Thread: My rather long, gushing chain of observations about Stieg Larsson's Millenium Trilogy

I went to see the new American version of "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" last Friday. I had never read any of the books, and wasn't familiar with the story. I was aware of the Swedish movie versions from a few years ago, but other than that I didn't know exactly what to expect.

I know this sounds like I'm gushing, but my God I don't remember the last movie I've enjoyed as much as this. I had no comparison, but I thought it was a wonderfully bleak yet touching film. I loved the characters and the music and pretty much everything about it.

After the movie I had to know what happened to the characters, so I went out to buy the book. But I wanted to start with the first one, even though I had just seen the movie version. (Usually I prefer it to be the other way around -- book first, movie afterward.) So over the next few days I read "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" and loved it. I then bought "The Girl Who Played With Fire" and read it in about three days. I literally could not put these books down. I went out today to buy "The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest," but unfortunately the paperback version will not be out in the U.S. until late February, and I didn't want to pay $30.00 for the hardback edition. So I went on Amazon and ordered a copy. (I know that might sound obsessive, but I can't wait a month and a half to find out what happens!)

I love the world that Stieg Larrson creates in these books. I became thoroughly entrenched in it and found myself wishing at work that the day would hurry up and end so I could go home and read them. It is a dark world, yes, but he has a way of coming through with these moments of real poignancy that make you really care about the characters.

I did have a few criticisms. I found his writing style to be a little on the "stiff" side technically -- his prose didn't flow as eloquently as some authors I've read. However, I think this might be partially due to the fact that it was originally written in Swedish and I was reading an English translation. Maybe some of the style got lost in the translation, I don't know. He tends to just explicitly state "he did this", "she did that", and oftentimes he'd "info dump" on the reader. There were occasions in which he, as the narrator, would go off on a tangent about social issues in Sweden, even though he wrote it as third-person omniscient, which could be a little off-putting. Also, he was incredibly detailed in his descriptions of some events, sometimes to the point that the book seemed to drag a little bit. (Most notably the Wennerström affair that the main protagonist is involved in at the story's beginning.)

But man, does he make up for it on other counts. I thought that, despite his somewhat "humdrum" recounting of what the characters did or said, their personalities really came through. I think a lot of this had to do with their dialogue and interactions with one another. I can't pinpoint exactly why, but I really felt like I came to know Mikael Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander, and many of the other characters. The actual plots of the books, while good, are not groundbreaking, and I think it would've been a much less compelling story without having these strong personalities in it. And, even though I mentioned some of the excessive detail he puts into his character's backgrounds above, I also wonder if I would've enjoyed the stories as much without a lot of that material -- it did have the effect of making the world he created in the books seem very large and vivid.

Has anyone else read these books and, if so, what did you think about them?

I'm surprised no one has read these books! Maybe my long gushing post scared people off...