I am driving to the university almost every day, a trip that takes about 35 minutes (in public transportation it would take about one hour or even more). This daily driving would have been very boring if I had not discovered the world of audio books. This week I finished listening the much enjoyable trilogy starting with “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”, then “The Girl Who Played with Fire” and ending with “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest”.
The books tell the intertwined story of two persons: Lisbeth Salander and Mikael Blomkvist. Lisbeth is an impressively strange girl with a very troubled past. She is smart beyond normality, is a world-known hacker, and looks like a 16-year-old punk girl. Mikael is a renowned journalist who has fallen hard after publishing a damaging article whose truth could not be proven, making him look as a fool. He is depressed and awaiting trial for libel. Suddenly their paths converge in an investigation that takes wild twists and turns, ending in a very unexpected way. This is happens in the first book. The second and third book deal with Salander’s strange and ugly past, managing at the end to close most of the story threads that were spread all over the place. Many strange things happen as the plot unrolls, even a world-class boxer plays a role in the story :-).
The story takes place in Sweden and from the book’s descriptions I am looking forward to traveling there. One thing that struck me as strange is that the people in the book never seemed to wear heavy clothing in winter. They wear jeans, t-shirts, and sometimes jackets. Isn’t Sweden supposed to be COLD??? And talking about clothes, this is one of the ways in which the author gets the reader into the story, describing what the importantly characters wore up to the detail, helping us imagine what he wanted us to imagine
The stories are full of multi gender sex, violence, and complex crime – reader discretion is advised. Having said this, the books are EXCELLENT, enjoyable and highly addictive. And the audio book read by Simon Vince is of great quality.I also saw the movie for the first book and it is also very enjoyable and fairly close to the book.
You can support my extreme reading habits by purchasing these books from amazon: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
