#16: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larsson

I ended up picking this book up by chance. I was traveling and had finished the two books I brought with me - The Sex Lives of Cannibals and Air Babylon - and wanted to trade them in for something else. But I just couldn't find anything decent, until I discovered The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo in a spirituality focused used-book store in a small beach town. I only picked it up, actually, because a guy at Borders had just told me it was one of the best books he'd recently read. The point is, I hadn't intended to read it, but it came into my life anyway.

For the most part, I liked it, although not enough to read the next book, The Girl Who Played with Fire, in the trilogy. On the one hand, I was pretty into the book until the last 100 pages or so, and couldn't wait to dive back into it; on the other hand, I was absolutely shocked by the sexual violence in the book, which the jacket doesn't mention.

The book seems to be about disgraced journalist Mikael Blomkvist, who's both trying to solve the mystery of what happened to 16-year-old Harriet Vanger in 1966 and get revenge on industralist Hans-Erik Wennerstrom. But I think the book, on a deeper level, is really about violence perpetrated against women. (Each section starts with some kind of statistic, after all.) And it's fine as a topic, but I wish I'd known beforehand that that's what the book is really about, because I'm not sure I would have picked it.

But otherwise, the book is pretty well-written, although I think Larsson (in the form of Blomkvist) took a few unbelievable leaps in solving the mystery. The writing is a little stiff - though that may be about the translation - and, as a side note, has a surprising amount of techy details (like an exhausted list of Mac laptop specs) which I found amusing for some reason. I would argue that the last 100 pages - which resolve the Wennerstrom thread after the Harriet mystery has been solved - could have been eliminated, but that's personal preference.

So, all in all, I liked it but I didn't love it. :)