Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

I’m very late to the party on this one, but I picked up The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo at my favorite vacation bookstore for a holiday read and was thoroughly pleased with my purchase.

Tim covered this one pretty well in his review, but he didn’t marvel at what for me is the main salient insight I gained into Swedish culture by reading this book: If Stieg Larsson’s depiction of his countrymen is even close to accurate, the average Swede drinks enough coffee in a week to reanimate the corpse of Dag Hammarskjold.

I also enjoyed the fact that Larsson, who was a middle-aged lefty magazine reporter in real life, created a protagonist who is a lefty magazine reporter. The fictional (or not-so-fictional?) investigative reporter, Mickael Blomkvist, drinks a cup of coffee every eight minutes, routinely solves mystery capers, and has sex at least nine times a week–with all kinds of different women, including the titular heroine, a computer hacker with Asperger’s Syndrome.

I liked the book a lot for what it was: it had memorable characters, an original, fast-moving plot, and what I thought was a very strong sense of place (though I’ve never been to Sweden, so I can’t compare this to reality). I look forward to reading the next installment in the series, but it will have to wait for next year’s vacation.

Books, Fiction, Review | Dr J | August 27, 2009 8:21 am

2 Comments

By Tim, August 27, 2009 @ 8:44 am

The second book is better than the first (review coming soon). Lisbeth buys a coffee maker worth tens of thousands of kroner.