"Bossypants"

I have always been a huge fan of comedy.  I stay up and watch Saturday Night Live every weekend, and I frequently watch shows like The Office, 30 Rock, etc.  So when I found out that Tina Fey wrote a book, I got really excited.  Not only because I like 30 Rock and I really love movies like Baby Mama and Mean Girls, but she just has a really clever and hilarious writing style for comedy which has come clear to me through watching 30 Rock.  Bossypants talks about Fey's journey into becoming a boss, not a very easy task to do being a woman and trying to balance a family.  This sounds already boring, but don't fret! It's hilarious with stories that she sprinkles in.  

Fey talks a lot about women in her book and how comedy is being dominated by men.  I find this to be sad but true, that men often dominate the comedy scene.  Fey brings up a story that I especially liked about when she was working at SNL.  They were trying to come up with commercial parodies, a common thing they do on SNL where they film it in advance.  Fey and another woman come up with a great idea that they pitch, which had something to do with women products, something men didn't really understand.  Even though idea was really good, it was rejected.  Later Fey persisted, and talked to the head writers.  It ended up that they didn't like it because they didn't understand it.  So, long story short, the commercial parody did end up airing, it's called "Kotex Classic." 

In my opinion the best part of this book was when Fey decided to respond to her "fans," something that she regrets not being able to do.  It ends up having her respond to people that trash talked her on the internet and it's great!  My favorite one included some person claiming that Tina ruined SNL, and the only really she was got attention was because she was an over celebrated liberal woman.  Of course Tina knows exactly how to respond.  She subtly comes back, talking about how woman over the years have been celebrated too much such as Hilary Clinton as secretary of state, and missing girls being mentioned on television.  Mostly I think this chapter of this book made me come to the conclusion that one, I would never want to challenge Tina Fey, and two, when someone insults you like these people did to Fey, it almost "burns" them more when your come back is more subtle and sarcastic.  Plus it's much more funny that way!

 

Honestly this book is a really fast read, and I would recommend for everyone not just girls.  It may be leaning towards more of the women demographic, but it really is funny for both genders!  Tina Fey tells lots of interesting and comical stories about how she got started, and how she continued in her comedy career.  It was a great read and everyone should go buy it!

Dragon Tattoo and Played with Fire

I finally finished "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo!" It only took two months... Nevertheless, it was a great book.  I found it to be quite unexpected in its twists and turns in the plot.  So I'll begin explaining the very complex plot that the author set up very briefly.  Basically it holds two very different plots all in one very long book.  So the first one we are presented with is Blomkvist and his messed up life.  He is a journalist for a magazine called Millennium and published a story before the book begins that gets him in a lot of trouble.  This story we are shown had a lot of evidence that mysteriously ended up being false.  But Blomkvist wasn't crazy, he knew something was up with the millionaire Wennerstrom and he was right. We'll get to that later.  That is just one of the plots of this story, and it's not even the main one.  As this crazy news frenzy is going on around Blomkvist, he is also offered a job by a millionaire named Vanger who owns a huge corporation.  This job has nothing to do with Blomkvist's journalism, but instead Vanger wants to find out what happened to his niece who mysteriously disappeared many years ago.  Blomkvist accepts the job to investigate the case and to also write a book about the family and moves to Hedestad where Vanger family lives.  If two plots aren't good enough for you, the author throws another one in for free! This one includes Lizbeth Salander who is a brilliant investigator for a security company.  She gets thrown into the mix because she investigated Blomkvist for Vanger, so when Blomkvist needed someone to help with the case, Salander was referred.  Salander and Blomkvist quickly found that they worked very well together and even developed a relationship.  Long story short, yeah you need to read the book to get the juicy details, the crime fighting to duo finds a serial killer amongst the Vanger family AND finds out what happened to Harriet.  And if you must know, Blomkvist also nails Wennerstrom with a killer article at the end of the book that puts him out of business.

So what happens with Blomkvist and Salander?  This is actually a really complicated question because Blomkvist is kind of a player and Salander is not having it.  I have only just begun the second book, "The Girl Who Played With Fire," and S&B are not doing so well.  In fact, at the end of the first book, Salander had decided that she loved Blomkvist only to find him hanging out with his long-term affair girl Berger.  Salander is very delicate as I am finding in the second book.  She had been through a lot of trauma, none of which Blomkvist really knows about.  Salander is such an interesting character, she has so much depth.  With her interesting qualities of having photographic memory, and amazing skills at hacking, but also the fact at how strong and weak she is at the same time.  She is able to intimidate her abuser (Bjurman) and others with her looks, and yet she is so insecure and fragile.  I'm not yet to the point of the second book where they reveal what trauma she has exactly gone through, but I can tell it was not good.

I would recommend this book to everyone! It's one of those summer books that I wouldn't be able to put down, but unfortunately with my schedule I couldn't do that.  I am looking forward to nonstop reading of this series over the summer though because they really are entertaining and interesting.  They have real depth and present very complex and yet somehow very understandable plots that make the book very hard to put down.           

"The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" continued

In every mystery we are introduced to the puzzle.  In every puzzle there are puzzle pieces.  Throughout the mystery, puzzle pieces are recovered.  The only problem is, some puzzle pieces are missing so you must figure out what the picture is (or the main character must figure it out). I find these puzzle pieces to be quite frustrating at times, especially in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.  For example, Blomkvist and Salander find a very interesting clue hidden in the bible.  Earlier in the book, Blomkvist took a trip to Harriet's old cabin and found a list of numbers.  After much research and trial and error, he realized that these numbers were bible verses.  This led to one of the biggest discoveries in which he found that each bible verse indirectly described a string a murders.  Salander was able to find many other murders that also had bible verses directly correlated to them.  This is a big discovery because they finally have to some clue as to what happened to Harriet.  It's always great to be introduced to more evidence, but I find it only raises more questions in my head.  How did Harriet get involved with this serial killer?  Why was she chosen?  Who and where is this person?  And many more as the book continues.  I think that's honestly why so many people like mysteries because it makes you want to read to the end to find out the answer, but you also want to see how the characters unravel the whole mystery.  This book definitely a quality mystery and it's also not too generic.  I find when I read  the classic mysteries, that they all have a pretty straight forward and similar plot.  This isn't always true, but for the most part mysteries don't vary too much.

When I'm reading a book, I sometimes feel like if the characters are not very interesting, the book itself is not interesting even if the plot is good.  Yet, if the plot is bad the characters can still made the book good.  Luckily The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo has a very good plot and characters, but I feel like it would just be good with the characters.  Salander especially interests me, as I feel a lot of people are intrigued by her.  She's so weak, strong, not confident, confident, not outgoing, outgoing, and so many other opposites all in one.  For example, when she was sexually assaulted she did not turn to the police as most victims do not because they are afraid of the outcome.  Instead she confronts her abuser and ends up getting revenge quite nicely.  When you think about it, what she did was actually quite smart because she prevented her abuser from attacking her again, (she recorded him abusing her and uses it as blackmail) but she also got to see him have to face his consequences instead of risk talking to the police who may or may not believe her.  I'm not saying what she did was smart, but it did work.  She seems so innocent and self-contained and yet she's so smart and outgoing.  I think Salander will continue to confuse future readers, but also show us how a character can evolve and not only have one specific trait.

"The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo"

I began reading The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo about two weeks ago thinking it would take me forever.  I'm typically a slow reader because I take way too long trying to understand what's on a page, like each detail has to make sense to me before I move on. Surprisingly though, this book is going pretty quickly for what I'm used to.  It scared me at first because of the interesting kind of language in the beginning. It was like watching the news because it talks about lots of business and political information that I don't even know how to describe because I'm that ignorant about it.  Fortunately the book does get a lot better because he actually starts into a very detailed plot.  I can really tell this author put in a lot of thought into this book because the characters are so intricate and detailed! They don't seem like the characters I usually read in books that seem like the author just kind thought of on the spot and wrote about them. No, these characters seem like the author took real people and dug into their personal lives because he actually got the sense of a "real" character.

I think usually when I write for school assignments I cheese up my writing a little bit, you know, make it sound like I'm completely and utterly in love with this book and I will list all the reasons why it's amazing.  Well, I'm going to try really hard no to do that.  It's hard though because I really do enjoy this book!  The plot is already starting to unravel and I'm not even too far in. It's a really great mystery not in the typical way. In fact you don't even get introduced to the "mystery element" until after a long and detailed look at the all the characters that will be important to the story.  I'm usually not really into the whole detailed thing, and it was kind of annoying in the beginning, but as it started to get less confusing it also got really interesting.

I'm really excited to read about the family history of the Vangers who seem to have a complex story that I can't wait to unravel as the book continues. This wealthy family seems to have a lot of secrets that I'm interested to learn about. I especially enjoy the actual "girl with the dragon tattoo", Lisbeth Salander.  Even though the book doesn't talk about her as much, she interests me quite a lot more than Blomkvist.  Maybe it's because she's female? I doubt it though, I think I really just like that she has a certain uniqueness in both that she's hard core and yet surprisingly brilliant at what she does.  I think I can speak for a lot of people when I say that it's kind of cool to read about someone who in real life you would not expect to be so smart!  I think that's why the whole Susan Boyle story blew up on the internet because no one expected her to be amazing at singing and yet she blew their socks off! So I think that's maybe why this book became so popular, because so many people are interested in that kind of story. I'm not sure because I'm not too far in the book, but The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo continues to intrigue me and I'm looking forward to reading more into the complex story that awaits me.