Abba Would Have Been Proud

[I got back from Taiwan last night and had wisely planned a day off from work to recover from travel before "diving into" a work week consisting of Thu and Fri. Woo-hoo on having 5 weeks of vacation!]

So, let's talk about the books:
"The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" [Tattoo]
"The Girl Who Played With Fire" [Fire]
"The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest" [Nest]

First, I saw the US movie "Tattoo" before I went off on my trip. It intrigued me, so I was able to borrow a Kindle from a friend who had purchased all three books for her reader.

I read on the plane from Dallas to Tokyo. I had heard that parts of Tattoo had to be trimmed for the movie, so I read the Tattoo book even though I'd seen the movie just a few days before. Typically, I don't like to do that. But when you've got 13 hours to kill....what's it going to hurt.

From the trilogy, this is what I learned:

• Swedes smoke a lot
• Swedes love to drink a lot of coffee
• Swedes mate like rabbits
• Apparently, sleeping with Mikael Blomkvist 5 times or more will cause a woman to reluctantly fall in love with him
• And he's clueless that she has feelings for him
• Sweden is a truly Big Brother Socialist State
• In Sweden, the moment your head hits the pillow, you instantly fall asleep
• And it must be documented as such

Okay, so reading Tattoo on the plane made me appreciate the work of the screenwriter. A lot of extra fluff was trimmed from the book. And if you know the story of how the author died of a heart attack after he had delivered his trilogy to the publisher, you can understand why it's a bit start-stop in some parts of the book. If he had lived, I hope his publisher would have made him polish it some more.

So, I finished Tattoo somewhere over the Pacific and then started in on Fire. Reading both books back-to-back made the 13 hour trip go fairly quickly. It seemed that I was only flying....3 hours instead of 13.

The only part was, as documented in a previous post, I didn't know how to increase the size of the font. I'd only received the Kindle 24 hours previously with no instructions (beggars can't be choosers).

Sometimes I had to squint or read with one eye closed so I could read the text.

I finished reading Fire and Kaohsiung and started in on Nest. I was reading it through the many periods of waiting for people to show up in Kaohsiung and out at Grandma's house.

And after I was finished with the third book, I spent time re-reading portions all three books since I was saving another mystery book in LARGE TEXT format (thank god) for the plane ride back.

About two days after I finished the books, my Mom wanted to kill some time before a dinner with my Aunt and Uncle and suggested we go see a movie. I'd seen many of the movies at the theater, but told her all the movies there I had seen that Tattoo was probably the best. But, I kinda told her in the movie that there was a rape scene in the movie that might be uncomfortable to watch. She said, "Well maybe it will be edited out". And then I remembered that overseas, some US movies are edited depending on the country they are presented in.

Finally, my parents and I sat through the movie. I figured now that I read the book, I could finally figure who was who when Christopher Plummer's character started pointing to buildings on the island in the movie (which I could finally understand the second time around).

Watching a rape scene with my parents? Uncomfortable.

Watching sex scenes with my parents? Awkward.

After the movie, my Dad said, "Ummm, I got confused as to who was who and what just happened."

My Mom that it was a good movie and asked me to clarify about 10 points. It took a while for her to understand what had happened.

And then while I was sitting in LAX for 4.5 hours during the layover, I exchanged some quick emails with Wifey's cousin. She said that Netfix streams the 3 original Swedish movies. Hmmm, with my $4.99/month account, I'm allowed to watch 2 streamed movies a month.

I got home around 8:30 last night, and watched some TV with Wifey after the kids had gone to bed.

And as expected, I wasn't sleepy when Wifey went to bed (she's been fighting allergies while I was gone) and she's been going to bed each night at 10:00.

Hmmmm, bored....hey let's fire up Netflix online and watch some movies!

I decided that watching the US version of Tattoo, then reading the book, then watching the US version of Tattoo in Taiwan and then watching the Swedish version of Tattoo AGAIN was too much.

Thus, I kicked off Fire and watched an hour of it last night.

Me watching a Swedish movie with subtitles a few hours after arriving home from a trip to Tawain.

Abba would have been proud.

P.S. By the way, production values in the US movie far surpass the original Swedish version. And the US Solandar is far more representative of the character than the Sweish Solandar. In my opinion.