Bernard Jan's Blog, page 25

The Girl of Millenium

The Girl in the Spider's Web by David Lagercrantz

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


The Girl of Millennium

The girl with the dragon tattoo. The girl who played with fire. The girl who kicked the hornet's nest.

And the girl in the spider's web.

I love the Millennium series. I love this brutal, raw, dark and violent Swedish saga, cold and ruthless as the Swedish weather. And I love that this story continues.

Even though the first opening pages of The Girl in the Spider's Web by David Lagercrantz stroke me as slow and a bit lulling in building the plot, soon new pages are turned and stick to your fingers like frost sticks to the frozen windows in December Stockholm. The Girl in the Spider's Web sets with vigor and thrill into an action worthy of its literary predecessors, continuing Stieg Larsson's series with dignity and justified trust. Mikael Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander continue living, and that is what's most important.

I didn't pick this book by chance to read it during my vacation in Sweden, although I had a few more other books in store to chose from. I took The Girl in the Spider's Web on a flight with me and read it until I reached my final destination; as well as on my way back via Copenhagen and Frankfurt to Zagreb. However, while staying in Växjö I chose to live my own personal Swedish story, a story of hundreds of unwritten pages no one will be able to read but me.

As for Lisbeth and Mikael, they kept me company for ten more days upon my return, making that intoxicating feeling of Sweden linger linger linger and last throughout my whole conscious being.

I look forward to our reunion. We are alive and Sweden is ready and waiting for us.

BJ
www.bernardjan.com



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Pagliacci: Collages from the Swedish Tale

When everything is gone, memories remain. Snapshots of the moments your soul feeds on. And craves for more. Even when it's over. Because all good things come to an end.

Not the craving, though. It's insatiable. It wants more. It wants to suck on your good memories, rip your heart to pieces. Devour it in a few bites of the crazed, starved beast, making you bleed on the inside as you go on with your life with a fake and pathetic smile on your face. Like a clown.

Pagliacci.

No one sees your tears. No one smells your longing. No one licks your wounds. No one hears you cry.

No one picks you up and holds you under your arm as you stumble to take another breath and blink away your blurry sight while you grope for a familiar memory in a very distant future, trying to make it alive. Trying to make it omnipresent. Trying to relive it – now.

Except for those who know you, except for those who have shared it with you. The moments, the images, the laughter, the smells, the walks, the ice creams, the sounds, the games, the thoughts, the experiences, the dreams, the feelings, the recollections, the foolishness. Knitting them into collages that will stay with you forever. Those are your people. Your friends.

That is the beauty of it. The beauty I will try to share and portray here for you. Because when the words fail, pictures continue to tell our story.

Thank you, Växjö, for everything. Really.

BJ
www.bernardjan.com

Original blog post - images from Sweden

Related posts:
Summer in Sweden
Sweden in My Mind
In Between Places

My other blogs

Suppose (It Didn't Happen When It Happened)

Suppose the accident didn't happen. Suppose we were less immersed into things we were doing and more focused on the things the others were about to do. It took only a second, a blink of an eye, for a scream to penetrate the stale calmness of an ordinary evening and set everybody in motion.

It did happen; accidents happen when no one expects them, this is why they are accidents, I guess. Commotion and shouts in the room are fighting for the primacy with the sounds of the howling wind and things falling and clattering from the outside. Suddenly everyone and everything wants your attention. Suddenly nothing was important except for this brief moment in time when you have to ACT in order to prevent more grave things to happen, to stop consequences from taking their course and reach the point beyond the conclusion: The damage is irreparable. Once you step over the threshold, the door closes and not even the howling wind and drums of rain of the building storm can open it again.

Once bygones, always bygones.

Life sucks, doesn't it?

Sure it does, don't lie to me about it!

Monsters of the night are screaming behind my windows, thudding and banging for my attention as I am trying to make love with the sleep, craving to be embraced in its comforting promise of things to be undone and the history reversed to before it happened. I crack-open the balcony door, securing it from being shattered into pieces of the broken glass in case the wind wishes to grab its handle and tries to force itself on my slumber. Nothing happens, though. At least nothing I perceive. A barely traceable kiss of the fresh air softly lands on my exposed neck, arms and bare chest as I surrender myself into the winning pull of a sleep, aware of the blinking dim dot of consciousness that the morning will be the time and place to deal with the consequences. To tackle the issue. If what did happen decided to leave the scars of the accident of the event that only in my regretful mind supposedly didn't happen.

I'll try, but I know that sleeping the morning away won't make any difference. What is bound to happen is already being fed with the thick squish of the pouring rain.

If only this water turned into tears of remedy that would make my dad's eye heal. My mom would be granted forgiveness, and one ordinary, boring and uneventful night would be written off in the forgetfulness of time.

If only it didn't happen when it happened.

BJ
www.bernardjan.com

Original blog post

My Muse Blog

Ghost Flight (Wir sind die Zukunft)

Ghost Flight by Bear Grylls

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Ever heard of Bear Grylls? I truly hope so, because this former soldier in the British Special Forces, the youngest ever Chief Scout to the UK Scout Association and an honorary Colonel to the Royal Marine Commandos is also an adventurer, writer and television presenter. His Facebook bio says that “Bear Grylls has become known around the world as one of the most recognized faces of survival and outdoor adventure.”

I first heard about Bear Grylls seven years ago when I was on my vacation visiting my friends in Sweden and we watched his Ultimate Survival (also known as Born Survivor/Man vs. Wild) on the Discovery Channel. Needless to say that Bear Grylls captured my attention on the spot, that I wanted to see more of him, making me check for him online immediately after returning home to Croatia.

I loved the concept of his show in which he was left stranded with his crew in an unfamiliar wilderness – rainforests, glaciers, deserts, islands, to name just a few – with only one goal: to survive and find his way back to civilization.

The similar pattern follows his entertaining and exciting thriller Ghost Flight. Packed with action, adventure, beautiful landscapes of the remote Amazon jungle where lies hidden a mysterious WWII warplane, Ghost Flight guarantees to keep even the most demanding fans of this genre glued to its pages. It is so easy to picture Bear Grylls, an ex-soldier and a survivor, as an ex-soldier Will Jaeger, also a leader of a team of former elite warriors in their quest to uncover the mystery of the hidden warplane and the secret of Nazi evil forces (Wir sind die Zukunft) that lie buried in it.

I am a sucker for WWII novels and I am a sucker for Amazon rainforest. When those two are combined, you have an explosive reading before you. You are drinking up a cocktail made of ghosts from not so recent past, to majority of people almost forgotten, but the ghosts which are patiently waiting for their moment of the rise of the new Reich, and a pristine nature beaming with both beautiful and deadly life.

Ghost Flight is a successful debut novel with interesting and well-developed characters, full of action, twists and turns and gripping moments. It is also a very detailed novel which probably might not help us in a fight against the rise of a new Reich if it comes to it, but it could very well serve us as a survival guide in a primeval rainforest if we ever find ourselves in our personal mission under the canopy of magnificent trees where neither evil Nazis nor modern-day humans got to leave their destructive imprint.

BJ
www.bernardjan.com



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Books by Bernard Jan on Promocave

Two of my books in Croatian are now also on Promocave.com.

For those of you who speak Croatian, you can check my novella Potraži me ispod duge (Look For Me Under the Rainbow) here:

a) About Potraži me ispod duge
b) Excerpt from Potraži me ispod duge

or my novel Okrutno ljeto (Cruel Summer) here:

a) About Okrutno ljeto
b) Excerpt from Okrutno ljeto

I also thought of you who do not speak Croatian. On this blog post you will find an excerpt and a link to read more about my novella Look For Me Under the Rainbow, while this blog post will provide you with excerpts in English from my YA adventure/mystery novel Cruel Summer.

Thanks for checking me out!

BJ
www.bernardjan.com

The Term Sheet

The Term Sheet: A Startup Thriller Novel by Lucas Carlson

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


"The large American elms and Norway maples filled out the autumn landscape with yellow, orange, and red. The ginkgo biloba gave off a spectacular yellow show. Paperbark maples stood like bright red fire engines with dark red splintering bark. The bending birches glowed neon yellow on stark white. The smoke bushes could be found as shrubs or small trees. As they faded through fall, long stalks with fuzzy pink and brown hairs popped out, creating the illusion of a purple smoke."

David Alexander didn't forget to notice the beauty of the urban forest of inner southeast Portland as he set out on a walk to clear his mind burdened with many worries – we soon find out while walking with him through The Term Sheet: A Startup Thriller Novel by Lucas Carlson.

David is a young man in his early twenties who wants an easy way out of life of ordinary people. He doesn't want a regular job and the faith of mediocrity, pressured by his unquestionable talent for programming and desire to follow his dreams. Geek by nature, at times he seems to be out of touch with this world, but in truth he never stops thinking big, even when people he loves most characterize him as just a dreamer. Dreamer he may be, but what is wrong with dreaming as long as we dare to strive towards our goals, big or small, ready to pay the price of success or failure, ridicule or admiration, abandonment, alienation?

David was paying the price, a big one, because huge things were at stake on his way to seizing his entrepreneurship dream. It was not only the question of alleviating himself out of poverty into the world of financially stabilized and millions-dollars-successful young entrepreneur, the morality of national security versus human rights, or the right of individual for his privacy, to be more precise, was at stake as well.

Hitting and holding on a startup idea of encrypted chat and email have cost David dearly. The love of his girlfriend, friendship and companionship with his best friend and partner, an easily given promise to take care of his sick sister, everything was submitted to making one of the most secure options out there for which the big shots of a corporate world fought not choosing ways and means to get David, his company and a desired product.

Unlike some books of the same or similar genre, this likeable technothriller is deprived of tough and strong muscular superheroes who are bombing, exploding, shooting and car-crashing their way out of impossible situations. It is like a slow, pleasant dance with everyday people who could be our next-door neighbors (or even us!) dancing gracefully their way out of their problems. The Term Sheet: A Startup Thriller Novel has its moments of well-balanced and timely action, which only adds to its realism and the severity of fate of its characters.

David, Andrew and other characters in this Lucas Carlson's first novel are believable characters, their situations and actions are believable, and The Term Sheet: A Startup Thriller Novel is a believable novel. The loss of our privacy is also believable and the fact that we are nothing but modern slaves controlled and manipulated both by governments and big corporations alike gives a huge slap on the back of justifiability of Carlson's novel. Many debates will be going on about who is more important – a nation or its individuals. Some might say they both are. But not at the cost of the other!

Living encrypted life is not too much appealing, nothing more than looking back over your shoulder in constant fear from an unknown pursuer, or putting your faith, as David did, "in a man who had nearly kidnapped him and a guy who had already abandoned him once."

Kudos to the writing and publishing of The Term Sheet: A Startup Thriller Novel, with another quoted paragraph which will wrap up this review. Although both paragraphs, at the beginning and at the end of the review, are completely irrelevant in the scheme of terrorist and capital plots, government espionage, advanced technology, broken relationships and unavoidable casualties, they are a hint, an idea or maybe a promise where Carlson's literary talent might take us in his new books.

"The early spring felt like summer. David knew the showers would return soon, but he loved the rare respite where people could leave their jackets and sweaters behind and throw caution to the wind. Even the plants and trees forgot what came next. The cherry blossoms burst with white snow and the daphnes bloomed in fragrant bushes. It seemed as if only the wise rose knew better."

Compliments to the book cover, which gives the whole story an expressive visual identity.

BJ
www.bernardjan.com



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Wool-Shift-Dust

One of the best trilogies I've ever read. Scary, gripping, moving. Highly impressing.

Unlike some novels I have been reading with a serious effort like I was plowing through a field devastated by drought, The Wool Trilogy by Hugh Howey is exactly the opposite. A perfectly balanced deep fall through a silo, which forces the reader to keep falling and falling, unable to stop himself and put the the books down until he hits the end.

Science fiction? Maybe. But only for the reason of being set in a Dystopian future.

The scariest thing was looking at a daringly realistic portrait of our society today. What happened to humanity?!? Plausibly unintentionally (or maybe intentionally after all), upsetting parallels of the real world are screaming into our faces like a wake-up call. If we do not do something to light up the flames of humanity and share with our loved ones and the stranger on the street, we will all end up in our present-day versions of silos eventually to be suffocated and poisoned, reduced to mere things, numbers.

Howey gave us a masterpiece. But he has also shown us the safe path to our future. This is the gift we should cherish, even if we chose not to believe that silos could actually happen.

BJ
www.bernardjan.com

My Domain

The day has come. I have it! Now! Finally!

My own domain.

BERNARDJAN.COM

Yesterday was the day when I did that major change in my Internet appearance and life. I still have to do Google-related changes and stuff (ugh!), but it is already available for browsing, with much simpler and more memorable URLs.

I invite you to visit www.bernardjan.com and share with me my enthusiasm and happiness!

Hope you enjoy it and please don't hesitate to share and recommend my web page to others if you like it. (Not hard to imagine a happy grin on my face!)

Thank you!

Bernard Jan

Get your copy of Okrutno ljeto

If you want to purchase my latest novel Okrutno ljeto in Croatian, you can do that directly at my publisher's web page here. Feel free to visit my web page to read sample chapters in Croatian and in English. Thanks!