Probably the best collection for absorbing the critical discipline and evolving politics at the heart of Orwell's writing, the model for the 20th century. ( )

I really wanted to love this book. Several people told me that I would enjoy this book. It was really just okay. I usually ignore the hype when it comes to bestsellers. I tried to give this book a chance, I really did. When I started reading it, I think it took me about a week just to get through the first chapter (and I am a VERY fast reader). I don't know if it was just the translation. I have read other books that were translated from Swedish and LOVED them; but, this one was hard to get through. It was filled with violent acts against women and characters that I really wanted to like but couldn't.
The story itself was interesting, I won't say otherwise, but I just didn't care enough about what happened to most of the characters. I even started reading the second in the trilogy and I was still left without a sense of caring about the characters and what happened to them. Perhaps it is the author's verbosity. Maybe if the books weren't so full of information that, while I suppose it is relevant to the story, really took away from the sense of story telling and instead seemed like something of a manual rather than a story being told. ( )

I maybe would've liked it better if I hadn't seen the Swedish movie first. The movie was better than the book. ( )

On the one hand, the mystery is relatively interesting and the 'girl' of the title is an unusual character, so I can see why so many people latched onto this bestseller. On the other, had this book not been pressed into my hands by an enthusiastic coworker, I would never have finished it. I have a good stomach for violence, but I need more than 'relatively interesting' and 'unusual' to deliberately set out to read a book with quite this much. (I rather suspected this would be the case when I noticed the sections were all headed by statistics about violence against women in Sweden.)

Potentially spoilery lament - Also, seriously, every villain in this book turns out to be a sexual sadist? Really? ( )

Ohh, this book made me uncomfortabel a lot, and I finished it rather fast because it absolutely would not wait.

I liked how it didn't shy away from many issues, and I liked Lisbeth, but I disliked how the protagonist was very, very Mary Sue-ish. Not sure if I'm going to read the other parts. ( )