Women are raised to routinely fear rape.

“If you go at night, take a friend.” “Check under the car and in your backseat before you get in.” “I’m just saying it’s a good idea to know where the exits are.” “I got you this whistle for your keychain, you know, just so you have it.” “You were an hour later than I thought you’d be! We called the police!” “Oh, that’s pepper spray; I keep it with me just in case.” “I just make sure I get my keys out and check for other weapons if I’m getting off work lat More...

Swedish people are nuts! I realize that’s a bit of a broad generalization and it sounds a bit rude, but I don’t care. Because more often than not, I’m nuts too.

I was born and raised in Minnesota, and if you know our state history, you’re already aware that we were predominantly settled and populated by Swedish (and Norwegian) immigrants. So not only are many Minnesota residents of Scandinavian descent, myself included, a lot of our quirky mannerisms and even our accents are commonly attributed t More...

After having leaped onto the bandwagon with the rest of everyone, I feel a certain amount of pretentious indie pride saying that I wasn't as awed by this book as everyone else apparently was. Which is not to say that the book wasn't enjoyable and exciting; it just didn't knock my socks off whilst simultaneously blowing my mind and rocking my world. (that sounds like either some great song lyrics or a very complicated sexual maneuver. Let's go with the first option.)

So, the good stuff: the main s More...

Thanks to the slew of Swedish and Hollywood movies, everyone knows that The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a story of a kickass hacker Lisbeth Salander who has the eponymous tattoo and a knack for solving decades-old murders. Wrong! Lisbeth is awesome and badass, no doubt there, but this book is so much more than just her story, and focusing solely on that undermines the message Stieg Larsson was sending. The original Swedish title is Men Who Hate Women and it is precisely what the story is ab More...

A good book that got screwed up due to poor writing
Keeping in mind that the only crime/mystery novels I have read are novels by Dan Brown and novels dealing with financial matters are the ones by Jeffrey Archer, on this basis I can say that this book was a cross between their book but not at par with either, inferior to both.

The premise of the story is not so simple:
Meet Mikael Blomkvist, a journalist of financial sectors, but today his accusations against industrialist Hans-Erik Wennerstrom ar More...

Larsson takes what seemed at the outset to be a juicy 'locked-island-mystery plot' and turns it first into an insightful family saga and then into a scathing political and social commentary that forces us to think about such a wide variety of themes and aspects that we normally refuse to accept as part of society. It takes an author like Larsson to shove it in our faces in all its stinking ugliness for us to stop turning the blind eye at these atrocities.

Do not mistake this for a mere fictional More...

He slapped her hard. Salander opened her eyes wide, but before she could react, he grabbed her by the shoulder and threw her on to the bed. The violence caught her by surprise. When she tried to turn over, he pressed her down on the bed and straddled her.

That's just to give you a little taste of what one is dealing with by picking up this book. If you can handle that and the previous x amount of paragraphs and the following x amount of paragraphs, you're golden. If that sort of makes that thing More...

Disgraced journalist Mikael Blomkvist is hired to solve the decades-old murder of Harriet Vanger, member of one of the wealthiest families in Sweden. Aided by a tattooed, antisocial hacker named Lisabeth Salander, Blomkvist unearths horrible skeletons lurking in the Vanger family closet...

For a few years now, I've been avoiding The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Since so many people told me I just had to read it, many of them non-readers, I assumed it was a lot of over-hyped, dumbed-down crap. Wel More...

One of the best thrillers I've ever read. Great story, great characters, very intelligent and thoughtful. Writing is nothing special but it doesn't need to be.

___________________________________________

I finally saw the movie a couple of days ago, and I'm a bit conflicted. On the plus side, it conveys the feel of the book very well, and several of the main characters are excellently realized. I particularly liked Lisbeth, who was just perfect. But they have taken some enormous liberties with the More...

While stranded in a Barnes and Noble for a couple of hours without the book I was currently reading, I started The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo mainly to see what all the fuss was about. I was pretty certain that I wasn't going to like it as I'm generally not a big mystery fan, but saw this as an opportunity to at least have a passing acquaintance with this cultural phenomenon. I was hooked by page 65. Why? Two words: Lisbeth Salander. And why was I so fascinated by Lisbeth? Because she is 4' 11" More...

Although I enjoyed this book, for me it didn't live up to all the hype. I found some of the financial/business jargon a bit confusing and boring and feel the story could've done without that whole subplot. The mystery of the Vanger family was intriguing and kept me wanting to know more ... but once that was solved I lost interest again and skimmed the last few pages. However, I found Lisbeth Salander to be a very interesting character, and I think I will definitely read the next instalment when More...

ode to a dragon-tattooed girl

shall i compare thee to a cinematic adaptation of one of my favorite books?
thou art more genuine and less mass marketable.
rough cgi does shake my sense of disbelief,
and the movie's adaptation hath all too short a running time.
sometimes too overemphasized the plot and action sequences,
and often the depth of character dimmed.
and every sequel from prequel's quality declines,
by chance, or budgets allowed to expand, untrimmed.
but thy entertainment value shall not fade
nor More...

When I think of Swedish industry, I think of IKEA, Volvo and Erricson. After reading this novel, I also think of the Vangers, whose secrets are darker than just the usual corporate sin of fake accounting, money laundering or embezzlement. Mikael Blomkvist is a muckracking financial journalist who has just been convicted of libelling an industrialist, whom he had accused of corruption. In his nadir professionally, he accepts an unusual assignment from Henrik Vanger, the 82-year old patriarch and More...

The original Swedish title of this book is "Men Who Hate Women." If you ask me, it suits this story much better than catchier but less relevant "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo," because it is in fact about men doing all kinds of horrid things to women. So here is the first warning to you, if you don't handle violence against women and children well, skip this novel.

It's hard to give a short synopsis of the book. "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" starts off as an investigation of a 40-year old More...

I loved this book and suffered a few very late nights as a consequence.

The book centres around a journalist called Blomkvist who has just been sentenced to 3 months in prison for a libelous article in his magasine Millenium against a business big-shot. After his sentencing and deciding to have a break from the magasine, he is approached by Henrick Vanger, another business man now in his 80's with his own empire dating back generations. He hires Blomkvist to research his family to find out wha More...

**Dude, I just watched the Swedish film "När mörkret faller" (When Darkness Falls), a crappy movie about violence in Stockholm. But it made me think back to this book, which constantly refers to stats about violence against women in Sweden. Something is seriously up in Sweden. Gives me the creeps even more than Swtizerland.**

Wow. 500+ pages and entertaining right up to the last sentence? Lingers in the mind long after the book is finished? Geez. I didn't think it could be done in today's fiction More...

PS: I hadn't realised until I finished reading the legal arguments being prepared for Assange that his defence is now headed by no less than Geoffrey Robertson. If you ask me, that should be enough to make grown-up countries quake in their boots.

12/1 update:

Those following the Swedish attempt to extradite Assange should take a look at this:

http://www.fsilaw.com/~/media/Files/A...

It is the 35 page skeleton argument just lodged by his lawyers in the UK prior to the extradition hearing being held e More...

This was so good and provocative on so many different levels.

I really liked Salander as a character. She is disturbed and disturbing and that is the fascination. The book hints at her past (which will surely come out in book 2) and I can guess at some of it based on her dealings with the men in her life. She is incredibly vulnerable, but certainly not defenseless. I like best the part when she realizes that she has misjudged something about a person's psychological make up, realizes that she her More...

I've heard and read many complaints about Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo:

1. It's misogynistic.
2. It's packed with cliché.
3. It's too convoluted.
4. It's too disturbing.
5. Lisbeth wasn't autistic enough or was foolishly autistic.
6. There were too many red herrings, and the damn Nazi red herring didn't have the usual payoff.
7. Too/Two many plots.
8. Too hard on Leviticus.

I will answer these in a moment, but first I must declare that I am an unrepentant fan of this book. This is More...

Hard to grade this one- where as most of it was totally amazing, there is the beginning and the end that pulls it down for me because really, the best part of the story is when the protags were chasing down a killer- which only happens in the middle of the story, oddly enough. (The beginning and ending is almost another story all together!)

Bestselling The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo begins with investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist being hung out to dry for a piece he wrote that went horrib More...

***Movie Update: I just saw the movie today and I have to say that it was so much better than the book! The pacing was great, the actress who played Lisbeth Salander nailed the role and all the Financial Journalism nonsense was obliterated. Even the Blomkvist-Cecilia love affair was not seen. The movie has awesome camera shots and it was a very good adaptation of the book. Even made the book amazing in my eyes. Now I'm really confused why I don't think that the book was awesome when I read it. More...

I really don't understand the critical orgasms over this book. Amazon pushed it on me for weeks, and the minute I stepped into Borders an employee ran over and recommended it. Thinking, this really better be the best book I've ever read, I took it up to the checkstand, where the register guy asked: "Did one of our employees recommend this?" Um, yeah. And Amazon, too. So of course I asked him why.

"Oh," he replied, "we've been told to recommend it this week." That should have tipped me off right More...

In 1966 sixteen-year-old Harriet Vanger, daughter of the CEO of the large family-run Vanger Corporation, goes missing from her family's island community and is never seen again. Not even a body is found, and her great uncle, Henrik Vanger, has explored every possible lead to discover what happened to his one and only favourite family member.

Over the last forty years her disappearance has become Henrik's obsession, and he's positive someone in the family murdered her - but they never found a moti More...

Journalist Mikael Blomkvist is charged with libel and decides to take some time off from his magazine. Instead, he works to find what happened to Harriet Vanger, the young niece of a wealthy CEO. Meanwhile, punky hacker Lisbeth Salander has her own investigations, which presumably eventually have something to do with Blomkvist and the Vanger family. I don't know, because I couldn't bear to finish this. It usually takes me about a day to read a book. It took me an entire month to slog through les More...

Millennium Sleuths
(A Book Review of Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo)

To call Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo an explosive read is an understatement in my case as I finished the book amid the noise of fire crackers when midnight struck to usher in the coming of the New Year 2012.

It’s no mystery to everyone that the book is accompanied by hype from the time of Stieg Larsson’s untimely death in 2004 caused by cardiac arrest even before the book — the first in a three- More...

Upon finishing the novel, I find the original Swedish title, Men Who Hate Women, infinitely more fitting.

This book took a little while to hook me, but I think that is a failure on my part as a reader rather than a failure on Stieg Larsson's part as a writer. I was trying to read too fast, and I wasn't taking the time to really let the material sink in. All the financial journalism jargon at the beginning caused this, as that subject is one that goes completely over my head...it's just not someth More...