Sarah Schiavoni

Sarah Schiavoni

By now, most people have seen Girl with the Dragon Tattoo featured on bestseller lists around the world, heard about the movie version (released in 2009), or read it for their book club. My mother heard of the book through the latter of those three but barely got past the first few chapters before losing interest and passing it on to me. The title intrigued me, and the green Chinese water dragon slithering across the cover caught my eye, so I decided to give it a shot. Like my mother, I was unimpressed and slightly confused by the first few chapters, which consisted of a lot of discussion and debate about financial magazine reporting, a journalist facing jail time for false reporting, and a large corporation fighting against possibly true allegations of some sort of financial scandal. As the book is set in Sweden, I couldn’t get my bearings straight and had no concept of what the towns and businesses were like—forget being able to pronounce the characters’ names properly. Despite this not-so-great start, as I read further, the story quickly became clearer and I became more invested in learning about the lives of the characters.

Girl with the Dragon Tattoo follows the stories of Mikael Blomvkist, a financial journalist caught in a journalistic scandal, and Lisbeth Salander, a pierced-and-tattooed 20-something with a knack for spying and using advanced technology. Blomvkist, accused in court of libel, is struggling to put his life back together when he is contacted by Dirch Frode, lawyer for the aged but famous businessman Henrik Vanger. Vanger offers Blomvkist a two-part job that is to last a year in Hedeby, the town where the Vanger family lives: he is to write the autobiography of the Vanger family, but his true purpose is to research the disappearance of Harriet, Vanger’s grandniece, and try to find out what happened to her. Salander, a sullen and difficult ward of the state, works for Milton Security, taking on freelance jobs involving extensive background checks on select individuals. She is first connected to Blomvkist when Frode contacts her to look into Blomvkist’s history before bringing him to Hedeby. When her research is complete, she works on other jobs in Stockholm, facing terrible problems due to her status as a ward of the state. The story is peppered with scandal, familial and romantic tensions, murder, sexual violence, and mystery as Blomvkist steadily works toward finding out what happened to Harriet and reconnects with Salander in order to find the truth.

Though the book had a confusing and slow start, it quickly improved and was incredibly hard to put down. I had a thousand guesses about what happened to Harriet, was caught by surprise when murder enters the already convoluted story and creates an even more expansive mystery, and was curious to learn more about Salander and her sad past. The story is detailed, intense, and, at some points, graphically violent, but it is very well told and maintains a high level of suspense even until the end. I’m most definitely considering picking up the second book of this 3-and-¾-book-long series, though I’m curious to see how Larsson’s death before the completion of the series will affect the whole story.

By Sarah Schiavoni

He loved the suddenness of spring—closing his tired eyes on grey and brown and opening them to shades of cool green hovering just outside his window. Spring always seemed to arrive overnight, but really it arrived by steady ascent, with hardly a soul taking notice. While the skeletal trees cast shadows on dry grass and brown earth, spring slowly brewed in their roots and branches, ready to arrive in spurts of crisp green and soft yellow. Spring woke everything from a cold, winter slumber—the unfurled leaves yawned on trees, the flower buds stretched out on their stems.

He loved falling asleep seeing the twiggy crabapples outside his window and waking up to find them dotted with vibrant pink blooms. He loved to stand by the flaky brown tree trunks and splay his hands over the bark, feeling the gritty curls scrape against his fingers and palms. His kept his feet bare so he could feel the grass between his toes, wet with dew and springy in the early morning. He loved the fresh smells, the caress of sunlight, and the subtle calm, but mostly it was how spring arrived, so sudden and triumphant after such a long cold spell—it was life after death; a reawakening of the senses.

His mother had always loved the winter, even before she got ill. She loved the frost; loved to wake up and see its spiky fan over the windows, like iridescent lace. On winter mornings in the kitchen, while piling golden pancakes and steaming eggs onto plates, she’d ask her son if he’d seen “Jack’s paintings” on the windows that morning. She loved the crisp, glittering snow, white sun, and bare trees.

It seemed to suit her that her hospital room was always like winter—the bare wooden chair in the corner like a solitary tree and the white walls like sheets of shiny snow. The only color in the room came from a sparse grouping of smudgy Kinkade’s, their blurry cottage scenes a poor substitute for the spring season her son loved so much. Her room was a mix of cold metal, white plaster, and dry air. The starched, white sheets and itchy, vanilla-colored blanket on her hospital bed were synthetic and rough against her icy, translucent skin. He could have paid for her to be moved to a nicer room, but she always shook his head at the suggestion. He wanted her to feel at home in her room, but so long as she got hot tea in the morning and was able to watch the local evening news, she was content and needed nothing more.

He hated to sit with his mother there, watching her stare listlessly out into the hall at the passing nurses, her hands white with cold. She never looked at all the “Get Well Soon” cards she got, painstakingly arranged on the windowsill by him. Her wig rested in tangles on a stand in the bathroom; though her head was only dusted with feathery down, she felt no need to cover it up. He hated her apathy and the emptiness in her voice when they spoke during his visits.

“Mom, why don’t you let me bring some flowers in here?—Perk up the place?”
His mother shook her head and stared out the grubby windows.

“The gift shop girl told me she has red tulips…you like the color red, don’t you?”

Still staring out the window, his mother sighed and straightened out the covers by her waist. “The room is fine as it is. You know the pollen makes my nose itch.”

She looked tired and small. Her lips were chapped from the winter air drifting through the cracks in the window frame. Her hands were crawling with spidery, blue veins that disappeared under the skin of her wrists and elbows.

“How about Gerber daisies? She’s got every color under the sun down there.”

His mother groaned. “They look fake. Too bright. I don’t know how they get them to be those wild colors.”

“She’s got roses down there too. Remember how dad used to always get you a yellow rose on your birthday?”

She smiled just a bit at the memory, but quickly pushed the thought aside. Her husband had died the year before. Heart attack. She’d just found out the month before that she had cancer and was making plans for chemo. They’d spent hours browsing online wig stores during that month, laughing at the ridiculous hairstyles and colors that were offered.

“I don’t need the clutter. I’ve already got enough junk on my nightstand—those nurses keep bringing me these silly gardening and cooking magazines. And I don’t have space on the windowsill with all those cards filling it up.”

Her son frowned at her as she gestured at the table by her bed, pointing out the little pile she called “clutter.”

He wanted to bring a little color and life to her room. Every time he visited, he stopped by the gift shop and perused their small flower selection in the grimy, chilled container in the back. The shop mostly stocked generic, seasonal flowers, but occasionally they received prettier flowers, like star gazer lilies or purple irises. When he got to her room, shuffling slowly on the newly-waxed linoleum, he’d tell her about the flower selection and they’d argue over whether or not to put some in a vase in the room. Sometimes, his mother relented, too tired to grouse about flowers agitating her allergies or messing up her nightstand. Most times, his mother started to ignore him after the third or fourth flower suggestion, choosing instead to turn on the TV and tune him out.

When he did succeed in bringing her flowers, she’d complain to him—the flowers were too bright, they made her eyes water, they cost too much. She never threw them out, but, inevitably, the nurses would forget to change the water in the vase, the flowers would lose their color, and eventually, the blooms shriveled up and fell from the stem.

She allowed flowers on her birthday, and he brought her yellow roses, hoping to conjure up happy memories of her times with his father; hoping to bring some life to her cloudy eyes. For once, she didn’t complain. When he set them by her bed, her eyes crinkled with happiness for a brief moment, but she didn’t thank him or smile when he and the nurses sang a quiet “Happy Birthday” to her after.

“Your father was a wonderful man” she said, her eyes rheumy.

He smiled at her, but she had a faraway look. She’d forgotten he was in the room.

She died a few days later, wrapped up in her itchy blanket with the tiniest of smiles on her face. The roses drooped in the vase by her bed, touched with the winter cold. Their petals were wrinkled, the edges brown and curled under. She hadn’t asked the nurses to put clean water in the vase or trim the ends of the stems. What water was left was a murky yellow-green and the stems were ragged and soft where they’d been left uncut. She liked her empty, cold room and itchy blankets. She preferred the white walls of the room and didn’t mind when the paintings got caked with dust and lost their color. Yellow roses were no substitute for the husband who had left her behind. The first blooms of spring had burst outside her hospital room window. She hadn’t even bothered to open the blinds.

By Sarah Schiavoni

Too often when we think of stories, we think of books, magazines, blogs, movie scripts—anything written on paper or saved in a Word document. One storytelling medium that we tend to overlook is video games. Growing up with an older brother during the budding electronic age, I was surrounded with video games and game systems. I played Sonic the Hedgehog with my neighbor, had Mario Kart races with my two cousins, recklessly drove a cop car in Twisted Metal 2 with my brother, and played countless rounds of Super Smash Brothers (all three games) with friends in college. I’ve looked up game walkthroughs on IGN.com, beaten the Donkey Kong game for the Gameboy, toned up my calves with Wii Active, and logged countless hours playing Yoshi’s Island for the Super Nintendo. I own a Sega Game Gear, a Gameboy Color, a Gameboy Advance, a PlayStation, a Super Nintendo, an N64, and a Wii, not to mention that I have access to other game systems through friends. I’m an intermediate player at best, but I’ll play just about any game on any system given the chance.

While video games can offer multiplayer fun with friends, immersive adventures that keep you playing late into the night, and a way to blow off steam after work, it is the stories they tell and the depth of the gameplay that keeps me interested. While my more experienced gamer friends will often skip through the game introduction and barely glance at the booklet that comes with the game, I prefer to learn as much as I can about the back story, the characters, and my mission in the game. Like books, video games feature a beginning and end, good guys and bad guys, fighting and love, and countless adventures. Also like books, there are games for all ages and game genres for every interest—fighting, adventure, role-playing, shooter, and strategy, to name a few. While some games follow a set format that doesn’t change no matter who plays, others offer gameplay that evolves with the player. Video games have developed from simplistic setups, like Pong, to detailed and involved games like World of Warcraft. With so many systems cranking out new game titles each year, there are countless new stories being told.

In a recent conversation with my boyfriend, an avid gamer and owner of countless games and gaming systems, he explained to me what he views as the five common story structures for games: 1. Traditional story structure (Halo, Call of Duty, Super Mario Bros.), 2. Branching story structure (Mass Effect 2, The Witcher), 3. Little to no story (Pong, Tetris), 4. Less story, more symbolism (Ico, Braid, Katamari Damacy), and 5. Emergent story (EVE Online, Second Life). Rather than blather more about the games I’ve played and the stories I’ve encountered, I thought it would be helpful to explore these five common game story structures and how they might be compared to literature.

1. Traditional story structure: This is your basic story—the equivalent to, well, a typical book. You play as one character (or sometimes interchanging characters) through various levels, defeating bad guys and working towards a (hopefully) happy ending. These can play out like basically any book genre—mysteries (who stole the treasure?), romance (save the princess), horror (kill the zombies), and general nonfiction (explore the world and interact with townspeople), to name a few.

2. Branching story structure: This is a subset of the traditional story structure, but in this set up, the story in the game is partially determined by the actions of the player, much like a reader influences a “Choose Your Own Adventure” book. In many of these games, you choose who to play from a set of different kinds of characters, and depending on who you choose, the story will change. More detailed games involve your player choosing what to say during a conversation or what action to take during a mission, which further changes the story. Your choices may make you a trusted leader or a hated betrayer. Games with this type of story structure have grown more popular lately because they allow players to become much more involved with the story, but because these games still have an underlying story structure, your decisions have little impact on how the story ends—there are only so many paths you can take to reach a limited amount of endings to the story.

3. Little to no story: There are some games that offer little to no story and provide a basic challenge. Pong, Tetris, Pac-Man, and Minesweeper are perfect examples. They are mindless self-indulgences that let us flex our fingers and put our brains on hold. These could be like advertisements, the backs of cereal boxes, and the classifieds—no real story, but there’s still something to be told.

4. Less story, more symbolism: In the literary world, these would be poems. There’s less of an emphasis on a beginning-to-end story and more of a focus on symbolism and abstract ideas. Things are often less real—there are shifting landscapes, blurred faces, objects acting in opposition to their nature. There isn’t a set-in-stone story, but rather a rambling path to take.

5. Emergent story structure: Rather than have players influence an existing story set up by game developers, the stories in these games are created by players and their interactions with the environment and other players. These games involve making creative use of the people and objects in a game and continually changing the story structure. While branching story structure still holds to a basic plot and can only be taken in so many directions, emergent gameplay is like living in a new world with endless endings and countless adventures to be had. This story structure is a lot like the process of writing—you have ideas in mind and are writing, but the story is not complete.

Video games have their own stories to tell, and I’ve only touched the surface in this essay. They have their own genres, audiences, and difficulty levels. Like books and movies, games can spawn spin-offs or morph into sequels, prequels, or whole series. They can be set up similarly to poems or novels—games can be abstract or straight-forward. Players, like readers, grow attached to the characters—perhaps more so because they can literally be the character. Every game has its own story, simple or complex, and I think they’re well worth playing, whether you’re a reader, writer, or gamer.

By Sarah Schiavoni

Heading home for some sort of school break some time ago—spring, summer, Thanksgiving...who knows?—I complained to my boyfriend that I didn’t have anything new to read. He offered me Chuck Palahniuk’s Diary, and explained that this was the guy who did Fight Club, a phenomenal movie that I hadn’t realized was first a book. Having enjoyed that movie, I was eager to see what Palahniuk’s books were all about. What I found were crazy plot twists, quirky characters, insane stunts, and more. Since then, whenever I’m in a bookstore, I peruse his books and often pick up another to add to my growing collection. The other week, I grabbed Invisible Monsters, attracted to its cover: a black and white picture of a woman’s head with a splash of neon pink splattered across her mouth. Like the three or four Palahniuk books I’ve read before it, I raced to get to the end, stumbling over the twists and turns as they came.

Invisible Monsters opens with a chaotic scene: a house is on fire, Evie Cottrell stands screaming on the staircase, and Brandy Alexander lies bleeding from a gunshot wound, asking the narrator to tell her life story. What occurs after is a series of non-linear stories in which the reader slowly learns about the characters and the circumstances by which they’ve become what they are. The narrator, a former model, unnamed until Brandy gives her a new identity, suffered from what appeared to be a freak accident that left her face mutilated--that made her an “invisible monster.” She hides her face behind veils and sets off on an adventure with Brandy, a pill-popping transsexual, and Manus, her ex-lover, that leads her back to Evie. The story is confusing, sarcastic, odd, and sometimes too graphic, but it kept me on the edge of my seat as I learned more and more about the intricate connections between the characters and the events that have shaped them.

Palahniuk brilliantly leaks out information in his books, slowly explaining the behind-the-scenes of the story but still completely surprising the reader at the end of the book. His interesting writing and the odd characters and events he describes make his books nearly addictive. If you like intense, unique stories, I highly recommend reading Invisible Monsters and all of his other books.

By Sarah Schiavoni

Romance novels are described as romantic escapes for trapped housewives, soft core pornography for women, and women’s fiction. They follow a fairly well-defined format: a man and woman meet and get to know each other. Sexual and emotional tension build and several passionate kisses ensue before the two finally make love. Just when everything seems perfect, a conflict arises and the lovers are drawn apart, but in the end, the two are brought back together to live happily ever after. Though these books are geared toward women and meant for casual reading, the way they portray characteristics of masculinity and femininity, as well as the way they construct gender roles, generates a lot of discussion—particularly, are they worth reading and how do they affect the women (and occasional men) who read them.

As a student of English and Women’s and Gender Studies, as well as the occasional reader of trashy romance novels (gimme a break!—they’re fun to read at the beach!), I often have the topic of romance novels and their worth come up in my day-to-day life. During a discussion of gender in the media in a Communications seminar this past spring, my class discussed romance novels at length—why they are or are not valuable reading for women (and men), what purpose they serve, and what problems they present. The great part about romance novels is, well, the romance. You get the physicality of love--the trembling of hearts, the passion of the first kiss, the flaming desire behind the first sexual encounter—but you also get the story behind that love. The not-so-great part about romance novels is that you typically get a stereotypical man-to-woman relationship, in which the man has all the power and the woman goes weak in the knees for him.

Personally, I’m all for reading a crappy romance novel every once in a while. While I wouldn’t pick one up at the bookstore, I’d be more than happy to pluck one off of a hotel bookshelf while on vacation or borrow one from a friend on a rainy day. Romance novels are typically light, easy to follow, end happily, and essentially give us (women) the same feeling that a chick flick would. Okay, so maybe I’m playing right into a female stereotype, but I like reading about romance. I like watching two people fall head-over-heels for each other, and I like to pretend sometimes that life can follow the same cookie-cutter format that romance novels do. The problem comes in looking at how romance novels have traditionally portrayed men and women. Romance novel leading men are typically strong, lustful, and independent. More than likely, they’ve had more sexual partners than you can count, and they insist they’ll never get married. The typical leading lady of romance novels is what I call a Taming-of-the-Shrew-woman—she feigns independence and strength, insisting she doesn’t need a man, but in reality, she’s a virgin who just wants to be saved by a man: a man who she hopes will someday see how much he needs her—sees that she is “different” from all the others. It’s hard to be on board with something that gives men so much power and women so much weakness. My only advice to rabid romance readers is to not get so wrapped up in the story that you believe this is how all love stories should go—that cookie-cutter format is not all it’s cracked up to be and real love rarely seems to play out in such a way. Read the novels for fun, and perhaps for study, but don’t take them too seriously and don’t worry about seeming silly for reading them. I myself enjoy a trashy romance novel every once in a while, and as much as I hate to admit it, sometimes I really love when the leading man, a sort of knight in shining armor, saves the beautiful maiden, and they live happily ever after in anti-gender studies bliss.

By: Sarah Schiavoni

In our house, my father was the bedtime storyteller. My mother would make sure I had clean teeth and a scrubbed face, but it was my father who tucked me in and read me stories. When I was a very little girl, we read Bear and the Big Ripe Strawberry, Goodnight Moon, If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, and many other classic children’s books. When I got a little older, we moved on to the poetry of Shel Silverstein and Jack Prelutzky and read and reread so many of the poems that I soon knew many by heart. These poetry books were hard to put down—there was no “The End” to signal it was time for bed, just pages of fun, humorous reading. Each night, my father would tuck me in and sit beside me, reading me countless poems. After a little while, I’d hear my mother say, “Story time is over. Time for bed,” and I’d call back, “Just a few more poems, please!” I could picture her rolling her eyes as she loudly sighed, “alright,” and glanced at the clock to see how late it had gotten. A few minutes later, a few more poems read, and again we’d hear, “Lights out!” I’d beg and plead for just a few more minutes of reading, and she’d acquiesce. A couple more minutes would pass, and I’d hear her yell “It’s time for bed! Turn the light off right now!” My father would grin sheepishly before slipping the book cover flap between the pages on which we left off, saying goodnight, and turning my light off.

As I got older and was able to read for myself, I found I would encounter the same struggle over when to turn off the light and go to bed as I had when I was little. I’d try to read by flashlight, shut my door to help block light from leaving my room, or even turn the lamp back on and continue reading once I knew my parents were in bed and asleep. Huddled in a mass of bedcovers, oftentimes with a cat curled up by my side, I’d read late into the night, constantly telling myself, “I’ll close the book and get some sleep when I finish this chapter,” but finding myself ignoring this promise and continuing to read. If I was close to the end of a book, there was no way I’d be able to put it down before I was finished, and the same was true if I had gotten to an exciting part in the book.

This secret mission to stay up late and read is a story I’ve heard other book-lovers tell. But why did we do this? Why did we ignore our parents’ pleas to go to bed and continue to read by lamplight until we saw spots in front of our eyes and the sun peeking through the window blinds? Why, now grown, do we still huddle under the covers and feverishly read late into the night?

There is something magical about being the only one awake in a dark and quiet house. There is something about reading by dim lamplight, wrapped in the warmth of blankets while the whole house sleeps that is wonderful. While days are ruled by hours, minutes, and seconds, nights seem timeless. Nighttime is dark, quiet, and the perfect time to escape into a book. When I get drawn into a book, surrounded by warm covers, dark shadows, and the soft glow of lamp light, everything is perfect. No distractions, no ticking clock, no schedule—just me and the book.

For those of us who consider reading an experience to be treasured, the lost hours of sleep, disgruntled parents, and book-influenced dreams are all worth it. Those childhood stealth missions to stay up late and read are reminiscent of our attempts to stay up to see Santa Claus or watch the ball drop on New Year’s—they filled us with excitement and wonder, and for those of us who still stay up late, reading by lamplight and hearing the echoes of our parents telling us to turn off the light, the experience is still meaningful.