Not to jump on the literary bandwagon du jour (or rather, du 2005), but I finally picked up The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.* For the first time since 2006ish when my book club disbanded, I really miss having a group with whom to kvetch about whatever’s on my nightstand.
This book started slow, then got interesting at around 16%.** But I’m SO distracted by the author’s constantly awkward references to technology. It’s as if it was written by somebody’s grandpappy who’s just baffled that kids these days can send each other messages with their pocket walkie talkies.
For example, one mere chapter references the iBook***, PhotoShop [sic]****, a Hotmail.com email address, and checking one’s messages on Eudora. Oh, and a “…a Canon digital camera the size of a cigarette packet.” CAN YOU BELIEVE HOW SMALL THAT IS, READERS? Cigarettes in packets. GOLLY GEE. Go bring Grandpa his pipe, now.
This has me ponderingt how writers can include specific, pointed, identifying details yet avoid sounding dated and precious. To be fair, the book’s 2003-ish references were published posthumously, so maybe the author would have had time to clean them up or modernize them… but it seems like any specific reference to software, brand names, etc. is bound to end up sounding silly in five years.
After the storm of dated references, I was flummoxed enough to look up the book’s (2005) publication date on its Wikipedia entry, which contained a big spoiler as well as some fascinating info. The original Swedish title, Män som hatar kvinnor (Men Who Hate Women), is so much harsher and more interesting than the stateside translation. Why the heck did they change it here? Google Images tells me France and Catalonia got closer translations. And check out the differences in international cover art choices — only the USA gets a disrobed gal’s back instead of the cold face of a jaded, punked-out, once-brutalized woman who happens to have a tattoo of a dragon, among much other body art. Mmph.
Anyway: Book club, I miss you; blogging, a little less so, but maybe I’ll stop back again soon; Eudora, not at all. You suck. Everything ever should be web-based now forever. Suck it. Stupid footnotes after the jump, because clearly I have forgotten what blogging even is. What a very dated thing of me to do.
*If by “picked up” you can read “IMed my husband to please purchase it on Amazon so I could read it on our shared Kindle across town a minute later.” eBooks are weird.
**How weird is it that I notate such progression with a Kindle percentage instead of an actual page number? More accurate, but still weird. And yes, I am an old lady.
***But which COLOR was it?!
****A mistake I myself made until a couple years ago, thanks to constant but welcome corrections from Grant.