Tag Archives: novel

Book Review – The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo Trilogy

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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, The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest.

Book Review – The Black Book

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From the list of books that I have already read, you can deduce pretty fast that I am not the type who reads Nobel-prize authors. In truth, I usually approach them with sincere dislike, and rarely touch one. But somehow The Black Book by Orhan Pamuk made it into the bookcase on the side of my bed, and after reading the book that came before it in the bookcase (The Monk Who Sold His Ferrary, which also got there without my notice… must check who is messing with my bookcase) I decided to start reading it, worse that could happen was that I would waste a couple of days reading it (or in case it was a disaster, a lot less before just throwing it away).

To my greatest surprise, the book was really enjoyable. It tells the story of a man in Istanbul (a lawyer, but this is not really important) who has a lovely wife who suddenly disappears. He then goes on a trip to find her on which he starts to loose himself. The imagery that the book leaves on the mind is impressive, giving a taste of Istanbul that wants the reader both to visit the place and at the same time never to go there in his life. The author somehow describes places in a way that allows the mind to create them very easily, and impressively realistically. The story also changes course all the time, leaving the reader in suspense. Although sometimes it does get too long in descriptions, on the whole the book was easy to read (466 relatively large pages word-wise) and while the end was a bit anticlimactic, the whole book was worth reading it.

Support my work by purchasing this book from amazon.