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Financial, Political Drama / Murder Mystery Detective Story

I finished reading the late Stieg Larrson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and I have to say, it was pretty awesome and impossible to put down. The original Swedish title was Män som hatar kvinnor, “Men That Hate Women,” a far better and more appropriate title. Also, let’s be honest, the name  The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is pretty lame. I think the name Men That Hate Women is also much better in setting the general tone for this book. Regardless..

This is a really complex novel that seems to be part finance, business, political, crime thriller, and does pretty well on all parts. I will try to give a brief overview of the book. The book opens with our hero, Michael Blomkvist, losing a libel case to an accused industrialist Hans-Erik Wennerström, putting his magazine at serious risk of collapsing. The disgraced journalist is hired by a wealthy old former industrialist, Henrik Vanger, who offers Blomkvist a huge sum to spend a year writing the Vanger family chronicle and attempting to solve the murder mystery of Vanger’s niece, Harriett of which there have been no developments in 40 years. The ensuing tale goes crazy.

That’s basically it. At times the language is a little clunky, I can’t tell if that’s the translator, Reg Keeland, to blame, or how Larrson intended it, and there are some almost masturbatory extended descriptions of Apple computers that seem a little bit unnecessary. Regardless, this is a super fun read and I’m sure you’ll tackle it within a week. There’s some messed up stuff in this book! Recommended reading. I will be reading the second one in the series after I get through some other books I have lined up.

By the way, their making a movie (actually made in Sweden, not a bastardized US version just yet), and I’m not sure what to make of it. As a movie, it looks a little bit corny… I feel like you can get away with more things in a novel, but once you start seeing them it’s a little meh…. but either way it looks interesting and I’m sure I’ll watch it at some point.

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Detective Stories

From The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larrson (translated by Reg Keeland):

Somehow she had always had this gift.

Her reports could be a catastrophe for the individual who landed in her radar. Armansky would never forget the time he assigned her to do a routine check on a researcher in the pharmaceutical industry before a corporate buyout. The job was scheduled to take a week, but it dragged on for a while. After four weeks’ silence and several reminders, which she ignored, Salander came back with a report documenting that the subject in question was a paedophile. On two occasions he had bought sex from a thirteen-year-old child prostitute in Tallinn, and there were indications that he had an unhealthy interest in the daughter of the woman with whom he was currently living.

After finishing the awesome novel that is The Alienist I am on to yet another detective-story-thriller (this new one adds a financial drama element). I’m only about 60 pages in but it’s quite interesting so far save for having to deal with all these Swedish names! I ran into two people in the subway reading the book and nodded in approval as they saw me on the task of starting it… a good sign! Intriguing – and even though it’s a translation, it feels pretty honest (unlike when I read Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore, which had a very meh translation) and I’m definitely about to get engulfed in this one…