The Girl Who Should Just Shut Up
My mom bought me The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo which I read and thought was alright. My mom apparently thought I thought the book was "awesome," so she gave me the second one, The Girl Who Played With Fire. Now, I've read a decent amount of books, and I've paged through my share of stinkers, but The Girl Who Played With Fire actually sucked worse than anything I've read in recent memory.
First off, it's 630 pages. Roughly half of the pages describe how the main characters drink coffee or enjoy sitting in their luxury IKEA furniture. Honestly, is IKEA really that nice? Where I come from, it's where people sheepishly buy crap to sit on and when it breaks they say, "Meh. It was crap from IKEA. What do you expect? I couldn't afford Walmart stuff."
Along with the endless descriptions of coffee, we learn all about neighborhoods and driving directions to said hoods. Who cares? I've never been to Sweden, and if this is a good view of their culture, I don't really want to go. Unless it's to piss on the author's grave. Or bang the Swedish Bikini Team.
Reading this book was like reading a 630-paged novelization of a Lifetime Channel Original Movie: If it has a penis, it's evil.In the first book, Lisbeth was moderately interesting and only a little bit annoying. She's a skinny punk girl with really bad-sounding tattoos and a photographic memory, but now in the second book, it's like the author turned into a 10-year-old playing fantasy superheroes during elementary school recess.
"Oh yeah, your character can see through walls? Well, um, Lisbeth Salander has, um, a perfect memory. And she's a math wizard. And she doesn't need to eat anything but 7-11 pizza. And she's a professional boxer. And she has fake boobs. And she can beat up two bikers at the same time without getting hurt. And she can get shot three times without getting hurt. And she's the best hacker in the world. And she is sexually awesome. And she knows all about guns and cars and security systems and motorcycles and computers and everything in the world. And she can find the most important things on somebody's computer within mere seconds. And she's really really really smart but sadly misunderstood. And she can seduce anybody she wants. And she's a master of disguise. And she doesn't play by the rules, just her rules. And she is always thinking ahead. And she's like a ninja. And she's got more superpowers, I just don't want to tell them all at once. Did I mention she's really really really smart? But misunderstood?"
Not only is Lisbeth completely invincible in this book, but she's also really bitchy. Except for her girlfriend, she's a total witch to anybody with whom she comes in contact—especially the men in the book. Even the tools who are nice to her. The dipshit who saves her life or whatever she constantly calls "do-gooder." So often I thought, "Man, I wish she'd just get blown up."
This book is pretty black and white. Men are all evil. Even if they're good, they're still just sex-craved perverts looking for a way to exploit the women of the world. Reading this book was like reading a 630-paged novelization of a Lifetime Channel Original Movie. The doctors are all evil, the judge is evil, the police are evil, Lisbeth's former teachers are all evil...if it has a penis, it's evil.
I can just see the author sitting in his writing room thinking of "new" ways to show how male domination has ruined this world. He's kind of like that asshole guy who badmouths men in order to suck up to the girls he's trying to bang, but doesn't have the balls to actually do the deed. "Oh Jenny, I would never be mean to you like your current boyfriend. I'm so thoughtful and cunning and hairless and always would remember to bring you flowers when you were sad. And never make fun of your periods." The whole book felt like an ass-kissing exercise to the female reading population.
"You've GOT to love the Girl books, because the author died while writing them..." I know I'd probably hang myself if my name was attached to them. The male character in the book is a thinly-veiled caricature of what the author likely wanted to be. And I see nothing wrong with that, but this writer's fantasy was pretty lame. He wants to be a famous magazine reporter who takes down "The Man," sleeps with everybody he wants to with little to no consequences, trained in the military yet totally pacifistic. I think the character would be alright if he wasn't 99.99% boring.
I guess in the movie the new James Bond plays the main character, with a name I can't remember and don't care to Google because I find him so boring and annoying.
However, the women are always darling little angels. From the lesbian lover, to another lesbian death metal music producer and med student (or something), the female cop and on. They all suck and are paper thin in every shape and form.
So, with crappy characters, maybe the plot is the book's saving grace? Nope. It takes about 400 pages for the book to get started, and even then, you've got to wait another 200 pages for it to really get going. I felt like I was listening to a friend of a friend tell a really awful story, then end it with, "Well, I guess you had to be there." Only, in this instance, since the author is dead, "You've GOT to love the Girl books, because the author died while writing them..." I know I'd personally probably hang myself if my name was attached to them.
Basically, the plot goes: every man, Russian, teacher, doctor, police officer, public servant and prostitute-goer is evil. One girl (ahem, woman) is going to globetrot and stop them all with her own sense of justice, armed with her iBook, invincible body and systematically growing intellect.
At least in the first book there was some sex, relationships, and other naughty stuff going on. In this edition, it's all boring, all nothing-business.
The writing in the book itself is almost as infuriating as the characters and plot. I don't know if the Swedish-to-English translation causes some things to be lost, or if they just hired the cheapest interpreter they could find, but there are a ton of clichés. More clichés than you'd see in a freshman writing course, which I'm kind of assuming this book was pinched from. More clichés than even the writing you find on PIC, except for my brilliant stuff of course.
There are many wasted pages in this book, as just about any negative reviewer will say. What I found most wasteful, and most boring, and most unnecessary, were the notes about mathematics at the beginning of the chapter. You see, there's a math problem that Lisbeth has to solve—actually, no she doesn't. It's just a subplot that goes nowhere, for no reason. We just learn that Lisbeth likes math problems, not for fun, just ‘cuz. So these little math blurbs seemed to me like the author said, "Hey, look how smart I am! I can cut and paste from advanced math textbooks!"
Then you have the glaring weird inaccuracies. Lisbeth buys a mansion for a few million Kronor, the Swedish form of money. This mansion has 21 rooms and only 3,000 square feet? I know not everybody uses the feet system and metric conversions are tough, but how big are these rooms? Do bookshelves and kitchen cabinets count as "livable space"? If so, NYC landlords are going to have a field day with this one.
A few years ago I made the mistake of reading Twilight. Mostly I wanted to see what all the hype was about, and it turns out, gay dudes and teen girls and soccer moms all love gay sparkle vampires. So what's all the hype about The Girl books? And who likes these tomes of boredom? And why? I have absolutely no idea. The only time I found this book entertaining at all was when two mosquitoes made sweet bug love on the cover.
But what the hell do I know? I've never written a book people read. And I'm semi-intelligent. I don't claim to know what the hell is going with other people's brains, but if you are a fan of this, then maybe you don't have anything going on at all.
