The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

CRACK-COCAINE! You seriously CANNOT stop reading this.

An epic!

Reading this book I often felt that too much description was being given to every single situation and thought at the time that I was going to write something along the lines of “some books are long because they describe everything in such detail, not because a lot actually happens in them. This is one of those books.” And a little bit of me feels like that with this book. But then in hind sight, this book tells two incredible stories. Theres a murder mystery embroiled in family drama whilst supporting a financial investigation. It's truly a great book.

Starts pretty slow and the author is a bit chewy with the back story. A good edit could have cut out a lot of unnecessary stuff. Once it got moving it really took off, but that was about halfway through and the central mystery wraps up sooner than expected. The last quarter of the book could be considered hit or miss depending on how much you care about Mikael.

The mystery falls apart a bit, but I loved spending time with both characters, particularly the girl with the dragon tattoo. The most fun I've had reading in a book in a long time.

I was so happy with this book for the half of it that I've read so far.. Compared to most mystery thriller type crap, it has a lot of good writing/character development, etc. The story is actually told without constant dialogue!

Basically, I loved reading this book until it incorporated the element of woman as rape/torture victim. Reading those kind of story lines are troubling, for sure, but more importantly, they have become really boring and stereotypical. Seriously, are there any thrillers out there without this stuff? Part of me thinks that readers of these types of books become numb to REAL violations of women's bodies and rights, or at least expect it to happen. (I guess I should have known when Lisbeth was described as so thin and vulnerable that the author might disappoint in this way)


I do have half the book left.. we'll see if it gets better (or worse).


update... It didn't get better, but at least he's not playing fake relationship with Lisbeth anymore.

Liked it better than I thought I would.

This was really a case of me picking up a book because of how highly it was spoken of and being mildly disappointed for all of the accolades it received. The pacing was deliberate and the language was very dry and felt more like a journalistic endeavor than that of fiction. It did pick up though, and was engrossing up until the end, where the finish was just confusing and felt like it should have ended 100 pages sooner.

The bones of the story were good but I have to question much of the actual narrative, which was tedious and awkwardly translated. And Lisbeth really bugged me because her character is turned into such a cliché male fantasy: delicate, abused victim who ultimately needs to be saved by the power of some man's love.

So far I am not loving the book. Perhaps I just don't enjoy this genre? Mostly the overwrought descriptions of the central characters inspire eyerolls more than interest...

—-

...finally finished this. It's not a terrible book, but it's not my cup of tea, and the main characters are pretty simple caricatures, which was disappointing, especially since I'd heard the female protagonist was really interesting. Goth-girl-hacker-with-a-troubled-past would be just fine if it were acknowledged on some level as tongue in cheek, but it ain't.

It was a slow start and found myself sort of starting to skim through it. Once Lisbeth came on the scene it became interesting and only got better from there. I particularly enjoyed the relationship between Lisbeth and Mikael. It was a relationship that Lisbeth needed and I think it helped heal her to a point. I was so sad at the way it ended though. I was hoping she could have a nice relationship.

A good mystery. The first half of the book is slow but then picks up speed. I like a mystery where enough information is presented that the reader can puzzle it out themselves, yet not so obvious that the characters look stupid for not seeing it. I was able to figure out most of it along the way, but some of my guesses were wrong, so this book seems to have hit that balance nicely.

Kind of a slow start, but picked up in the second half of the book. Overall a good read. And it made me want to get a book on Swedish sandwiches.

It's quite lengthy but I think rather than that being a hindrance to this book, it worked in its favor. I really enjoyed being sucked up into this world. The writing flowed and whether a good/bad character I felt like they were fleshed out, many motives being laid cleared. And when it all came together it was a successful and rewarding read.

Over the past year I've started to read a lot more crime and mystery stories, and in doing so, you tend to get a certain feel for the conventions of the genre. Not to say that all the stories I've been reading in that area are the same, or even derivative of each other, but there's a general feel to them

One of the unsettling things about this story is how clinical it can be at times. that you start to notice. Girl with the Dragon Tattoo violates those conventions completely in a way that , and in doing so leaves you unsure of exactly what the book is until it's nearly over.
A girl goes missing, under circumstances that are either baffling, or suggest murder. But no body is found, and decades later a disgraced reporter is hired to investigate the believed crime and see if he can implicate any of the girl's faamilyh members in the crime.

All three of the main characters (Blomkvist, Lisbeth, and Vanger) are all ultimately seeking the same thing - they want to be free of their pasts, and they paradoxically do so by digging in to the life of someone who had their freedom taken away from them; unfortunately, they become so focused on this that they ignore the other problems that they're digging up until it's almost too late.

One of the things I found unsettling about this story was how clinical the writing was at times - this cold could be an artefact of the Swedish to English translation, the author's past as a journalist, or just because the story's dealing with a crime that's nearly forty years gone by the time the action opens; regardless, it draws you away from caring too much about the characters, and more about the mystery. When you realize this is happening, though, you realize you're being put in the same sort of objectifying frame of mind that the villians of the piece are using. It's a very clever effect.

I'd recommend this one even to people who aren't fans of mystery novels, although your level of enjoyment is likely going to be affected by how familiar you are with the genre.

Lending library find. I can see why this was so popular. I liked Larsson's pacing, and the intertwining of large-scale financial crimes, when government oversteps the bounds of people's rights and dignity in the name of helping them (Salander's situation is an absolute mockery of the idea of guardianship that I think is closer to real life than many people might realize), and the more run-of-the-mill (at least for the genre) psychopathic sexual sadism. I went back and forth as to whether the detail of the sadism was gratuitous or not, and perhaps this is a weird and/or counterintuitive place for me to be, but it didn't bother me. I think that's in part because I'm getting an extra onslaught of vicarious trauma at work right now, and it has been an unfortunate reminder that truth is stranger than fiction: in this case, I mean more horrifying. What actually irritated me about this book is the “good guy” male protagonist, when I think Lisbeth Salander is the real hero. Which is sort of how Larsson wrote her, but also sort of not? I have no idea if a female and/or queer author would have done it differently, or if Larsson's treatment of her was lost in translation, but the most annoying part of Lisbeth's character is her bisexuality feels like a plot device to convey liberalism that to me just felt more like queerbaiting, written at a time I think before people had that word to call it out as such. Anyone who follows me on goodreads knows sometimes I return to series I didn't like somewhat inexplicably, so I won't say I won't read the others, but now am not feeling interested in doing so.

One of my new favorite series, so sure. The characters are so engaging and unusual, and the story (at least in the first book) is incredibly gripping.

This was the vacation of disappointing reading material. There's little redeeming about the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Perhaps the best thing I have to say about it is that it's fast paced, and once you actually get to the mystery, it's a little compelling to at least see what comes of it.

That being said, there's a lot not to like. Let's start with the fact that absolutely no progress is made on the central mystery until page 294, when the character all of a sudden announces that he's found three clues. What happens until then? Lots of backstory on totally extraneous materials and three very explicit sexual assaults that have literally nothing to do with the main plotline (and never really come up again.) The pacing is particularly awkward, because we're usually subjected to all information once in the main plotline, regurgitated a second time (often verbatim) by the private investigators and then a third time either in a newspaper article or quoted from the main character's book. Similarly, the book extends for over 100 pages after the mystery has been solved. These pages are ostensibly to wrap up the sketchy finances plotline, but pretty much exist to tell us that the main character is drinking coffee and not going into work for a 100 pages until an authorial fiat fixes the financial plotline.

Want to talk about characters? The main character is a flimsy self-insertion, who is adored by all women, hired to solve a mystery on the basis of zero credentials and seems to just manage to stumble into evidence ignored for the previous 50ish years. Perhaps the most damning thing is that after figuring out who the murder is, despite the Mikael knows that the murder knows who he is and has already tried to kill him twice, he decides to go over to the murder's house without any backup or anyone knowing where he is, passing the gasoline and rifle used in the previous murder attempts on the way to the front door. That, friends, is a suicide attempt.

His sidekick is not just a quirky anti-hero. She's a bona fide psychopath who gets revenge on a predator by sexually assaulting him. Um, not awesome. Also, her deep secret on how she's such a good private investigator? She's a hacker. That's so lame it doesn't even deserve spoiler tags. It keeps getting repeated – Oh no, someone might find out that Lisbeth is a hacker! Newsflash: every fictionalized private investigator since 1985 has hacked in some form or another.

How about the writing? The translation is definitely clumsy, but it can't camouflage the underlying clumsy writing. My two pet peeves? Larsson's decision that it is necessary for us to know everything that a character does at all times (at one point he tells us the time a character wakes up, the time he drinks his coffee and how long he waits before leaving the cabin.) The second is Larsson's need for us to know what brand of object is in use. It's like if I made sure you knew that Becca wrote this review on her husband's Dell laptop, having used her Android phone to use the Goodreads App to select this book at the Borders bookstore inside the Cleveland Hopkins Airport.

The graphic crimes, especially sex crimes depicted have been very controversial, and I don't feel I can review this completely without mentioning them. I'm far from squeamish, but both the crimes themselves and the statistics about violence against women in Sweden seemed to have no purpose to their inclusions. For an author who complains in his book about the use of sex crimes in literature for titillation, well, the lady doth protest too much, methinks.

Really interesting. A bit greusom, but glad I read it.

A little slow to start but almost impossible to put down after the first 50 or so pages. I regret that I took so long to actually read through the beginning and get into the book. Fantastic read.

It was slow to get going and in places felt like it was written by someone applying rules learned in a writing class. Then I remembered that I was reading a translation and forgave the stilted language and choice of vocabulary and just enjoyed the story. It was an entertaining read but hasn't really whetted my appetite to read any more of the series. Certainly not as good as the hype.

In terms of the how this compares to the original text novel I feel like it is one to one and maybe a bit shortened but nothings appears completely cut out. So I am not going to review that already well discussed original. Lets talk about Josep Homs art - love it. Gives the story a earthy look and I caught an Enki Bilal, Heavy Metal vive to the art. Not hyper realistic but grounded in reality with real dimensionality to characters and settings.

4.5 stars, going on five.
The only problem I had with this book is the obvious point, the one you can't ignore, and that it is translated. AND DO YOU KNOW HOW MUCH I HATE TRANSLATED WORKS? Well, now you do. Even so, I found the translation to be better than I thought.
But other than that, the book was perfect. It is sooooo smart I can't even begin to think how brilliant the story teller is.
Loved it!
But the problem is, people told me it is mind blowing repeatedly that, like Sheldon From the Big Bang Theory puts it “My mind was pre-blown” :(
Fucking hopes up.
But I enjoyed this. This was something you can't live your reading life without at least having a simple glimpse at.
I recommend.

This book is very addictive. In the first part it carefully sets up the story piece by piece, and after a while you just watch in amazement as it all comes together. The characters are well fleshed out and act the way you'd expect them to act.

Both Michael Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander's side of the story are interesting to read. I enjoyed when both threads were written in parallel, jumping from one to another inbetween paragraphs. What I think this book excels at is pacing.

When I say I couldn't put the book down, I mean it. When the dominoes started to fall, I had a hard time stopping to read. I'm a little afraid to buy the next one...

Better than I had expected. (The next two are better, but I wouldn't recommend reading them without having read this one as background).

Una novela policial moderna y fascinante. Con ritmo rápido pero sin descuidar ningún detalle, el autor rápidamente nos hace sentir cómodos (o profúndamente incómodos) con los personajes. Una trama que se inicia como sencilla, pronto se destapa y empieza a tomar velocidad mientras la tensión de la narrativa se electrifica a medida que pasan las páginas.

Imperdible.