The Girl

I bought my first ipod at some point in 2005 and it came with a free subscription to Audible.com. For a few months I received free digital downloads of audiobooks from a nice sized library of selections. After that I paid a reasonable monthly fee to keep the books coming and was able to build a nice collection. I lost interest when it was time to renew the committment after the first year, but reactivated my audible account before I left the states to download some material for the long flights and travels ahead. While perusing the material available from audible I found The Girl with Dragon Tattoo under the most popular downloads page. I'm pretty sure it was number one actually. This was pretty much a no brainer for me as I'm a big fan of girls, tattoos and dragons so I downloaded it without any knowledge of what I was getting into.

I first started listening to GWDT in Auckland and found that it was narrated by an older man with a heavy swedish accent. It was a little bit difficult to listen to and I kept falling asleep in the first chapter. I switched to Phil Lesh's autobiography and didn't think about the girl for a while. In Queenstown, I was given a paperback copy of The Girl who Played with Fire by a travelling American who was passing through. She only relinqueshed the book to me when I promised her that I would actually read it. So I made myself get through the first chapter of the dragon tattoo. Once I finished it I couldn't stop. I'm wore my headphones for three days straight listening to that book and it did not come close to putting me to sleep. It was reminiscent of the first times I read Jurassic Park, The Firm and The Da Vinci Code. I blazed through played with fire and after a short break in the trilogy I'm now halfway through The Girl who Kicked the Hornet's Nest.

The Girl story is everything that it's hyped up to be. A truly original and thrilling crime drama that puts the reader in a choke hold from the very beginning and doesn't let up. The late Stieg Larrsonn's villains are as dreadful as I could possibly imagine, but his genius shines through in his protagonists. Michael Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander are hardly a stereotypical hero and heroine. They come packed with character flaws and failures. Blomkvist is a terrible father who sleeps around. Lisbeth smokes, cusses, and sets her father on fire. This couple is a far cry from Robert Langdon and Sophie Last Sion. Larsson's characters are believable and act more human than typical novel characters. This comes alive in the film version of the The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. If this movie had been made in the states it would have starred Brad Pitt, or Leonardo DiCaprio or whoever else is commanding 30 million dollars a picture these days. Lisbeth would have been played by Kristen Stewart or Anne Hatheway or Miley Cyrus and there would be rumblings of academy awards. The swedish version with english subtitles keeps things simple and in doing so creates a powerful movie. With the exception of The Godfather, it is probably the closest book to movie conversion I've ever seen. Looks like I'll be back at the theater tomorrow seeing the girl who played with fire and then counting down the days until the final film is released.