The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

It turns out I really had no idea what this book was about when I started seeing it everywhere and made the completely uninformed decision that I just wasn't interested. And as I started seeing it not just everywhere, but everywhere else as well, I started to think that maybe I should revise my decision. But I also heard a lot of mixed reviews - mostly that there were plot inconsistencies and some clunky writing, but it was still an awfully fun read. My book snobbery kicked in and I paid attention to the first part, but not the second, until my brother and sister-in-law gave me the book (and its sequel) for my birthday, and when someone gives me a book I can't not read it anymore.

So I did. And the reviewers were right. It's not perfect. I couldn't always tell if it was the writing that felt clunky, or if it was just the translation. Some important characters were more fleshed out than others. And when Larsson starts describing character interactions with technology, I felt like I had just stepped out of the story and into an Apple commercial.

But the story pulled me in. And like I said, the story was not at all what I thought it was. I think I was imagining sort of an action-hero movie in book form, but it's not. The main character (who is not actually the titular girl with the dragon tattoo, but a middle-aged journalist) spends most of his time in a small, sort of isolated Swedish town doing research. The story is really about about an aging tycoon who hires the journalist, Mikael Blomkvist to write a family history, and to secretly investigate the 50-year-old unsolved murder of his beloved...granddaughter? niece? grandniece? I can't quite remember, because the family tree is complicated and full of Swedish names, and while I had fun imagining that I was pronouncing all the names and places and phrases in perfect Swedish, it was also a challenge to keep everything straight in my head.

In fact, for that very reason, I had a hard time getting into the book. The action doesn't really pick up until about halfway through, and the first half of the book takes a slow pace and throws out a lot of complicated background information without giving the reader much help in sorting out what's going to be important to the story later in. But it works, and there's a payoff. This is definitely an airplane novel - it doesn't require too much deep thought or analysis or concentration. But it's a good airplane novel. Favorite novel ever? Probably not. But my interest is definitely piqued enough to read the next two books.