do, based on the reviews of Mr. Larsson’s books and the ratings for those TV shows and movies.

Really?

I don’t happen to think a good thriller needs to have psychopathic men killing and otherwise hurting women to succeed. And I’m not going to buy or watch anything that uses cruelty to women as its central plot element. What really gets me is that much of what incorporates this cruelty is written/created by people who also claim that they are giving us strong women characters. Yeah, strong women characters like Lisbeth Salander who is sexually humiliated by her legal guardian and turns to graphic sexual violence to retaliate. I don’t think I’ll be holding her up as a role model to my nieces.

Now that I’ve read his first book, I can’t believe how much critical acclaim Mr. Larsson’s books have received. Hoping it would be different, I read the first few pages of his second book only to find it started out with a thirteen-year-old girl locked into some contraption and held prisoner by a man.

Keep it. I’ll go back to Henning Mankell if I want to read Swedish mysteries.

What's in your reading wallet?

This is a confession.

Right now, I'd rather read than write, rather bury my nose than let my fingers do the walking over the keyboard. It's summer and to me, that's always meant books. Books, the smell of coconut suntan lotion (yes, I'm so old I used lotion to get a tan), and the ice-cold inside of a Dairy Queen are the very essences of summer to me. Mountains of books and mountains of hours in which to read. So lazy, so decadent, so perfectly right.

I didn't even realize what was tugging at my metaphorical apron until I read a blog post by my aspiring novelist friend, Eman, and she talked about getting distracted from her work by a book of short stories. Then I realized it was the wish to lie about somewhere, anywhere comfortable and cool and lose myself in a ripping good read for hours and hours on end.

It's June, after all, and I'd like nothing better than to trade the to-do list for the new mystery by Elizabeth George. I don't want anything too heavy or hard to read in June, July, or August when even the beverage glasses sweat. I don't necessarily want to be a better person, or know more facts, or understand literature of any sort better when the summer is over.

Although, I fall crazy in love with anyone who can both write a good story and make me better for it at the end. Marilynne Robinson, Saul Bellow, John Updike, Phillip Roth, Wallace Stegner, Toni Morrison, Virginia Woolf, J.D. Salinger, Tim O'Brien, Susan Minot, J.R.R. Tolkien, Raymond Carver, and Jane Smiley are just a few writers who have done that for me. They are the ones whose books I go back to over and over, sometimes just to look at, sometimes to read a bit, sometimes to re-read.

What I want my summer reading to do is transport me, take me away to some other place, where I can inhabit another world, get lost in it, meet and get to know people I might never meet in my real life. To get to the last page and sigh, "Ah, that was SO good!" These books are also on my summer list:

Little Bee
Netherland
Let the Great World Spin
The Private Patient (by P.D. James who always writes a perfect mystery and has been doing so for years.)
Anything and everything by George Pelecanos
Mysteries by Laura Lippman because we both live in Baltimore and that's where she sets her books.

What's in your reading wallet? I would so love to know!