Julia

My bestie recommended this back to me when it came out, and I have no idea why I didn't just read it immediately! She and I are literary "twin flames" (thanks, Megan Fox, for the parlance), so she was 100% accurate in her educated guess I would love this. 10/10; no notes. Read the last third really slowly because I didn't want it to end!! Epic, intimate, searing.

I don't think this quote from the final pages can be captured in its full glory out of context, but it was rattling around in my head for days afterward and came up in another book club when someone was talking about the tightrope between nihilistic despair and hope: "A breeze would blow them over, and the world is filled with more than breezes: diseases and disasters, monsters and pain in a thousand variations.... How can I live on beneath such a burden of doom?.... Circe, he says, it will be alright.... He does not mean that it does not hurt. He does not mean that we are not frightened. Only that: we are here. This is what it means to swim in the tide, to walk the earth and feel it touch your feet. This is what it means to be alive."

The blurb on the cover of this book, from Elizabeth Gilbert, says, “A hymn of love to the world.” Yes, yes, YES. I had first heard Wall Kimmerer talk about her perspective during an On Being podcast, and this book was just a treasure from start to finish. She has so much scientific and indigenous wisdom to share, and an exquisite way of blending the two. If I could make everyone I know read this book, I would. I tend to feel environmental despair (when I'm not actually out digging around in my garden), and this was the antidote, call to arms (or rather peace), and way forward.

Lending library find. I can see why this was so popular. I liked Larsson's pacing, and the intertwining of large-scale financial crimes, when government oversteps the bounds of people's rights and dignity in the name of helping them (Salander's situation is an absolute mockery of the idea of guardianship that I think is closer to real life than many people might realize), and the more run-of-the-mill (at least for the genre) psychopathic sexual sadism. I went back and forth as to whether the detail of the sadism was gratuitous or not, and perhaps this is a weird and/or counterintuitive place for me to be, but it didn't bother me. I think that's in part because I'm getting an extra onslaught of vicarious trauma at work right now, and it has been an unfortunate reminder that truth is stranger than fiction: in this case, I mean more horrifying. What actually irritated me about this book is the “good guy” male protagonist, when I think Lisbeth Salander is the real hero. Which is sort of how Larsson wrote her, but also sort of not? I have no idea if a female and/or queer author would have done it differently, or if Larsson's treatment of her was lost in translation, but the most annoying part of Lisbeth's character is her bisexuality feels like a plot device to convey liberalism that to me just felt more like queerbaiting, written at a time I think before people had that word to call it out as such. Anyone who follows me on goodreads knows sometimes I return to series I didn't like somewhat inexplicably, so I won't say I won't read the others, but now am not feeling interested in doing so.