Box 21, by Anders Roslund and Borge Hellstrom, is a hard ball police work novel with a harsh look at the hard core of prostitution in Sweden. This novel begins in pieces, which over time are put together in ways one suspects but follows into the darkness. The reader meets two Lithuanian prostitutes sold as sex slaves, ostensibly to a pimp named Dimitri. Then there is an enforcer/killer for hire named Lang who is just out of prison. Inspector Ewert Grens and his partner Sven pivot between these characters as the action soon heats up. When one of the girls goes beserk and the police are called, the threads wind up tightly, in ways Grens would prefer the rest of the world never finds out. But Sven has more of a consience and pursues leads on his own initiative. In the mean time, there are a few dead end plot lines that could have been left out but do lend a bit of authentic confusion to the police work aspect of the story. This is the world of scum and their victims, hunters and hunted, the innocent and abused all writ intimately and without the gloss other stories use to polish over the depravity.
All in all, this is a bleak story, one with few redeeming messages. Right to the end, the reader will be looking for some light at the end of the tunnel. Warning: there isn’t much. Such is life as created by this team of authors. However, those readers who want a glimpse into the savage ways of human traficking will want to peer through this lense, if only to see how bad it can be and what happens when a person can’t take it anymore.
The Bent Page 
Getting Spacey
I ambled through several bookstores last evening. My how things have changed. Over the past couple of years I did notice a thinning of the ranks of books on the shelves, an increase in general merchandise, and the ever present smell of coffee. However, last night the point hit home hard. There are fewer books than ever in some of the major chain stores I visited. More space is dedicated to presenting electronic readers to the typically paper-book-buying public. In one location, fully 20% of the floor space was occupied by long counters with only two or three of the devices on display. That’s a lot of real estate that used to be filled with examples of the printed word.
Electronic readers are on the march, and rightly so. They offer instant purchases on the fly, without having to spend time going to and from the bookstore. They have the ability to increase the size of the text, contain an internal dictionary, and are lighter than traditionally published works. Furthermore, the ability to tote many large volumes within a single unit is wonderful for people who are reading several different tomes at one time.
At the same time, I’m sad to see bookstores waning. I’ve always thought of a trip to the bookstore as an adventure, a mission to find treasure or discover a secret. Searching with an electronic unit is more akin to checking airline fares than spelunking through the cave of the book master. But these are romantic notions from a previous age. Todays new readers seem unaffected by such quaint ideas. Price and selection count above all and the bricks and mortar stores can’t compete with digital inventory in the sky.
Long live the book! In whatever form. Read, it’s good for you.
- Commentary
on October 12, 2010 at 10:55 am Leave a CommentTags: Books, bookstore, Commentary, digital reader, idea, Kindle, nook, random, reading, thoughts, Writing