The Girl Who Put Down the Book

You know, I can see why people love The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, etc.  I liked the first one all right--it had a decent thriller plot with some pretty good business/espionage stuff going on.  They weren't really related to each other...at all...but they were enjoyable enough.

But my God, that drag through The Girl Who Played with Fire.  I honestly couldn't tell you how far into the book I am, because I've found it to be torture for so long that I've mostly stopped listening to it.  I'm probably a quarter of the way in.  A number of unrelated things have happened, and I'm pretty sure that I know which of them are going to have something to do with a broader plot and which aren't, but God, I don't care.  So here's my permission to give it up.

Some points before I go:

1) I'll be really excited to see the movies.  The plots are good; the writing isn't.

2) I wonder if there's a translation issue, or if people in Sweden just like their books that way. 

3) I think it's the shopping lists that did me in.  She bought one thing from each page of the Ikea catalog about three pages before she went to the convenience store and bought three frozen pizzas, four microwaveable burritos, instant coffee, a carton of orange juice, a block of cheese, and half a dozen apples.  She then drove down four streets I can't pronounce to get home. 

4) I also find the author's fondness for Salendar to be kind of creepy.  She's a fun antihero--smart, antisocial, independent.  But all the fifty-year-old men in this book seem to find her skinny, unwashed asexuality to be highly sexy.  And somehow her "whatever works" morality is venerated by the characters whose morals I'm supposed to trust.

5) This.  Warning: there's one pretty big spoiler, so if you don't know what All The Evil was yet, consider yourself warned.  But overally, this sums it right up for me, and I'll bid you good day.