Review: Dragon Tattoo

I did it!  I finished The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo!  It took awhile, not because it wasn't a good book, it was, but because I'd already seen the movie so I didn't feel an urgency to finish the book.

I was resistant to the book at first.  Two summers ago the book was EVERYWHERE (and kind of still is), so I picked it up off the shelf since it looked cool and because it reminded me of the song Red Dragon Tattoo, which I like.  However the first little bit, two old guys talking about an unsolved case, didn't really capture my attention.  I rolled my eyes, assumed it was in the league of some rather tedious Oprah Book Club selections, and moved on.

But the book stalked me.  Every book store, every grocery store, had the book prominently displayed, it's cool cover and catchy title taunting me.  But I wasn't about to get reeled in, fooled with promises of  'best book of the year' or 'most intriguing heroine'.  After all, those first few pages hadn't given the least hint of a intriguing heroine.  And although I have nothing against a book full of octogenarians reminiscing about past crimes, I just didn't think the book was for me.  Stieg Larsson wore me down though.  Soon Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest was out, another cool cover and title.  And slowly I began to cave.

Then I got my Kindle last January.  TGwtDT was at a really good price, so I downloaded it.  I also downloaded a whole bunch of other books, so it lingered on my tbr list.  My friends, Ame and Bittner read it for their book club, which served coffee in honor of all the coffee drinking done in the book.   So I picked it up, read a little bit, but got distracted by other bright and shiny books.

I ended up watching the movie with my husband because we caught a trailer in which the character of Lisbeth Salander looked so kick ass.

And we quite enjoyed the movie.  So I picked the book up again... and then put it down again.  Here's a problem with reading the book on a Kindle, it's hard to remember who's who in the Vanger clan.  If you get a chance to read it in paperback then you should do so.  I read on and off for months, but finally decided a few days ago that I wanted to finish it before the new year.  I was about 30% done with it, and it's not a short book.

However once I got about halfway through I found I couldn't put it down.  I had a good idea of what was going to happen, but that didn't stop me from getting sucked in.  In two days I had the book finished.  And even though I've seen the second movie too, I immediately downloaded the second book.  The movies are good, but I have to say you get a lot more out of the books (of course I'm only able to refer to the first book since that's all I've read thus far).  Yeah, there's a lot of references I didn't get because I'm American (and I try really hard not to be a dumb, self-absorbed kind of American, but I don't do well in Jeopardy in the categories of Geography and World Events.  I do kick ass in Greek Myths and Beatles trivia, in case you want to give me credit for that), there's lots of names I have no clue how to pronounce, and I don't really have a clue who Kalle Blomkvist it except that I now know that the author that wrote Pippi Longstocking wrote about Kalle too.  There's also some financial intrigue that I'm too daft to understand, but the characters are interesting, the plot complex and intricate and did I mention how cool the title is?

Of course, recent events have somewhat altered my vision of Mikael Blomkvist's arch rival, Hans-Erik Wennerström.  I couldn't help but picture him as Wiki-Leak founder Julian Assange.  Yes, I know, Assange is Austrailian and not Swedish, but that's the face I put with Wennerström.   Maybe it's a sign that I really need to travel and actually meet Swedish people, which I'm more than willing to do.  Especially since Sweden is the birth place of that perfection known as Alexander Skarsgard.  Feel free to sigh and/or swoon:

 

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo gets a Midnight Book Rating of  11:30pm, it was almost a midnight read, but it started out a bit slow and felt a bit name brandish at times (total shout outs to Mac computers... which I can't afford whether it be in dollars or kroners).