Monday, December 13, 2010

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Steig Larsson

The Girls with the Dragon Tattoo begins as a legal thriller that reminded me of John Grisham's The Firm.  It is about 100 pages of complete business talk and legalese and I seriously got lost in translation.  I probably would have quit reading at this point but since it was picked by my book club, I kept on reading.

Lisbeth has to be my favorite character, mainly because she rides a motorcycle, doesn't take crap from anyone, especially creepy men, she is an awesome computer hacker and has an super cool dragon tattoo.  What is not to love? 

If you love psychological mysteries and suspense, you will probably love this book.  My mom adores these books.  It is definitely multi-genre, combining business, law, murder, mystery, sex, journalism and family saga all in one.  The family saga is particularly entertaining.  The novel takes place in Sweden and I love to visit other countries in the books that I read.

My book club met at IKEA in the Mall of America to discuss the book.  I had a delicious plate of Swedish meatballs with ligonberries.  The discussion was good and we all applied Dragon tattoos somewhere on our body.  We were a book club of women all sporting dragon tattoos.  I felt invincible, ready to kick ass and hop on my motorbike in the freezing cold winter snow.  Anything is possible if you have a dragon tattoo. It was a lot of fun and I think ligonberries are my new favorite food. 

This book is beloved by many who go on to read the second and third books in the trilogy.  I wanted to love it, I really did but all I can say was it is OK.  I guess I was turned off by the sadism and had a hard time stomaching the brutal violence towards women in the book.  Basically the book had me seriously stressed out probably because I was a victim to a sex crime when I was a child.  I had a few bad dreams.
 


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