Hi. I'm Kirsten, and I'm a bookoholic. Or bibliophile, if you want to be fancy about it. I don't care, as it comes down to the same thing: I have a problem, and I cannot deal with it alone. I cannot stop reading. Seriously. Sit me down at the breakfast table in front the cereal and try to talk to me, and I'll emerge from my trance halfway through your statement to tell you that I had stopped listening in order to read the nutritional information on the side of the box. I stop walking to look at graffiti. I've been known to make myself carsick reading billboards...while driving...
So, now you know, and that's over with. Here's the other thing: I compulsively avoid "trending" books. I wouldn't read The Time Traveler's Wife for years, because everybody's book club was talking about it. And you know what? It's now in my Top 50 Books Ever of All Time. No kidding. Same thing with The Sparrow, all the Harry Potter books, and The Worst Hard Time. I'm such a snob that I actually deny myself great literature simply because it happens to be popular.
Ha! I scoff at my foolishness, and vow to be more reasonable in the future. Let's just see how that goes...
My latest stunning surprise took the form of Steig Larsson's totally unbelievable series of mysteries which began with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, continued with The Girl who Played with Fire, and has just concluded with The Girl who Kicked the Hornet's Nest. I had an extra reason to avoid this hot read: people just wouldn't stop giving me copies of the first one. "Have you read this, Kirsten?"; "This is so sweet, and look - it's about you!"; "Dude, did you know that this Swedish dude wrote a book about you?" And so on. Yes, yes, I happen to have a dragon tattoo. His name is Smaug, by the way, and he predates Lisbeth Salander's now-famous ink by at least 10 years. Take that, peanut gallery.
Lisbeth Salander is the glue that holds this giant work of fiction together. She's exactly the type of heroine you'd expect to find in a William Gibson novel, or even Neal Stephenson, or running around in The Matrix. But she comes as a welcome shock tossed into the format of the contemporary thriller. Salander is unrepentantly antisocial, incredibly skilled with digital systems of all forms, a phenomenal hacker, and unfailingly guided by an internal moral compass that leads her sometimes astray but always on the path of justice.
And as the series progresses, Lisbeth Salander becomes more and more an archetypal blueprint for the modern, intelligent, capable, abused woman. Larsson's exploration of and empathy for her character are perfectly sublime. Even if you haven't a care for the murder mystery to be solved or the take-down of the industrial Goliath of the hour, you'll want to keep reading just to see what Salander does, and where her choices take her.
These definitely top my must-have summer reading list. I grudgingly encourage you to join me in seeing what all the buzz is about. We've got all three books in the Millenium trilogy in stock, and we just can't wait to grab one for you!
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