Prentice Hall

I just read briefly through some of the most recent comments, and I can see there is quite a variety of responses. I'll begin by saying that I liked all three of the books very much, but I think the first is the best and worthy of all the attention it got. The other two are good, even great, but the first was special. It had a very satisfying beginning, middle, and end. It had interesting characters, a stunning setting, and didn't get side-tracked, as I think the other two did (especially in all the psychology involving Salander and the political intrigue involving her Father, the defected agent). I read the Joan Acocella article in The New Yorker, as well as an article in Rolling Stone, both good. But what got me interested in this book in the first place is that a friend of mine who is as voracious a reader as I am and who reads mostly literary fiction, as I do, put me onto it. And, of course, I couldn't dismiss this book's obvious attraction. When a book gets this much attention, I have to look into it. I wasn't disappointed. What makes Larsson attractive I think is his passionate interest in women's rights and the many offences against women. Michael and Erica are the more or less "normal" characters who espouse Larsson's attitude toward women. Salander is one of the most interesting characters I've ever encountered. She is totally off the wall, but she's very moral in that she always is against injustices especially against women, but injustices against anyone, really. So Larsson also has the always interesting theme of good against evil. This book has so much. It's a very good story, as they say, a page-turner, and I did just that. It's hard to believe but I actually turned the pages in all of them, it must be about 1200 or 1300 total. Some other things to note. I very much like Larsson's attention to detail. He tells us what his characters eat, read and do in their spare time. And all the books read like a travelogue of Sweden, a country I'm not too familiar with. The winter scenes in the first book are fantastic. The second two books are really one 900 page novel. In fact, I had to read the beginning of the third to fully understand how the second really ended. After the third, everything gets tidied up. It's hard to believe what a fourth would have done or much less 7 more which Larsson is said to have had in his mind to write. Nevertheless, I found these three very enticing.