Day: March 6, 2019

Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

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I didn’t expect to enjoy The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. I picked a copy up on the cheap a few years back, part of a workshop I was taking where one of the exercises involved best-selling novels. There was a remarkable dearth of best-sellers on my bookshelves at the time, so I grabbed a bunch of ebooks to get me up to the quota I needed: Stieg Larson; one of the Alex Cross books; the most recent Nora Roberts I could find. I loved the Roberts. Didn’t enjoy Kill Alex Cross, but developed an appreciation for what James Paterson does via books like Zoo and his Bookshots Novellas. And yet, despite all that, I still went into Steig Larson’s crime novel with a sense of trepidation. It occupied that space: a best-seller. Not my thing. A book loaded with assumptions predicated on how much it sells, none of which it actually fulfilled when I sat down and devoured it