The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest by Stieg Larsson

I hate to admit it, but I got bogged down in these books. After finishing the first, and starting the second, I felt compelled to finish off the whole trilogy before really diving into anything else. But where the first book was engaging and entertaining, in spite of not really being my genre, the second didn't hold my interest as well, and the third was just a slog for the sake of finishing.

It's not that I hated the books. I just didn't care the way I want to care about a book. It's not that I didn't feel any investment in the characters. I did. Just not a deep investment. It's not that I didn't want to know what happened. I did. But sort of in the way that I wanted to know what happened in the last book in the Twilight series (in spite of only having ever read the first book) enough to go skim the Wikipedia entry on it. I would have been satisfied with reading the Wikipedia entry for this one too.

I know that there are an awful lot of people out there who love these books, who feel like the trilogy finishes even stronger than it starts. I think part of my feelings might be that I'm just not familiar with the genre. I read the first book as though it were a mystery, and it kind of was. So I expected that of the second and third installments, but they weren't. It was about halfway through the third book when I was feeling resentful that we knew everything - what the bad guys were doing, what the good guys were doing, and all of their motivations - that I finally realized that I was reading the book wrong. It wasn't a mystery at all, it was a crime drama. Which is even less my thing than a mystery.

So I'm putting this out there as just my opinion. I might recommend the first book as a fast, engaging summer read, and for the purpose of knowing what all the fuss is about. But you can probably pass on the other two. But I did finish.