Old-hat reviews: The Hunger Games Trilogy

In June, it was my turn to pick the book for August's book club meeting. My first two suggestions were shot down as, inexplicably, they'd already read them (bad Maud, forgot to check the list). And despite their five-star reviews on the book site I'd taken their titles from, nobody present had liked them much. This left me feeling insecure: people don't have to love the book you choose, but it helps. And I wanted an easy read, because I knew I'd probably be reading most of it on a plane, my eyes propped open with matchsticks but unable to sleep. I cast about for a third option and came up with something other people kept telling me to read: The Hunger Games. I was afraid it might be gory or gruesome, because I'd heard something - erroneously, as it turned out - about cannibalism, but it was the best I could come up with on short notice. I was pleased when the others seemed happy to take it on.

I bought it in the airport, read the first 20 pages or so, and promptly left it in the pocket on the back of the seat in front of me. I didn't manage to find another copy until about a week later, but it's not as if I'd had much time for reading anyway, what with navigating myself and two children past the transatlantic jetlag and around the local parks of Cardiff while my husband attended a conference. I bought it again in Dubray Books in the Blackrock Shopping Center in south county Dublin, along with a Oliver Jeffers for Monkey and a tiny box-set of Charlie and Lola books for Mabel. And then I read it rather quickly. Indeed, it was a page turner. My husband, having finished his own reading matter, picked it up and was immediately engrossed. It's that sort of book. It pulls you in from the instant you start, and tosses and turns you over and over until you're dizzy, but you keep going.

Yesterday I finished the third and final book of the series, Mockingjay. (The middle one is Catching Fire.) My husband finished it the night before that. So now I think I can discuss them here - and they've been out long enough to qualify as "old-hat" in my review series, right?

If you haven't yet read them, there will be some spoilers ahead, but nothing too vital.

The biggest question I had was why I wasn't more traumatised by the horrible images of violence and suffering in the books. Terrible, horrific things happen, the sort of things you don't want to dwell on lest you wake in the middle of the night, and yet, I was able to gloss over them and keep reading without them entering my brain and scarring me.

It might be because I know they're YA books, and I scorn anything that's "popular fiction" rather than "literary fiction". Except that I love YA, especially YA fantasy - ever since I was pulled into the wardrobe with Lucy and Edward, since I entered the hole in the ground where a hobbit lived, ever since I read Alan Garner's Elidor, I've loved this sort of thing and happily suspended my disbelief along with my sense of time passing and my need for a snack or a bathroom break or to go to sleep until I found out how it ended.

It might be because I'm grown up now, and the books that I read and re-read as a teen just don't stay with me and become part of me the way books did then. Except that I read Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials series, and the Susan Cooper books, and Earthsea, not to mention all of Harry Potter, as an adult, and consumed them eagerly and without criticism. (Because at heart I'm a terrible literary critic - I could never get the hang of it and its pretentious vocabulary, despite my BA in English.)

I came to the conclusion that it's because the Hunger Games books are plot-driven, not character-driven. Maybe this was a conscious decision on the part of Suzanne Collins, because honestly, it would be impossible to write it more deeply and (a) cover all the material she covered and (b) leave your audience actually wanting to keep reading. I think you keep going, and you see these horrific images on the surface of your brain, but they don't penetrate because there are more words and you're just moving right along here and not thinking about any of it too hard. I didn't really identify deeply with the heroine, didn't feel a part of her despite the first-person narration. Maybe the present tense narrative made it easier to rush on ahead and not dwell on what had just happened.

I can't help wondering how they'll portray these horrible events - people being mauled to death by wild animals, consumed by acid, or having their flesh melted off by a beam of light, to pick a few at random - in the movies, without creating a horror to rival the Saw movies (which I have no intention of ever seeing) and getting an R rating. They'll have to dumb down a lot of the horror, and will presumably up the love-triangle aspect instead, but I wonder will it lose its punch as a result and become just another alternate-universe love story.

I can't even figure out what you would do to fix this sense of being slightly removed from the action, if you wanted to, which in this case I don't think anyone really should. But as an aspiring writer, it interests me. When a Dick Francis character is kicked in the ribs, breaks a bone, falls from a galloping horse (as they frequently do; Francis's heroes have amazing pain tolerance and live dangerously), I gasp and wince in sympathetic pain. But when Katniss is hurt, I just gloss over it. Is it overload, because she gets hurt so much? Is Francis so much a better writer than Collins? Or is there something obvious I'm missing about how this works?

If you have an opinion, I'd love to hear it.

Old-Hat Reviews: Fast Times at Ridgemont High

In our continuing quest to educate ourselves in popular culture and movies we may have missed, we found Fast Times at Ridgemont High appearing in our mailbox courtesy of Netflix last week. This 1982 oeuvre was the seminal high-school movie for a lot of people a few years older than me - Ferris Bueller's Day Off was probably the nearest equivalent American-high-school movie that I saw when I was actually the age of the protagonists.

Although this turns up on TV all the time, I'd only ever seen a small part of it. And the real thing is R-rated, so the TV version is pretty sanitized, which would make for a somewhat different experience.

It's notable for being the first big movie of a ton of famous-later actors: Sean Penn, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Phoebe Cates are the big names, but there are also small roles here for Anthony Edwards (that's Dr Greene from ER), Forest Whittaker, and Nicolas Cage, rolling pizza dough. I have decided that Sean Penn has spent the rest of his career choosing worthy, overwrought, thinky roles because this one, as the ultimate stoner surfer dude, was so embarrassing. But maybe that was just the hair.

When you didn't go to high-school in America, viewing these movies - and shows we watched like Beverly Hills 90210 or even Degrassi Junior High (I have to admit that I didn't really understand that Canada was a different country) - was somewhat confusing. Not having experienced the real thing, we had (and still have, to be honest) no understanding of where fact ended and fiction began. Those rows of tall lockers in the corridors, talk of hall passes, free periods, and study hall, boys and girls in all manner and means of clothes - these too were things of fiction as far as I was concerned: my school was filled with green-and-grey-clad girls, and lockers were small and square and mostly in our classrooms. As for sex, I have very little idea who was doing it and who wasn't (apart from me: I was very much on the wasn't side, and found it hard to believe that anyone really was). I tended to assume that teenagers in America were all straight out of Judy Blume novels, and was very relieved not to have to be one.

I had no idea, before watching this, that that its writer was Cameron Crowe - the guy portrayed in Almost Famous. He went back to high school masquerading as a pupil, and took notes. (Very Never Been Kissed, though if Almost Famous is to be believed, that wasn't a problem he had.) So I have to assume that it was quite true to life.

Which is damn scary, what with all the sex going on. And the complete disregard for STDs or pregnancy. Poor 15-year-old Stacy is pressured into Doing It because her friend Linda says that's what all the guys want: she ends up with an abortion - which is totally glossed over; makes it look like a visit to the dentist, with no more psychological impact than having a tooth out - and finally - duh! - discovers that the nice guy who actually likes her is happier to wait. Evidently condoms weren't invented till after the AIDS crisis.

I suppose I still don't know who represents the norm: Linda, who had all the sex - or at least said she did; or Stacy, who did, but didn't really want to? Then again, I could reassure myself that maybe this is what goes on in Californian high schools, but not in the rest of the country (lie!) or that this sort of thing may have been prevalent in the early 80s, but everyone's much better informed now and girls don't think they have to put out just to get a boyfriend (maybe?). What I can't tell myself any more is that this sort of thing only happens in America, and I'm safely in good old Catholic (ahem) Ireland, where the grass is green and the girls are virgins and the boys only want to hold hands and you have to keep a phone-directory's distance apart at all times until marriage, because whether I'm coming from the point-of-view of a shy teenager or the mother of a daughter, that's not true any more. It's probably not true in Ireland either.

Old-Hat Reviews: Inception

(No spoilers here. Read without fear.)

This film was so good that for long chunks of time I forgot we were huddled in bed in an otherwise dark, increasingly cold house during a power cut. Thank heavens for little laptops with big batteries.

I knew it was meant to be good, and that it was directed by Christopher Nolan, beloved of my husband for the little-seen and very clever Memento, but otherwise I had gone to some lengths to avoid finding out anything at all about the story. I love coming to a good film that way, without having seen so much as a trailer. (I sometimes shirk reading the backs of books for the same reason.) I had somehow got the notion that it was a police thriller - possibly because of Leonardo Di Caprio and The Departed - and I couldn't have been more wrong, or more happy about that.

Speaking of Leo, I'm glad to find I can finally take him seriously as a grown up. For so long I could only see a chubby-cheeked fourteen-year-old whenever I watched him - it made The Aviator particularly hard to swallow. But he has at last grown into his looks, or they've grown into him, and he makes a reasonable intense, marked-by-sorrow lead. I thought Ellen Page was great in a nicely understated way and I particularly liked the Englishman, played by Tom Hardy, who is kind of cute. There's also a token Irish actor (not playing an Irish character) in Cillian Murphy. (I was always partial to the name Cillian/Killian, but couldn't use it on account of having the alliteration problem.)

Sadly, with 40 minutes to go my personal alarm went off (in the shape of Mabel waking up) and we had to keep the rest of the movie for the next night. I imagine that seen all at once, on the big screen, it would have been an Experience. As it was, I found myself thinking about it (in a satisfying, not irritating, way) until I fell asleep. It was reminiscent of various films: Vanilla Sky, Strange Days, The Matrix, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind to name a few that toy with our perceptions of dreams and reality, or reality and hyper-reality - but better done: Inception isn't trying to confuse you: it's all quite above board and explained as you go - if you can't keep up, it's your own fault for not paying attention.

And at least I've seen one thing on the Oscar list before the awards. What else (that's out on DVD) should I watch?

Old-Hat Reviews: Babies

[Maud thinks: Babies. Yes, this sounds like a good choice for an evening when I'm home alone and have lately been pondering the question of a third child in a manner probably not altogether un-premenstrual.]

I'd heard of the film before, but not gone out of my way to see it. Then the other day someone told me it was available for instant play on Netflix, and last night B was out and my blog post was all written and the kids were asleep, so I hacked into our account (that means I had a lucky guess and remembered the password first time) and watched it.

It's a beautifully shot story without words that follows four babies in radically different parts of the world from birth to their first steps. The babies live, respectively, with a tribe in Namibia, in a yurt in Mongolia (you'd be amazed how much furniture they fit in a yurt (I like saying yurt)), in a high-rise apartment in Tokyo, and in San Francisco.

I love San Francisco, Tokyo looks uber-cool, and the windswept grasslands and big skies of Mongolia were amazing, but it was the little Namibian girl who stole my heart - all plump chocolate limbs and mischevious eyes, growing and learning in an environment so alien to anywhere I've ever been: the phrases "third world" and "developing world" are meaningless here - these people live without money because they don't need anything that requires money (or at least that's how it's, perhaps romantically, portrayed). They laugh and chat and braid their children's hair, and the babies put unsuitable things in their mouths and imitate their mothers just like babies do everywhere.

Some highlights:

• The nurse in Mongolia parcelling up the new baby in the tightest swaddle I've ever seen, finished off with two ribbons like a present - and then his mother bringing him outside and hopping (painfully) onto the back of her husband's motorbike, swaddled infant in arms, to bring him home. And off they rode, across the fields.
  
• The unmistakeable "am pooing now" series of expressions that crossed baby Hattie's face (San Francisco) as she sat on the floor.
• Namibia baby putting out her tongue to get the dog to lick it.
• All the Tokyo mothers bringing their babies to the zoo, placing them feet from enormous gorillas and prowling tigers (separated by just a pane of glass) and seeming surprised when the babies, very sensibly, burst into wails of terror.
• Mongolia baby's big brother pushing him outside in the stroller, apparently unsupervised, and abandoning him in the field with all the cows. As if to say, "There. Now you can't come back, and I will reign supreme once more."
• A beautifully plumed rooster hopping up on the bed in the yurt and then stepping carefully around the sleeping infant.
  

My inner anthropologist seems to think that we were all meant to live around a campfire in a desert or a cave, with the rest of our tribe; that clearly the way of the tribe is the one true way for humankind. (This is not actually true.) But apart from that, the oustanding contrast to me in the lives of these babies was how the San Francisco and Tokyo babies were only/first children who spent their time mostly in the company of adults, only seeing peers in artificial, organized settings like yoga or music classes; while the two rural babies had siblings and others of similar ages around all the time; loving, teaching, and persecuting them in equal measure.

Now, I'm the last person to cast aspersions on only children (being a high-functioning only child myself) but the latter model seemed much healthier, much righter to me. It goes back to the idea that the best way to parent may be to provide your kids with other children to interact with (they don't have to be related), and then ignore them all as much as you possibly can. (Preferably while you share a bottle of wine and some good conversation with the other parents.)

Five-second reviews

Harry Potter and The Whatever it is These Days: Harry, Hermione and Ron go camping and get very cold. Other stuff happens. I didn't care, I was just high on the fact that I was watching a movie in the cinema with my husband and no children. It was good, mindless fun. I suspect it would be totally incomprehensible if you hadn't read the book.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society: My optimistic aeroplane book, finished thanks to the total lack of Internet and tiny number of functioning TV channels at my parents' house. It was excellent, just the way I like my books - stealthily educational, tackling a serious subject (the German occupation of Guernsey during WWII) with a light touch and a lovely story. Go and read it, if you haven't already.

Going the Distance: Aeroplane movie #2, all of which I saw, with sound, while Mabel slept on me. The Apple guy and Drew Barrymore fall in love and pursue a long-distance relationship in the current economic climate (i.e. neither of them can just move and expect to find a decent job once they get there). With my extensive experience of LDRs (well, just the one, but a lot of it), this resonated with me, but the ending was annoying. [Spoiler coming up, so look away if you care that much...] When you've wished and hoped to be with your loved one full-time, moving to a city six-hours' drive away is a step in the right direction, but by no means a resolution. In fact, it's almost more annoying to be tantalizingly closer. When I moved to the US, I didn't move to a different city, or my own apartment on the other side of the same city - I moved into my boyfriend's bed, in my boyfriend's bedroom, in my boyfriend's apartment. Anything else would not have sufficed.

Salt: Aeroplane movie #3, mostly without sound, because Mabel woke up. Angelina Jolie is a double, triple, quadruple backward-triple-salka agent. Or is she? All I know is she looks funny as a dusty blonde.

Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow: The weather made me want to re-read this one, when I was within easy reach of my own bookshelf. Funnily enough, I remembered a lot about the first part, in the city; not a lot about the second, on the ship; and nothing at all about the denouement; which made it a satisfying finish, but I still think it meanders too much in the middle.

Old-Hat Reviews: Nine

This film was so unthrilling that I almost started blogging it while we were still watching. It looks great on paper: amazing cast, songs, Italy - how could it miss? And yet...it's just not compelling at all. We stopped halfway through and I felt no compulsion to finish it tonight beyond a basic duty to the nice people at Netflix.

Daniel Day Lewis is very good - he really does disappear into the character excellently and is very believable as the charismatic Italian director who's lost his way in both his private life and the film he's supposed to be making. It also stars Penelope Cruz, Nicole Kidman, Kate Hudson, Marion Cotillard (of fishtail dress at the Oscars fame, or at least that's what I always think of, not having actually seen any of her other films), Judi Dench, and Sophia Loren, for heaven's sake. (Whom I'm afraid I thought at first was Shirley Bassey. Sorry, Sophia, but you need to lay off the fake tan. Or the carrrot juice.) It should be great, no? But the story is kind of boring, the songs are in no way memorable, and it all gets very very meta at the end.

Chicago lite perhaps, but I won't be rushing out to buy the soundtrack for this one. Italy looks beautiful (as it should) and it's prettily lit and shot and the ladies are lovely and sexy and whatnot; it's all very picturesque, but there's no soul. Italy in the 60s has classic cars and lots of sunglasses and sharp suits, but there's a very contemporary feel to it - nothing like, for stark contrast, the amazingly gorgeous Talented Mr Ripley, where you just wanted to melt through your screen and emerge in a sun-drenched piazza to have a cafe latte and biscotti with Gwynneth Paltrow. And I'm not just saying that because of Jude, to whom I am somewhat partial. (At least, I was before he started shagging the nanny. Idiot.) It reminded us of what was possibly the best bit of all of Angel: the Ciao clip. (If you didn't watch Angel this will seem completely pointless, but believe me, it had me falling off the sofa in giggles.)

So, in short, not worth it. Though I suppose at least it gave me something to blog about. But I think I'll let B go back to manning the Netflix list.

Old-Hat Reviews: The Time Traveler's Wife

The movie, not the book.

I enjoyed the book a few years ago and looked forward to reading it again, but then my mother-in-law stole it* and I haven't yet managed to get my hands on a replacement copy. So I felt that by now I was far enough removed from the written word to watch the film without getting all annoyed about it. (Because some people did, you know.)

[*In her defence, I have to say that she didn't really steal it. She liberated it from the bonds of my bookshelf and sent it on its way in the world to be enjoyed by others. My mother-in-law views books as fluid objects, transcending ownership. I view books as mine, living on my bookshelves, to be lent out with caution and recovered zealously. But since I had appropriated her copy of Never Let Me Go in similar circumstances the same year, and she almost always leaves us whatever she's finished reading at the end of a visit, I'm in no position to take the high ground here.]

I'm blessed (from the perspective of one who enjoys re-reading books and gets great value out of a big reveal - again) with a terrible memory for details, once any length of time has passed. (I was a great exam candidate so long as I could review everything the night before, but ask me to integrate a whatsit or define a function these days and you'll be met with a blank look and a referral to my husband.) What I remembered from the book, apart from the basic plot of the bloke cursed with sudden bouts of uncontrollable, naked, time travelling, was that for some reason I had got it into my head that he was Harrison Ford. Ford is, of course, too old for the part, but such logic had no place in my head. Transferring my affections to Eric Bana was a bit of a leap for me, but I managed to accept his Henry fairly well - it probably helped divorce the on-screen story further from the written version, which was no bad thing for me.

Claire-in-my-head was the girl from Six Feet Under (Lauren Ambrose) - perhaps influenced by the fact that her character in that was also called Claire, and that she's a redhead. Rachel McAdams was a bit too dark of hair, but she's prettily generic-looking and was okay in the part, I thought.

I don't know what sort of experience this film would have been for someone who hadn't read the book: I suspect they might be left in the dust as the complex logic of this particular iteration of time travel was, sort of, brought to life. Of course, there's always an element of suspension of disbelief needed, and much as I love this sort of thing, I usually do end up at some point gesticulating wildly at the screen and going, "But, but, but..." like a broken record as my disbelief crashes to the ground and my logic circuits kick in uninvited. And this one really messes with the mind when it comes to predestination versus free will, because unlike some other time-travel scenarios, in this case there is only one future. And if you know it and you can't change it, what's the frigging point of anything, really? Gah.

The narrative moved very quickly, but such is always the way with films of books you've lived with and allowed to get under your skin. There's no way you can ever love a film like a book. There was hardly any time for the sense of foreboding and imminent disaster that I remember, the long-drawn-out fears for Henry's feet and legs and ability to get out of trouble fast, the repeated visits to the scene of his death, with a little more information being gleaned each time.

It was a decent enough way to pass the time, and mostly just made me resolve to get my hands on the book again. Maybe this just wasn't the right medium for this story; it's much, much better in words. Even Harrison Ford couldn't have made it work.

Old-Hat Reviews: Let the Right One In

I have very little control over the movies we see. At least, that's not quite true. I just don't choose to exercise my options. B is the keeper of the NetFlix, and though I have the login and am certainly entitled - nay, encouraged - to add films to our list, I hardly ever bother. With the result that the two DVDs that sit on the TV shelf waiting for our viewing pleasure are usually a delightful surprise to me. Or at least a surprise. Sometimes they're Batman, which is a delightful surprise for someone else.

And then there's NetFlix on Demand, where you don't even have to order the movie, you just press play and - thanks to the wonders of wireless internet - it streams straight to your computer. I'm pretty sure that Let the Right One In had actually been in our house ages ago for some number of weeks before we decided we weren't going to feel like watching it, and sent it back unopened. The other night I found B pressing Play on the NetFlix site and ended up watching the same film and being totally drawn in, if not exactly against my will, then at least without any intent on my part.

All I had known was that it was a vampire movie from Sweden that got excellent reviews as not-the-average-vampire-flick. I don't watch horror films; and if your vampires aren't called Angel or Spike, I'm not terribly interested in them, so you can see why I tended away from this. Also, sometimes you just don't feel up to subtitles.

In fact - and I don't want to give anything away, but I don't think this is going to be a big reveal - this is a sweet and tender teenage love story that deals with how horrible kids can be to one another. The whole vampire thing is somehow at the same time pivotal to the plot and also totally incidental; and even though there's a lot of blood, it's not remotely played for chills, or gore, or anything like that.

We were concerned that everyone in Sweden dresses very peculiarly, but then it turned out that it's set in the early 80s (which explained why I didn't recognise any of the furniture as coming from IKEA; it probably came from early-80s IKEA). The young protagonists are excellently understated, and the whole thing is low-key and unhurried, but not boring. It reminded me a little of The Ice Storm, in feeling as well as fashion. (And weather, I suppose.)

Apparently they're remaking it in American this year as Let Me In: no doubt the actors will be prettier, and it will be interesting to see whether they leave the resolution as it is in the original or feel they need to do something different with it.

Old-Hat Reviews: No Country for Old Men

Just in case you're confused, this is the film with Javier Bardem and the terrible haircut, not the one with Daniel Day Lewis and the milkshake. If that helps clear things up at all.

This had been sitting on our to-be-watched shelf for possibly months before we finally got around to it, because it was lodged in my mind as one of those worthy Oscar films that I really should see but didn't hugely want to because it would probably be depressing. I'd forgotten that it's a Coen brothers film; in fact it doesn't have a lot of the Coen hallmarks - at least going by Fargo, which I always think of as quintessential Coen (partly because I haven't seen them all, but let's gloss over that - I've seen The Big Lebowski and Burn After Reading too, but those are definitely in the realm of comedy and this sure as heck ain't). The sense of the quietly ridiculous that normally hangs around a Coen brothers film was very very subtle here - noticeable only in Bardem's quite quite terrifyingly loony hit man, and Josh Brolin's mother-in-law, who had The Cancer and wasn't going to let anyone forget it.

There were a few things about the film that made it particularly interesting to me: it's partly set in border-country Texas, and I just happen to have spent two years living in border-country Texas, albeit further down the river from Del Rio. Not that I could identify with the drug dealing, but the Mariachi singers certainly struck a chord in my memory.

We were surprised to see Kelly Macdonald - best known as the young girl in Trainspotting - as Josh Brolin's wife here. As we'd just spent previous evenings watching her in the very excellent BBC mini-series State of Play, in which she has her real, strong Glasgow accent, it was hard not to miss the tiny glitches in her Texas drawl, but I think she did a pretty good job.

Let me take a moment to tell you about State of Play. If you have a two-DVD gap in your Netflix list, I highly recommend you go and put this on it. It was later made into an allegedly-not-bad Ben Affleck movie, but I'm sure the original is far superior. It has a great cast, with the aforementioned Kelly Macdonald; a floppy-haired and before-he-was-famous James McAvoy; a guy called John Simm, who played The Master in several episodes of last year's Dr Who, if you happen to have a clue what I'm talking about there; and the always wonderful Bill Nighy. (Forgotten who he is? Remember the pervy aging rock star in Love Actually? Him.) It's about a politician whose girlfriend dies in suspicious circumstances, and the investigative reporting team who race the police to figure it all out. Gritty, realistic, BBC, those accents you people all love, damn good TV.

Sorry. Back to the review this is actually meant to be. Tommy Lee Jones does a good job as the laconic and sadly jaded sherrif. (Am I the only person who always thinks of Oz from Buffy when the word "laconic" comes up? /Quick Google search./ No, apparently I'm not.) Josh Brolin almost makes a moustache sexy with his McGyver-ish hunter with a heart of gold and questionable morals. (The film is set in 1980, which explains Bardem's haircut - apparently modelled on a photo of a brothel client from 1979. Lovely.)

I don't want to say anything more about the plot because I'm sure someone out there hasn't seen it and I always think the less you know about a film the better. But it was certainly worth seeing, I enjoyed it despite everything, and it's not at all unremitting gloom - somehow, those Coens make you think there's a laugh just around the next corner even when it turns out to be a crazy-eyed Mexican with a huge shotgun and a silencer. Rent it.

Old-Hat Reviews: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

When I was 12 we were required to write a book review for a homework project. This will be totally unexceptional to my American readers, who I believe as students were constantly required to turn in book reports (as they put it - see, I speak American), but I'm pretty sure this was actually the only time we ever did it. Most of the books I studied in school were laboriously read chapter by chapter, week after week, and then taken apart class by class and theme by achingly boring theme until Charles Dickens was well and truly dead and buried and spinning in his grave. (I'm just not a Dickens person. I find him long-winded and tedious and the fact that Great Expectations finally got exciting at chapter 58 offered no redemption. Actually, I'm really glad we weren't an Emma year, because it would have been horrible to have been put off lovely Austen by the Board of Education.)

Book review, then. My only problem was deciding which book to pick, since we were given free rein in the choice. So many great options - would I go classic with an LM Montgomery or Little Women, or try to impress the teacher with something more sci-fi/fantasy-oriented, something with time travel, perhaps; should I pick a long but straightforward book like Watership Down, or something a little more grown up like Rumer Godden's wonderful Greengage Summer? I don't actually remember what I chose in the end, but I'm pretty sure all of the above and more would have been at my literal and metaphorical fingertips that year.

My friend Alison (let's call her, because that was her name) had a different problem: she'd never actually read a whole book. I found that very very hard to get my head around, but I lent her Tom McCaughren's Run Swift Run Free, because she liked animals and it was about foxes. And not too long. I think I still had to tell her how it ended.

Anyway, that was my first book review, and I think it's time to write some more. Following the lead of my friend and excellent blogger, Morninglight Mama, I thought it might be handy for me to write down my thoughts on books I read or films I see. However, as I never jump on any bandwagon until it's almost completely out of sight, and never get to the cinema for anything more grown-up than Toy Story 3 (which was really very good) these days, these reviews will probably be of books you've already read and films you've already seen. Hence the old hat.

Herewith then, the first in a series. Or at least, what I think may turn out to be one.

I've just finished The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson.

I'm probably the last person in the world to read this, so excuse me if you've thought all these things already. I bought it in the airport as my holiday read, and got about three pages in before being distracted by a cloud or the ice in my Coke or possibly my two children not sleeping on an all-night flight. I found it not immediately engaging, to say the least. It spent the entire holiday somewhere in my hand luggage while I read my aunt's entire collection of Woman & Home and then devoured a Dick Francis in short order on the journey home.

But I picked up the Larsson again once we got back and started to plough through it with a little more concentration. After a while it wasn't so bad. I could put it down and walk away, but I was going back for more. And then, about halfway through, I was walking around the house holding it in case I got 30 seconds to stand still. I was reading it instead of sleeping, and if you knew what sort of sleep regression Mabel's going through at the moment, you'd appreciate how big a sacrifice that is. (Actually, if you know what sort of sleep regression she's going through, I'd be happy to hear when it will be over. Answers on a postcard, please.) I read it while nursing, I held it in one hand and dripped cheerio-milk on my pyjamas from my spoon with the other, I let the kids watch far too many episodes of Little Einsteins as I tried to finish the damn thing: in short, I was absorbed.

And now it's finished, so I can talk about it.

Because of all the hype, I was expecting this to be a really well-written novel as well as a page turner. Frankly, it's not. I mean, it's not Dan Brown, but it's not Nabokov either. Part of the difficulty is with the translation: I often dislike reading translations because it's so hard to get the mood of the writer in a new language. And there were some phrases that jarred, distracting me from the story while I grimaced at the words and tried to figure out what it should have said.

I was hoping to get a sense of Sweden from it, the way Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow - also a translation, but perhaps a much better one, or maybe just of a better book - did of Denmark. With Smilla, I really felt the crunch of the snow, the velvet of her clothes, what it was like - or what I'd like it to be like - in Copenhagen in the dead of winter. With Larsson, apart from all the references to kroner and the placenames, it may as well have been set in Minnesota.

But mostly, I found it a bit unnecessarily gruesome, and it made me wonder how much of the popularity of books like this is because they titillate with gory sexual crimes. It's a good thriller, but so are most of the Dick Francises that fill my shelf o' shame and to which I return time and again because he spins a good exciting yarn and I almost always learn something new from them. And yet nobody rushes out to make Hollywood blockbusters of Banker, or The Edge, or Flying Finish, or any of his other oldies and goodies. (Now I check, several of his books have been made into TV movies. But my point still stands.)

Anyway, I don't think I'll be rushing out to buy the next one and consuming it avidly tomorrow, but if it comes my way in a book sale or to borrow, I probably won't say no. But not right now, because my children can't really take that much neglect on an ongoing basis.