GJ

A family saga as narrated by a woman in her 80s, a perfectly ordinary woman with no talent or ambitions. It is like a road trip, this book; and this sassy grandma with an overactive imagination is driving us around, really slowly, taking all the sinuous side roads and detours, stopping every now and then to describe with exceptional vividness what we would have passed by unnoticed. In other words, it is long. I had to slog through most of it, but I don't regret it in the least.

The first line of the book fixes the pivot around which the rest of the tale is spun.

Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge.

“Mother is with God,” Laura said. True, this was the official version, the import of all the prayers that had been offered up; but Laura had a way of believing such things, not in the double way everyone else believed them, but with a tranquil single-mindedness that made me want to shake her

“Laura, what are you doing?” I said, “That's the Bible.”
“I'm cutting out the parts I don't like.”

Iris

I kicked off my shoes, threw myself down on the endless cream-colored bed. It had a canopy, with muslin draped around as if on safari. This, then, was where I was to grin and bear it - the bed I hasn't quite made, but now must lie in. And this was the ceiling I would be staring up at from now on, through the muslin fog, while earthly matters went on below my throat

The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read...Otherwise you begin excusing yourself

"I look back over what I've written and I know it's wrong, not because of what I have set down, but because of what I have omitted"

The girl writing this review looked up over to her bookshelf, and sighed at the size of Hornet's nest.
I wanted to love this book. I started this book hoping I would end up giving this a 4 or 5. Most reviews promised it to be better than the Dragon Tattoo, but sadly I don't feel so.
This continues about 1 year after the events of the first book. And this time it is Blomkvist's turn to help Salander out of a pickle. Since it's Salander, you can imagine how that would go.
I tried to write what I felt about what I was reading, while reading, since the book was too long and I had so little time to read and could not make it to more than 20-30 pages a day. It's a good thing I did that, because this book feels different at different parts. There are parts where I felt like reading without missing one word; pages I read multiple times and lingered on every word. There are parts when I felt like throwing the book, right out the window.
Blomkvist is a dry character. Considering how major a character he is in the book, he is surprisingly one-dimensional. I don't suppose the author put much effort into him - or purposefully made him dry, so that his masterpiece would stand out.

But she wished she had the guts to go up to him and say hello or possible break his legs, she wasn't sure which

She had stared at him for a whole minute and decided that she did not have a grain of feeling left, because it would have been the same as bleeding to death. Fuck you

She loved having company that left her alone

This must be the only non-fiction book till now, that I finished in a day.

The book is about as it says everything about the brain. A combination of simple physiology, experiments, theories, hypotheses and philosophy. It never gets boring and the language is simple. Very often I felt that this book isn't telling me anything new, atleast in the beginning, but that changes as the book progresses. He only lays a foundation describing the magnificence of “This hunk of tissue in our cranium” in the first half of it's book, and I'm sure, for someone completely new to brain physiology this will be mind blowing. Even if you have put some thought and effort in to know about this stuff earlier, this book is comprehensive. It neatly scoops out everything (basic) we can know about the brain and arranges it beautifully in 6 chapters.The earlier chapters are about the intricacies in the development of our brains, how a child picks up new information, forms new memories, the fallibility of our memory. The questionable ‘realness' of reality. The huge underground don of our existence - the unconscious which rules everything, though we dont realize it. The later chapters focuses on how the brain decides, the constant battle between our basal instincts and our wiser decisions, and the social component of our neural system. It also touches upon the property of the brain that could assist the visually impaired or hearing impaired to actually see and hear, if our brain can be replaced by a computer?, How prosthetic limbs can listen to our thoughts, and so on. It is not an academic text. It's a fun as well as informative quick read.

“No one is having an experience of the objective reality that really exists; each creature perceives only what it has evolved to perceive. But presumably every creature assumes its slice of reality to be the entire objective world. Why would we ever stop to imagine there is something beyond what we can perceive”