Fickle Words You Know How It Is

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, & The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest

I figured that I would review these books all together since I started this blog while I was in the middle of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest and felt that I couldn't really review the last one without even mentioning the first two.

I will start to say that I couldn't put these books down once I started.  They restored my "need to read" and I have been in the middle of at least one book ever since.

I wouldn't call this trilogy a "fun" read and by the end of it, I was kind of sick of Lisbeth.  However, Larsson managed to keep her interesting enough throughout the book that I only really got sick of her at the end.  I also thought that this series would be a little more literary.  Not to sound like a snob because I can read crap with the rest of them (not that these books are crap) but they are pretty much like John Grisham novels set in Sweden.  Thankfully, Larsson put more into his characters so they weren't so two-dimensional.

If you haven't already read these books (and almost everyone I have talked to has already), you find that the scenes are detailed to the tiniest minutiae and  soooo many brands are mentioned.  There are the Apple computers and the Nikon phones and the Ikea furniture.  Not to mention that he describes everything that each person is wearing or what they are drinking or how their apartment is decorated.  I was able to ignore it after a bit but in the beginning it was really distracting.  I couldn't use my imagination at all.  If I wanted to imagine Lisbeth eating a Digornio's pizza, I couldn't because of the constant chatter about Billy's Pan Pizza (I didn't know what that was until now: it's basically like a Hot Pocket).  Also, there was such an emphasis on how much everything cost.  I had a rough estimation about how many kroner were to an American dollar by the end (and I didn't look it up).

Speaking of Billy's Pan Pizza, if you search for it, so many other blogs mention it.  CRAZY!  I wonder if it's sales went up.

The constant descriptions almost made the book too slow to read.  I don't need to know everything about Lisbeth's shopping trip to Ikea.  I kept expecting something crazy to happen while she was there, but she just spent a lot of money and had the furniture delivered.

I'm whining about the books a lot here but I actually quite enjoyed them.  They are rather light reading, though the material is quite graphic and once you get past the idiosyncrasies of the author (or translator), you can't put them down and it's fun to see how everything comes together.