Paperback, 465 pages
English language
Published Sept. 10, 2008 by Viking Canada.
Journalist Mikael Blomkvist and hacker Lisbeth Salander investigate the disappearance of Harriet Vanger which took place forty years ago.
Couldn't force myself to finish this....
Takes about 100 of the 430 pages to really get started, but gripping once underway!
The story was fantastic, but I'm not a fan of Larsson's writing style. Too often Mikael would walk into a room and Larsson would plainly list off every piece of junk within view regardless of it's importance to the story. That said, I enjoyed the story enough that I plan on reading the sequel.
Surprised me in a few ways. I didn't know it takes place in Sweden, and I generally like unfamiliar settings, especially those that produced the ancestors of my spouse. I sort of knew to expect a mystery plot, and that is definitely delivered, but it's secondary to a finance plot that provides a good balance. Rounds out with good, strong characters.
The Girl With The Neon Signs That Point To Plot Twists....
OK, I've watched this book to suddenly show up on the bookstore shelf, quickly occupy the Most Popular category and then slowly sunset into the bargain bin. At which point I stopped dragging my feet and actually read it.
On the positive side, the book is very readable, the plot realistic enough, the writing style robust and engaging. If you want a crime novel that doesn't make you feel an idiot after you've read it, this one fits the bill pretty well.
(SPOILERS AHEAD!!!)
The book is not perfect though. The characters, so realistic and believable for the most of the narration go haywire toward the end. The main protagonist, an Aspberger syndrome afflicted girl with history of abuse and uncanny investigative skills turns into a super-hacker easily penetrating any computer system, manipulating major financials transactions and camouflaging as other people with the ease that should make James Bond cringe …
OK, I've watched this book to suddenly show up on the bookstore shelf, quickly occupy the Most Popular category and then slowly sunset into the bargain bin. At which point I stopped dragging my feet and actually read it.
On the positive side, the book is very readable, the plot realistic enough, the writing style robust and engaging. If you want a crime novel that doesn't make you feel an idiot after you've read it, this one fits the bill pretty well.
(SPOILERS AHEAD!!!)
The book is not perfect though. The characters, so realistic and believable for the most of the narration go haywire toward the end. The main protagonist, an Aspberger syndrome afflicted girl with history of abuse and uncanny investigative skills turns into a super-hacker easily penetrating any computer system, manipulating major financials transactions and camouflaging as other people with the ease that should make James Bond cringe with envy. One of the two antagonists, who starts as a fairly believable financier, who has some skeletons in the closet, and is not particularly picky about means, turns into a quintessence of evil, doing deals with anyone from the Russian Mafia to the Colombian drug cartels, trading enriched uranium etc. All of this definitely spoils an otherwise good book.
The other issue with the book is a constant treatment with the Author's view on the social justice. We are constantly reminded that the financial markets are merely parasites on the Swedish economy, that the big Companies are no more than a bunch of fraudsters. Same with the Author's view on what justice means. Apparently, it is perfectly acceptable to hack into other people's computers - even more so when they are bad guys. Using emails and documents obtained by these means is apparently perfectly fine as well - it's used for a good goal after all. One might argue that these views are those of the book characters and not of the Author, but they are way too explicit in the book to be ignored.
Overall, the book is not bad - nice read for a crime novel but with its own shortcomings. Based on the developments toward the end, I have a feeling the two sequel books will not be as good but this remains to be seen.
This book has a very engaging story: Solving the 40 year old mysterious disappearance of Harriet Vanger. Mikael Blomkvist is hired to try to solve it.
I enjoyed the reading, but it was not what I was expecting.
Some of the characters are a walking contradiction on ethics and morals; acting as if only the public life was subject to it. Then we have Lisbeth Salander,the smartest, bad est, unnerdy, anarchic, hacker. I found the authors obsession with her tattoos and piercings annoying, not to mention the occasional reference to her slim, boyishly body; we get it, she's different - MOVE ON!
In my opinion some of the violence was unnecessarily graphic and some was plainly unnecessary - it didn't really add to the story to know all the details of a raping and the details on the revenge. I don't think that adds to the repulsion that the reader …
This book has a very engaging story: Solving the 40 year old mysterious disappearance of Harriet Vanger. Mikael Blomkvist is hired to try to solve it.
I enjoyed the reading, but it was not what I was expecting.
Some of the characters are a walking contradiction on ethics and morals; acting as if only the public life was subject to it. Then we have Lisbeth Salander,the smartest, bad est, unnerdy, anarchic, hacker. I found the authors obsession with her tattoos and piercings annoying, not to mention the occasional reference to her slim, boyishly body; we get it, she's different - MOVE ON!
In my opinion some of the violence was unnecessarily graphic and some was plainly unnecessary - it didn't really add to the story to know all the details of a raping and the details on the revenge. I don't think that adds to the repulsion that the reader must have to the act itself, so why describe it? Is it because the author itself doesn't find the pure mention of rape repulsive?
Once the mystery is solved the remaining of the book is the TOTALLY unbelievable exposure of a corporate fraud - oh and by the way, it's ok if we got all the information using illegal means, as long as no one finds out - solid ethics.
To sum up, this is an entertaining book that ends up drowning in a contradictory sea of quickly changing "journalism integrity"
Better than I had expected. (The next two are better, but I wouldn't recommend reading them without having read this one as background).
Nice book! Very interesting characters.
I first tried to read this book in 2010 right away when I got it. I just couldn't get much into it, but that summer I also had zero non-dissertation related reading time, so that probably contributed to not getting through a 644 page book.
My husband wants to see the American movie, and I'm a person who prefers to read the book a movie is based on before seeing the movie, if possible. The eminent release of said movie bumped this book back up to the top of Mt. TBR. I read it over few days in December 2011. Amazing what having a few hours to read (and staying up too late with the luxury of just reading) will do.
I'm not a crime fiction reader. I like crime fiction with actual science in it because I'm a scientist and I often know just enough about most of the …
I first tried to read this book in 2010 right away when I got it. I just couldn't get much into it, but that summer I also had zero non-dissertation related reading time, so that probably contributed to not getting through a 644 page book.
My husband wants to see the American movie, and I'm a person who prefers to read the book a movie is based on before seeing the movie, if possible. The eminent release of said movie bumped this book back up to the top of Mt. TBR. I read it over few days in December 2011. Amazing what having a few hours to read (and staying up too late with the luxury of just reading) will do.
I'm not a crime fiction reader. I like crime fiction with actual science in it because I'm a scientist and I often know just enough about most of the crime science techniques as spin-offs from my chemistry education. There is nothing like that in this book. In fact, other than the vague amazing-ness of the computer hacking, I knew most of the computer stuff the people used well enough to make it mundane. Sorry, if it has to be couched in impossible-ness in order to make it amazing, then you lose me.
Lisbeth Salander is definitely badass, but in a broken version of Sarah Conner (T2) sort of way. The only twist is that she actually does save the guy at the end. I was surprised because I was certain that it would follow the trope that no matter how badass she is, she'd be the one to end up in the clutches of the bad guy and have to be saved by the hero of the novel. In fact, the hero of the novel has to be saved by her. This is cool. This is fairly redeeming. However, I really felt like this was a novel written by a guy for his peers - peers being narrowly defined as other men like him.
Also, the plot was bland. The other reason I don't like crime fiction is unless they throw in something completely unrelated and presented, I always figure out whodunit early enough to make me impatient with the stupidity of the characters and the plot rather than enjoy it. This book was no different.
What I found more interesting about this novel was the politics. There was definitely a commentary on both corporate greed and too much power of the state. Sadly, in order to be sure I was writing this correctly, I re-read the bio of the author and realized I misread it the first time. One aspect of this novel I found intriguing has just been shown to not be how I thought. I'm now disappointed and the novel has lost the last thing that made it interesting to me.
To be honest, unless someone who felt this novel was only okay to begin with tells me these novels get better, I'm not in any hurry to read the rest of the books in the series. I'll probably just see the movies with my husband and call it good.
I think that the mystery concerning Harriet was just too forced...
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 …
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.
Ample lovingly detailed descriptions of rape. Consenting sex given 2-3 sentences, as opposed to rape and torture getting multiple pages per event. Sandwiches.
Assigned for my partner's lit class, this isn't lit, it's shlit.
Also, love is not real.
This book is a classic case of verbal diarrhea.
Well, this book is one of my recent favorites!!
It all started when one day, last year, the hype of this series caught my attention as I saw it mentioned in some blog I was reading (I can´t remember which one now).
And I got somewhat interested after I knew it was a swedish author. I´ve been to Sweden a couple of years ago and I just loved their neat and quiet kind of cities, the peoples
objectiveness and straight forward attitude.
I´ve always loved mysterious and detective kind of stories, solving murders, etc, but at first, I was unsure whether I´d really enjoy the book because I didn´t know the author literary work at all.
Anyway, the book got me completely hooked, it was one of those “don´t-sleep-until-you-finish” ones, and I really enjoyed the story pace and the way it evolves. The heroine, Lisbeth Salander, is complex and even …
Well, this book is one of my recent favorites!!
It all started when one day, last year, the hype of this series caught my attention as I saw it mentioned in some blog I was reading (I can´t remember which one now).
And I got somewhat interested after I knew it was a swedish author. I´ve been to Sweden a couple of years ago and I just loved their neat and quiet kind of cities, the peoples
objectiveness and straight forward attitude.
I´ve always loved mysterious and detective kind of stories, solving murders, etc, but at first, I was unsure whether I´d really enjoy the book because I didn´t know the author literary work at all.
Anyway, the book got me completely hooked, it was one of those “don´t-sleep-until-you-finish” ones, and I really enjoyed the story pace and the way it evolves. The heroine, Lisbeth Salander, is complex and even with her strange attitude (comparing to usual standards) you really start to love the way she sees the world and her reasons. The other characters are fascinating too!
One thing I enjoyed in the book was the way the characters relate to each other, the interesting dialogues and the way the author informs us of what is going on inside their minds. You can understand the reasons why a character takes a kind of action, even when this action can be considered very stupid or very unlikely. It seems like the author has complete control of them, and it convinces you (at least it convinced me). Another thing I noticed was that the descriptions of the places and people are objective, with no unnecessary information, too succint maybe, but I could perfectly imagine the scenes. I thought this was curious and couldn´t remember the last time I´ve had this sensation reading a book.
And finally, the plot in this first book got me amazed and I was really surprised at the end with the solving of the mystery. Well, I couldn´t help myself but buy the other 2 books of the trilogy and read them right away!
P.S.: I definitely prefer the original swedish title, can´t understand why they changed it in some translations.
So unfortunately I watched the film (Swedish edition) before reading this, which was probably the wrong order.
The mystery and the characters are truly excellent. The main plot arc is incredibly well crafted and Larsson gives no 'clues' about who the killer is which must be a lot harder than it seems given how poorly other writers seem to do it. I really loved how the mystery blossomed into something much more than the initial 'locked room' mystery.
My main nit is the style of the writing (though I don't know how much of that is the translation or the original text). The language is extremely plain and comes across as a literary monotone. I'm not sure if viewing the movie colored my expectation or not, but I'm definitely going to read the second installment before watching the next movie.
The movie, by the way, is really suburb and really …
So unfortunately I watched the film (Swedish edition) before reading this, which was probably the wrong order.
The mystery and the characters are truly excellent. The main plot arc is incredibly well crafted and Larsson gives no 'clues' about who the killer is which must be a lot harder than it seems given how poorly other writers seem to do it. I really loved how the mystery blossomed into something much more than the initial 'locked room' mystery.
My main nit is the style of the writing (though I don't know how much of that is the translation or the original text). The language is extremely plain and comes across as a literary monotone. I'm not sure if viewing the movie colored my expectation or not, but I'm definitely going to read the second installment before watching the next movie.
The movie, by the way, is really suburb and really adds a lot of emotion to the text. (Though word of warning about both the book and the movie... definitely not for children or the faint of heart!)
