Stieg Larsson’s The Girl Who Played with Fire starts with a confidence, maybe certainty, that the readers of his previous book will hold on no matter what. Lisbeth Salander gets a lot of pages. This is her book. She travels the world; reads Principia Mathematica; tries proving Little Fermat’s theorem; and gets her breasts enlarged, [...]
Posts under ‘Books’
Book Review: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo opens with the one last wish of a very old birthday boy Henrik Vanger, a retired industrialist. Every year he receives a new exotic flower as a birthday gift and it is a constant reminder of the decades old unsolved disappearance of his brother’s daughter that continues [...]
The Debate on Posthumous Works
This is turning to be a big year for posthumousness. Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy is stealing millions of hours of his readers’ lives. Previously unpublished (and in some cases, unfinished) works of Agatha Christie, Carl Jung, Graham Greene, Kurt Vonnegut, Vladimir Nobakov and many others are in various stages of publishing. Every week literature sections [...]
How Tom Rob Smith Implicated Mayawati
As someone who reads little contemporary crime fiction, I have taken to reading the highly acclaimed debut novels of each year. Tana French’s In the Woods (2007), Tom Rob Smith’s Child 44 (2008), and Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2009). I haven’t come to the latter one yet because I can’t decide [...]
Crossing Off Alex Cross
Going by James Patterson’s income, Alex Cross has been the most resourceful detective in the world for a while now. I suspect that it is the personal side of this “doctor detective” that endeared him to most readers. A sensitive family macho man who plays the piano to relax, watches animation movies with his children, [...]