Karen Comes Clean page 10
Had a perfectly lovely weekend. Lambs were slaughtered. Buckets of gin and tonic were consumed. Men were men and girls were giggly.
Even found time to finish up a couple of books.
I'd mentioned earlier that I've been reading more novels in Norwegian, trying to brush up on the ol' language skills. I struggled with Jo Nesbø's Flaggermusmannen (that's The Batman for the scandie-deificent) for awhile until I finally had to give it up. It was just too lame and boring. Even though it's called Batman. I hear that later books in his Harry Hole series take a big jump in quality, so I may skip ahead and try one of the newer ones down the road. But Batman sucked ass.
Not to be discouraged, I moved on to Stieg Larsson's Menn Som Hater Kvinner which translates to Men Who Hate Women but they changed the english title to The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo for some reason.
I guess they were afraid people would mistake it for a self-help book. Larsson's Swedish, but Norwegian and Swedish are practically the same language, give or take a few letters and a bunch of words, so close enough. Anyway, this one's a real winner. Teriffic, complex characters and a twisty, turny serial killer story that spans decades, from the 1960s to the present day. It starts off slow but builds into a real barnburner. Good stuff. Read it in English if your Swedish is rusty.
Also polished off Stephen King's latest short story collection Just After Sunset.
Highly entertaining stuff as per usual from King. Maybe not as stellar as earlier collections like Night Shift and Skeleton Crew, but still definitely worth a read if you like your stories short and spooky. Highlights are The Gingerbread Girl about a lady that likes to jog and her serial killing neighbor and A Very Tight Place about a guy who gets locked in a port-a-potty. The best story though is probably N. One of those epistolary things that King is so found of, about a dude with OCD trying to prevent Lovecraftian creatures from spilling over into our world. Immensley creepy. I also watched the motion-comic adaptation of N by Marc Guggenheim and Alex Maleev. I'd classify this mostly as an interesting oddity. It sounds like King himself did one of the voices but I'm not entirely sure. The art is pretty cool (I'm generally a big fan of Maleev), but tips a little too far into photo-montage for my tastes. Also, the weird indescribable creatures are a lot scarier when left to the imagination than when visualized as big gobliny guys by Maleev.
Could've used a little more of that abstractifying I've been going on about! Worth a peek though.
Finally, here's a little fan-art I did for the always dependably entertaining Night Owls by the Timony Twins.
Oh, why can't Ernie and Mindy see that they're MADE for eachother?
Have a good week!
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