{"id":1375,"date":"2009-10-19T20:54:55","date_gmt":"2009-10-19T10:54:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/?p=1375"},"modified":"2009-10-19T21:02:05","modified_gmt":"2009-10-19T11:02:05","slug":"tfw-book-club-the-girl-with-the-dragon-tattoo-by-stieg-larsson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/?p=1375","title":{"rendered":"TFW Book Club: The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"The

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo written by The Stieg<\/p><\/div>\n

Stieg Larsson was a first time author who had worked previously as a journalist who was commited to fighting the rise of Nazism in Sweden.\u00a0 He wrote a trilogy of books in his spare time, handed in his manuscripts to a publisher and then died.\u00a0 The books went onto to become bestsellers and the inner sleeve of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo<\/em> tells me he was the second highest selling author of 2008.\u00a0 Larsson never lived to see how popular his books would become.<\/p>\n

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo<\/em> is about a mystery surrounding the Swedish Vanger family, who own and operate an ailing corporate empire.\u00a0 Henrik Vanger, 82 and not getting any younger, hires the services of a disgraced journalist, Mikael Blomkvist, to solve the mysterious disappearance of his niece Harriet four decades earlier.\u00a0 No body was found but Vanger suspects foul play.\u00a0 Not only that, the killer appears to be taunting Vanger by sending him a flower every year on Harriet’s birthday.\u00a0 To complicate things further, a young free-lance investigator named Lisbeth Salander is herself attempting to uncover just why Blomkvist, a once reputable journalist, allowed himself to be successfully sued for libel when he published an article accusing industrialist Hans-Erik Wennerstrom of corruption with apparently no evidence to back up his claims.<\/p>\n

TGWTDT<\/em> really appealed to my inner Agatha Christie loving self.\u00a0 Its a tried and true formula:\u00a0 The mystery is established to the reader in a matter of pages and then you are left to follow Blomkvist and Salander around a remote Swedish village, as they attempt to solve the case.\u00a0 Progression in the case is slow and dripfed with several red herrings.\u00a0 A lot of the developments are driven through intuition and psychology rather than hunting for physical clues.\u00a0 If it all sounds a little twee, don’t worry.\u00a0 It isn’t.\u00a0 The literal translation of the book’s Swedish title is Men Who Hate Women<\/em>.\u00a0 Despite its scenic setting in a sleepy coastal town, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is a very gritty with lots of violence, much of it directed at women.<\/p>\n

Larsson really seems to be project himself into the character of Mikael Blomkvist.\u00a0 They are both journalists, of a similar age and social standing.\u00a0 Both are heavily commited to\u00a0 fighting social injustice and corruption.\u00a0 Larsson also seems to live viccariously through Blomkvist and indulges in a bit of wish fulfillment.\u00a0 Blomkvist has sex with several women in the book rather effortlessly:\u00a0 its always the women that come on to him and they are all after commitment-free sex.\u00a0 At times he has multiple girls on the go and they don’t seem to mind each other’s company either.\u00a0 Sometimes, I felt this was a bit too much but maybe its just how they roll in Europe.\u00a0 Just a lot of hot women-folk charging around having sex with average looking dudes.<\/p>\n

As the first book in a trilogy, its easy to see why TGWTDT<\/em> became so popular.\u00a0 The central characters are very likable but Larsson is careful not to play his hand entirely and retains a certain mystique about them.\u00a0 The mystery is conclusive and self contained, yet the ending will leave you wanting more of the characters.\u00a0 Clocking in at five hundred pages, the story has both plenty of depth but still has a writing style that is very easy to plough through.<\/p>\n

I really dug TGWTDT<\/em>.\u00a0 Hopefully the remaining two books in the series are of a similar calibre.\u00a0 Next up though, I’ll be reading The Greatest Show On Earth<\/em> by Richard Dawkins.<\/p>\n

\"The

The Greatest Show On Earth by Richard Dawkins<\/p><\/div>\n

And, no, the book is not about The Wire<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Stieg Larsson was a first time author who had worked previously as a journalist who was commited to fighting the rise of Nazism in Sweden.\u00a0 He wrote a trilogy of books in his spare time, handed in his manuscripts to a publisher and then died.\u00a0 The books went onto to become bestsellers and the inner …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,230],"tags":[2399,445,87,446],"class_list":["post-1375","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","category-book-club","tag-book-club","tag-millenium-trilogy","tag-sex","tag-stieg-larsson"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1375","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1375"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1375\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1384,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1375\/revisions\/1384"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1375"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1375"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1375"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}