Sweden: The Girl Who Played With Fire by Stieg Larsson
Thoughts: So I liked this one better than the first, evinced by the fact that I read the first book three years ago and only picked this book up to read now in an airport bookshop where the choices were between this and a variety of Christian romance and/or horror novels. I found this better than the first, not as slow, and more relevant. Funnily, my parents have both read the series (my dad reads about one fiction book a decade). Spoiler (highlight to read): My parents were all disbelieving that any government would cover up foreign nationals for intelligence purposes, since clearly they had never heard of Operation Paperclip and its ilk. Also maybe working in government security for the past eighteen months has made me realise exactly how duplicitous national security officers really all – always the ends justify the means and all that. I also don’t know whether it’s the translation or the writing, but the book definitely plods less than the first, at least when it’s not plagerising IKEA catalogues or detailing the variety of frozen pizzas one can buy at 7-11. You can tell Larsson was a journalist by the way he structures the introductions to characters – more style than substance. In any case, after I finished the novel, I went out to the library to read the third. And now I am done.
Rating: 4.5/5