The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

This book has become a pop culture phenomenon on par with The DaVinci Code. After seeing it being read a hundred times on public transit (not including the rest of the series) I felt compelled to give it a read before the movie came out. Unsurprisingly, I am one of the masses who enjoyed it. Steig Larsson writes a compelling, stylish mystery with enough sex and violence to keep up an intense pace.

While I am almost more intrigued by the story behind this series being published, I did find the book worthy of it's success. It's sleek and simple although it suffers somewhat from too much cleanup. The ending is almost too happy for the male protagonist. Meanwhile, I wasn't necessary compelled by the girl herself. Her story, while terrifying and exciting isn't nearly as interesting as some of the other females in the series.

What did anyone else think?

I just finished the third book and ya Lisbeth is more central in the last two books. Like most trilogies the first book is more stand alone but the next two could be taken as one really long book and it does get more complicated with a lot more characters popping up and getting points of view from them. I enjoyed all of the books although I found "the girl who played with fire" a little slow at the start. The first book I liked it's self contained mystery and the characters are all very interesting. I found it to be a real page turner.

I read the first one back in June (because I saw the write up about it in Entertainment Weekly) and loved it. I def plan on reading the next two books as well. I really liked the characters and the way the story unfolded... even though it took forever to get to me there.

Yeah, I guessed that and glad it was confirmed with the trip to Australia. But there were things that I guessed that totally didn't turn out right, as well.

And I agree, interjecting Salander into parts of the story was a great device because it kept making me ask "how the hell is he going to get Blomkvist and Salander to meet? they're in 2 different stories at this point."

It was okay. I would have enjoyed it more if it weren't at least two books melded together. I found the initial plot interesting enough, but after that riveting murder mystery in the middle 400 pages, I had a hard time returning to the story about the journalist combating corporate corruption.

Salandar grew on me, despite my fear that she would be a total Mary Sue. I liked that she had flaws and everyone thought she was retarded. However, I didn't like her sudden transformation into socially competent super-spy at the end. Still, her final line of dialogue in the book broke my heart and made for a great ending.

Most of the violence is "told" rather than "shown." The way my sister described it to me it sounded like it would read like a Tom Harris novel, but it was almost too sterile in its execution. The concept behind what happens to the women is terrible, but it was approached in enough detail to make it compelling.

I'm glad they changed  the original title from Men Who Hate Women since the book isn't solely about misogyny. The misogynistic elements only deal with the topic superficially without explaining the underlying psychology or how society can correct this. Even with the Swedish abuse statistics, the book deals with the topic in a much more limited capacity. One of the prime villains in the book only abuses women becuae it's sexually gratifying not because he actually hates the gender. So the old title was a misnomer.

Edited by EvilMonkeyPope - 04-Nov-2010 at 4:48am

This story worked much better as a movie.