A Ripping Yarn

It has been a long time since I got so lost in a book that I would rather be reading it than doing just about anything else. Or rather, I should so it had been a long time. I came late to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo but I'm glad I did. This was the rare book that I stayed up later than I intended to to keep reading, and then woke up early and read some more. It's not great literature, but its a great story, a gripping mystery with characters that get under your skin and told in a simple, straightforward manner dripping with forward momentum.

To reveal too much about the plot would be unfair, it is a mystery after all, and a highly readable one that I would unreservedly recommend to just about anyone. But the basics are this: Investigative financial journalist Mikael Blomkvist is convicted of libel for printing an unverifiable story in his magazine that accuses a prominent Swedish business man of criminal acts. This brings him national attention, and one of the people who takes notice is an elderly titan of industry named Henrik Vanger. Vanger has a proposition for Blomkvist, one that gets Blomkvist tangled in the possibly sordid history of the Vanger clan. Meanwhile, Lisbeth Salander, an extremely bright but socially awkward sort-of PI (and the titular tattooed girl) is also on the case. Their paths cross, and together they uncover a mystery more twisted than they could have imagined etc etc...

My one complaint about the book is that I may have enjoyed it more if I was, like the author and all the characters, Swedish. It references Swedish geography, laws, history, rules, and themes that, while its possible to pick up on, could only be more resonant if you are already familiar with them. The epigrams that begin each section of the book deal are all statistics about violence against women in Sweden (a theme that runs throughout this book and apparently all of Larsson's novels), and there is a major plot point that deals with how Swedish legistlation deals with persons the government has deemed incapable of caring for themselves...neither of these things are unique to Sweden, or hard to get a basic handle on if you are, say, American, but they feel particularly Swedish in a way that means I feel like i missed something. In spite of all that, I enjoyed the act of reading this book more than any in recent memory. I can't wait for my dad to finish the next one and send it to me, and I'm glad I didn't read Allison's post on it a few weeks ago any closer than I did.