Stieg Larsson

[RainbowJude]

I started reading The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, which just about everyone I know has read. I haven't had the time, then I thought I would just watch the films. But since I went away for Christmas to a small town where the films aren't screening, I asked a friend if I could bring hers with and perhaps catch up with the books before I saw the films. I am about halfway through now and It's turning out to be a pretty easy read. The characters are pretty interesting and the mystery, a cold case with no leads that deals with the possible murder of a 16 year old girl that might have taken place many years before the action of the novel occurs, that holds one half of the story together - the novel concurrently focuses on the respective experiences of a journalist named Mikael Blomkvist and a kind of hardcore woman who works freelance for a PI company named Lisbeth Salander - is really intriguing, . I wonder how the two stories are going to come together. The prose has a weird feel to it; it reads as though it was translated from the Swedish because the English feels akin to the English used by my Scandinavian friends. There's just something ineffable about it that makes it different from novels originally written in English. Still, I'm enjoying it. It's good summer read and I am looking forward to seeing the film.

Anyway, to get to perhaps the real point of my post - a weird question that popped into my mind as I was reading this morning - what would Malory Towers and Miss Greyling have made of Lisbeth Salander? Reading about her disastrous schooldays made me wonder.

And now, of course, I am wondering what Fatty and the Find-Outers would have made of the mystery. In the book, there is a list of what appears to be names and phone numbers, but it might be in code. Nobody has figured out its relevance and it has puzzled both Blomkvist and the detective who originally worked on the case. I'm sure Fatty would have worked it out by now...