I just finished this, so I'll get my thoughts down while it's still fresh.
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a bit of a phenomenon. For those who haven't heard of it, it's a Swedish mystery novel published in 2005 after the author, Stieg Larsson's, death in 2004,. Two subsequent novels have been published - The Girl who Played with Fire and The Girl who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, exhausting the backlog of books left behind after the death. It has slowly caught fire internationally, originally published in America in 2008. By this year it's been making the book discussion group rounds at the libraries, and it has a film being made by David Fincher (of Seven and Fight Club fame). It was even recommended by a few people whose opinions I respect, which is a rare enough thing in and of itself, so I decided to give it a shot.
Ultimately, with all the above, it couldn't really live up to the hype. Don't get me wrong, this was a totally decent novel, and an fine entry into the mystery genre, but there was very little striking about it. Larsson was a journalist for many years before dabbling in fiction, and he dealt often with Sweden's extreme right and racist groups, and particularly with the remnants and current dealings of Swedish Nazis. While touched upon, there ends up being very little of this interesting subject in the novel. The Swedish title of the novel, Men who Hate Women (which I didn't hear until after finishing the novel), gives a much better idea on the content of the book.
In the end: I liked it enough, and I'll probably read the sequels, though I'm in no rush. This is a novel I'd recommend to mystery readers and avid fiction readers - it's got to be better then that next James Patterson novel you're going to read - but this won't be a "YOU HAVE TO READ THIS RIGHT NOW" moment for me. Next on the reading list - The Raw Shark Texts - though I'll probably post some novels that have been important to me before then.
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