Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.

Upon a recommendation from Mr. Scott Mosier (not directly, obviously), I decided to embrace the culture of Sweden and pick up Stieg Larsson’s blockbuster, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.  Before this book, my three biggest exposures to Sweden were Mats Sundin, the Swedish Chef from The Muppets and Drew Barrymore’s character from Wayne’s World – not exactly a broad spectrum of Swedish culture.

I loved this book. Loved it. It might have something to do with the incredibly LOW expectations that I had going in. For whatever reason, I refused to buy into the hype – only because the hype was so huge. I haven’t exactly had a great track record when it comes to “blockbuster” books but I did my best to keep an open mind. I’m not particularly coming off as a snob – the amount of books I’ve read will clear that up – I just have been let down in the past.

Most of the praise has been directed towards “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo” herself, Lizbeth Salender. I can understand it, she’s a very strong female lead and I enjoyed her throughly but to me, she’s pretty much on equal footing with Blomkvist. The two make a terrific team, it’d be hard to imagine one without the other.

The fact that it’s a trilogy is a little confusing to me – things are wrapped up pretty clearly at the end of this book. There are a few things left unanswered – but nothing major. That being said, I’m pretty happy that I get a chance to read about these characters two more times. There’s talk about farming out the characters to another writer once the trilogy is over as Larsson passed away in 2004 – but I don’t see the point. Not everything needs to go on forever. That being said, that’s easy for me to say when I’ve only read the first book.