"The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" continued

In every mystery we are introduced to the puzzle.  In every puzzle there are puzzle pieces.  Throughout the mystery, puzzle pieces are recovered.  The only problem is, some puzzle pieces are missing so you must figure out what the picture is (or the main character must figure it out). I find these puzzle pieces to be quite frustrating at times, especially in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.  For example, Blomkvist and Salander find a very interesting clue hidden in the bible.  Earlier in the book, Blomkvist took a trip to Harriet's old cabin and found a list of numbers.  After much research and trial and error, he realized that these numbers were bible verses.  This led to one of the biggest discoveries in which he found that each bible verse indirectly described a string a murders.  Salander was able to find many other murders that also had bible verses directly correlated to them.  This is a big discovery because they finally have to some clue as to what happened to Harriet.  It's always great to be introduced to more evidence, but I find it only raises more questions in my head.  How did Harriet get involved with this serial killer?  Why was she chosen?  Who and where is this person?  And many more as the book continues.  I think that's honestly why so many people like mysteries because it makes you want to read to the end to find out the answer, but you also want to see how the characters unravel the whole mystery.  This book definitely a quality mystery and it's also not too generic.  I find when I read  the classic mysteries, that they all have a pretty straight forward and similar plot.  This isn't always true, but for the most part mysteries don't vary too much.

When I'm reading a book, I sometimes feel like if the characters are not very interesting, the book itself is not interesting even if the plot is good.  Yet, if the plot is bad the characters can still made the book good.  Luckily The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo has a very good plot and characters, but I feel like it would just be good with the characters.  Salander especially interests me, as I feel a lot of people are intrigued by her.  She's so weak, strong, not confident, confident, not outgoing, outgoing, and so many other opposites all in one.  For example, when she was sexually assaulted she did not turn to the police as most victims do not because they are afraid of the outcome.  Instead she confronts her abuser and ends up getting revenge quite nicely.  When you think about it, what she did was actually quite smart because she prevented her abuser from attacking her again, (she recorded him abusing her and uses it as blackmail) but she also got to see him have to face his consequences instead of risk talking to the police who may or may not believe her.  I'm not saying what she did was smart, but it did work.  She seems so innocent and self-contained and yet she's so smart and outgoing.  I think Salander will continue to confuse future readers, but also show us how a character can evolve and not only have one specific trait.

"The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo"

I began reading The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo about two weeks ago thinking it would take me forever.  I'm typically a slow reader because I take way too long trying to understand what's on a page, like each detail has to make sense to me before I move on. Surprisingly though, this book is going pretty quickly for what I'm used to.  It scared me at first because of the interesting kind of language in the beginning. It was like watching the news because it talks about lots of business and political information that I don't even know how to describe because I'm that ignorant about it.  Fortunately the book does get a lot better because he actually starts into a very detailed plot.  I can really tell this author put in a lot of thought into this book because the characters are so intricate and detailed! They don't seem like the characters I usually read in books that seem like the author just kind thought of on the spot and wrote about them. No, these characters seem like the author took real people and dug into their personal lives because he actually got the sense of a "real" character.

I think usually when I write for school assignments I cheese up my writing a little bit, you know, make it sound like I'm completely and utterly in love with this book and I will list all the reasons why it's amazing.  Well, I'm going to try really hard no to do that.  It's hard though because I really do enjoy this book!  The plot is already starting to unravel and I'm not even too far in. It's a really great mystery not in the typical way. In fact you don't even get introduced to the "mystery element" until after a long and detailed look at the all the characters that will be important to the story.  I'm usually not really into the whole detailed thing, and it was kind of annoying in the beginning, but as it started to get less confusing it also got really interesting.

I'm really excited to read about the family history of the Vangers who seem to have a complex story that I can't wait to unravel as the book continues. This wealthy family seems to have a lot of secrets that I'm interested to learn about. I especially enjoy the actual "girl with the dragon tattoo", Lisbeth Salander.  Even though the book doesn't talk about her as much, she interests me quite a lot more than Blomkvist.  Maybe it's because she's female? I doubt it though, I think I really just like that she has a certain uniqueness in both that she's hard core and yet surprisingly brilliant at what she does.  I think I can speak for a lot of people when I say that it's kind of cool to read about someone who in real life you would not expect to be so smart!  I think that's why the whole Susan Boyle story blew up on the internet because no one expected her to be amazing at singing and yet she blew their socks off! So I think that's maybe why this book became so popular, because so many people are interested in that kind of story. I'm not sure because I'm not too far in the book, but The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo continues to intrigue me and I'm looking forward to reading more into the complex story that awaits me.