Pop Culture Vulture

Ever heard of Goodreads.com? If you’re not familiar with it, it’s a social networking site for readers. You can keep track of what you’ve read and what you’re going to read. You can see what you’re friends have read and what their friends have read. Read reviews of books from your friends and other people who have read the book. Goodreads also has a pretty good newsletter that they put out that I’ve pulled various future reads from.

I mention this site because it’s where I heard about The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson. A few of my friends read it with pretty high reviews and so I decided to give it a try.

The title of the book is rather deceiving because it doesn’t deal entirely with the girl with the dragon tattoo. She’s a big part of the book but the book, in my opinion, is more about Mikael Blomkvist, a financial journalist in Sweden. At the start of the book, he has just been disgraced having been convicted of libel for an article that he wrote about an important businessman. Our hero is indeed innocent but he can’t prove it so down he goes, bringing down along with him the little magazine that he and his best friend/off and on lover started up several years before. In comes retired businessman, Henrik Vanger, who has a family mystery that has gone unsolved for decades. He hires our down on his luck hero to dig into his families disgraceful past to find out which family member (and he wholly believes it was someone in his own family) killed his beloved niece decades before.

The book starts out very slow with a lot of back story and build up. It takes about half the book for things to really pick up but when they do, the book takes several crazy turns and it really becomes a page turner. Once it really got going, I found myself stealing a few minutes here and there to read it so I could see what happened next.

The girl with the dragon tattoo fades in and out of the story with her own story as well as a good deal about how she gets mixed up in Mikael’s story. From what I can tell from reading the summary of Larsson’s next book in the series, her story seems to be told in much more detail in that book. But don’t get me wrong, she has a significant role in this book as well, just not as much as I expect considering the title of the book.

Overall, I would give it three and a half stars. Unfortunately, Goodreads doesn’t do half stars so if you find me on Goodreads, you’ll see that I only gave it three. Couldn’t quite muster the love to give it four. I hear the sequel is even more fast paced so I might give it a try sometime soon.

But for now, I’m moving onto book three in the Sookie Stackhouse series.

Happy Reading!!!