33% of The Dragon Tattoo

I am currently 33% into The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Which is apparently the real book equivalent of page 167 of 469. By the way, thank the book gods for the recent Kindle update that now shows page numbers. I was feeling completely lost with this percentage –bar nonsense. Who thinks of books like that? 45% complete… that’s just silly. It was really cutting into my OCD habit of doing the math and figuring out how many pages I had left. Guess that’s karma’s way of getting back to me for being a traitor and abandoning real books.

Anyway.  Back to this Dragon Tattoo hoopla. Which is mostly why I figured, “what the heck, might as well jump on the bandwagon and see what all the fuss is about.”  So far it is very….Swedish. I never realized how little I knew about Sweden. Or Swedish politics. Or Swedish culture. Or anything Swedish other than IKEA. The first few sections were a little disorienting and confusing as Larsson weaves through the intricacies of the Swedish banking industries. The references to what I assume are well known real people and events flew over my head and I eventually stopped googling and wikipediaing and trying to figure out if they were real or made up and decided to just go with it.

When I said I was starting the book, I was told by almost everyone I know that has read it that the first 100 pages or so were dense and difficult to get through and that I might as well skip them. They were not wrong. Now that I am into what I assume is the bulk of the story, it is growing on me. I think.

Though, it is not what I expected. From the little I knew, I assumed that the story centered on Lisbeth and so far she seems to only be popping up at random intervals. People seem to love this girl, and I don’t really get what all the obsession is about. I had pictured some sort of female Bourne Identity badass, but so far she is a fairly typical Gen-X hacker type. I am hopeful that as her presence grows, the more her character will develop and that I will figure out what makes her such a big deal.

Blomkvist and the Vanger clan are starting to make some sense and I assume we are going to spend the rest of the book figuring out what happened to Harriett. That and finding a way to reestablish Blomkvist’s reputation. And  who knows what else.

I have 302 pages left to figure it out….