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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. This book was hyped enormously but it lives up to the hype with me. It grabbed me within 20 pages and I could not put it down. The best book I have read in 2009 by a long chalk. I long to read more adventures of the two superb lead characters, Mikael and Lisbeth. With 100 pages to go the main criminal is unmasked but then the story moves to another dimension. The detail is fantastic and the use of modern technology in the research by Lisbeth is fascinating. I rarely give 5 stars but this one deserves them. ( )A história é boa, mas é devagar It took a few chapters for the plot to grab me, but once it did, it didn't let go. Definitely an enjoyable read, although some of the imagery and subject matter was pretty graphic and horrible to think about. Overall, a good mystery and a fun, quick read. At first I wasn't sure if I was going to like this book since it starts off with a bunch of financial mumbo-jumbo about a dodgy industrialist and Mikael Blomkvist's trial gone wrong, and it was a little slow for me. But then the book switches gears to the mystery of the long ago disappearance of a young girl from a seriously dysfunctional but wealthy family. And because of those two plots, Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander are brought together and from there the book takes off. This was one of those books that made me stay up way too late at night trying to read as much as possible and kept me guessing along the way. And Lisbeth is one of the most interesting characters I've seen in a long time. She kicks some major butt. Looking forward to the next installment in the trilogy. Great read.
[Richman reviews several Scandinavian novels, including Larsson's.] Why have readers taken to these writers? The novels are not formally innovative: With a few exceptions, these are straightforward whodunits, hewing closely to conventional models from the English tradition. Nor does their appeal depend on a "relentlessly bleak view of the world," as a writer for the London Times has put it. Bleak worldviews are not particularly hard to come by in crime novels, no matter what country they come from. What distinguishes these books is not some element of Nordic grimness but their evocation of an almost sublime tranquility. When a crime occurs, it is shocking exactly because it disrupts a world that, at least to an American reader, seems utopian in its peacefulness, happiness, and orderliness. The novel offers a thoroughly ugly view of human nature, especially when it comes to the way Swedish men treat Swedish women. In Larsson’s world, sadism, murder and suicide are commonplace — as is lots of casual sex. (Sweden isn’t all bad.) The first-time author's excitement at his creation is palpable, strangely, in the book's sometimes amateurish construction. There are frequent long digressions in this big book (more than 500 pages) in which he laboriously fills in back-story details. Then there is the Vanger family; what might have seemed like a bit of fun gets out of hand as easily more than 20 people with the surname Vanger are mixed into the story. To his credit, though, he always regains control and restores momentum.
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A sensation across Europe—millions of copies sold
A spellbinding amalgam of murder mystery, family saga, love story, and financial intrigue.
It’s about the disappearance forty years ago of Harriet Vanger, a young scion of one of the wealthiest families in Sweden . . . and about her octogenarian uncle, determined to know the truth about what he believes was her murder.
It’s about Mikael Blomkvist, a crusading journalist recently at the wrong end of a libel case, hired to get to the bottom of Harriet’s disappearance . . . and about Lisbeth Salander, a twenty-four-year-old pierced and tattooed genius hacker possessed of the hard-earned wisdom of someone twice her age—and a terrifying capacity for ruthlessness to go with it—who assists Blomkvist with the investigation. This unlikely team discovers a vein of nearly unfathomable iniquity running through the Vanger family, astonishing corruption in the highest echelons of Swedish industrialism—and an unexpected connection between themselves.
It’s a contagiously exciting, stunningly intelligent novel about society at its most hidden, and about the intimate lives of a brilliantly realized cast of characters, all of them forced to face the darker aspects of their world and of their own lives.
(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:57:52 -0400)
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