lazing around

so i've been, well you could say "busy" but more accurate would be "lazing around", finally getting around to reading the second and third books of the millenium trilogy by stieg larsson. they were interesting, but. left a bit to be desired. i'm still not enamoured of the sometimes nasty & graphic depictions of violence. and i'm not sure how courtrooms in sweden work, perhaps they're more like a family group conference compared to nz courtrooms, but the courtroom scenes in the third book just seemed way too unrealistic to me. the plot was a little bit too predictable in the third book.

but despite all of that, i still did like his main character and i think there was good coverage of the reality of things like sexual harassment in the workplace, domestic violence, and inadequacies of mental health care. i'm not sure that i feel any richer or better informed after having read these novels - well, maybe i do quite a bit more about sweden than i did previously - but i do think they are a useful addition to popular literature in that the female characters are much better than what you often get in books written by men.

also this weekend, i caught the film "fast food nation" broadcast on maori tv (go them, yet again). i seriously think that every person should be sat down and forced to watch this film. it was a pretty brutal and gruesome look at reality, but it also really connected to some of what i was trying to say in my last post. the thread in the film i related to most was the appalling treatment of illegal mexican workers and the exploitation of their poverty. given the current immigration debates around the world, i wonder if seeing more of this kind thing would change people's minds about who the real parasites of this world are.