The entire first part of this book was completely fascinating. I was completely in love with the first significant chunk - about a man who loses his hippocampi in a traumatic accident, but still manages to go for walks around the block, make food and hold conversations about computers, all without being able to remember such details as where he lives or how old he is or what year it is. A Oliver Sacks-worthy story illustrating the power of habit in determining how we live.
Duhigg goes on from there to illustrate, using animal experiments in rodents and monkeys how habits are formed and how we can form good habits and extinguish bad ones. He perfectly balances practicality with intriguing science and anecdotes.
The latter two halves of the book spiral off in a multitude of directions. How is having willpower a habit? I'm not really sold. Some of his anecdotes read like they would belong better in Blink or the Tipping Point and it undermines the strong, consistent definition of a habit from the first third.
Also, some of my favorite parts of the book - the febreze model and the target/pregnancy story are available online on NPR & NYTimes magazine and excerpted on lifehacker. (I had read them prior to this and hoped that the rest of the book would be the same quality)
Andy Weir writes fast-paced, engineering-oriented scifi well. This heist on a moon colony, featuring a vaguely Saudi, lapsed Muslim protagonist was a quick and light read. There's welding and problems with low-gravity/zero atmosphere and family bonding and shady business dealings. So, almost perfect.
But look, some people shouldn't be allowed to write books about women, and Andy Weir is one of those people. Also, mostly, I wanted it to be the Martian redux. And by trying to make a convoluted conspiracy plot, Weir has wandered away from what he does best: MacGyvering in Space! books.
This was the vacation of disappointing reading material. There's little redeeming about the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Perhaps the best thing I have to say about it is that it's fast paced, and once you actually get to the mystery, it's a little compelling to at least see what comes of it.
That being said, there's a lot not to like. Let's start with the fact that absolutely no progress is made on the central mystery until page 294, when the character all of a sudden announces that he's found three clues. What happens until then? Lots of backstory on totally extraneous materials and three very explicit sexual assaults that have literally nothing to do with the main plotline (and never really come up again.) The pacing is particularly awkward, because we're usually subjected to all information once in the main plotline, regurgitated a second time (often verbatim) by the private investigators and then a third time either in a newspaper article or quoted from the main character's book. Similarly, the book extends for over 100 pages after the mystery has been solved. These pages are ostensibly to wrap up the sketchy finances plotline, but pretty much exist to tell us that the main character is drinking coffee and not going into work for a 100 pages until an authorial fiat fixes the financial plotline.
Want to talk about characters? The main character is a flimsy self-insertion, who is adored by all women, hired to solve a mystery on the basis of zero credentials and seems to just manage to stumble into evidence ignored for the previous 50ish years. Perhaps the most damning thing is that after figuring out who the murder is, despite the Mikael knows that the murder knows who he is and has already tried to kill him twice, he decides to go over to the murder's house without any backup or anyone knowing where he is, passing the gasoline and rifle used in the previous murder attempts on the way to the front door. That, friends, is a suicide attempt.
His sidekick is not just a quirky anti-hero. She's a bona fide psychopath who gets revenge on a predator by sexually assaulting him. Um, not awesome. Also, her deep secret on how she's such a good private investigator? She's a hacker. That's so lame it doesn't even deserve spoiler tags. It keeps getting repeated – Oh no, someone might find out that Lisbeth is a hacker! Newsflash: every fictionalized private investigator since 1985 has hacked in some form or another.
How about the writing? The translation is definitely clumsy, but it can't camouflage the underlying clumsy writing. My two pet peeves? Larsson's decision that it is necessary for us to know everything that a character does at all times (at one point he tells us the time a character wakes up, the time he drinks his coffee and how long he waits before leaving the cabin.) The second is Larsson's need for us to know what brand of object is in use. It's like if I made sure you knew that Becca wrote this review on her husband's Dell laptop, having used her Android phone to use the Goodreads App to select this book at the Borders bookstore inside the Cleveland Hopkins Airport.
The graphic crimes, especially sex crimes depicted have been very controversial, and I don't feel I can review this completely without mentioning them. I'm far from squeamish, but both the crimes themselves and the statistics about violence against women in Sweden seemed to have no purpose to their inclusions. For an author who complains in his book about the use of sex crimes in literature for titillation, well, the lady doth protest too much, methinks.
I love Veronica Mars more than probably any other TV show in the history of TV. It's certainly the only show I ever donated to the kickstarter of. The Thousand-Dollar Tan Line reads exactly like a Veronica Mars episode – the pacing's the same, the visuals are the same, the mandatory cameos of the season regulars are the same – to the point that I could imagine the commercial breaks. And it's fun. It has Rob Thomas' characteristic wit and depending on how fast you read you might, like me, find that it's in fact less of a time commitment than watching an episode.
Downsides? Maybe I just don't have Veronica momentum any more. This just didn't really stick with me. It didn't have the context that a VM episode did, so it mostly felt like a filler one-off episode. I want wry class commentary, anti-hero feminism and friendly camaraderie. Oh, Veronica, we used to be friends, a long time ago, but I have yet to see a high school show that makes the transition to post-high school and retains its je ne sais quoi.
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