The Girl Who Played with Fire by Stieg Larsson

“She was genuinely worried. First Kalle Fucking Blomkvist, then the name Zala, and now Nils Fucking Slimebag Bjurman together with an alpha male on steroids with contacts in some gang of ex-con bikers. Within a few days, several ripples of disquiet had materialized in the orderly life Salander was trying to create for herself.” – Chapter 10, pg. 141

“The three parallel investigations into the murders in Enskede churned on. Officer Bubble’s investigation enjoyed the advantages of authority. On the surface, the solution seemed to lie within reach; they had a suspect and a murder weapon that was linked to the suspect. They had an ironclad connection to one victim and a possible connection via Blomkvist to the other two victims. For Bublanski it was now basically a matter of finding Salander and putting her in a cell in Kronoberg prison.” – Chapter 18, pg. 258

“When all the media assertions were put together, the police appeared to be hunting for a psychotic lesbian who had joined a cult of Satanists that propagandized for S&M sex and hated society in general and men in particular.” – Chapter 21, pg. 313

“I’ve never been sympathetic towards people who take the law into their own hands. But I’ve never heard of anyone who had such a good reason to do so. At the risk of sounding like a cynic, what happens tonight will happen, no matter what you or I think. It’s been written in the stars since she was born. And all that remains is for us to decide how we’re going to behave towards Lisbeth if she makes it back.” – Chapter 32, pg. 490

So those were some of my favorite quotes from The Girl Who Played with Fire by Stieg Larsson

Again, I didn’t come across too many quotes worthy of copying down. Larsson seemed more concerned with storytelling than with describing mundane events in an interesting, amusing way that has never been done before. Which is probably best because “she had cut him out of her life as surgically and decisively as she deleted files from her computer” is one ridiculous metaphor. Let’s just blame the translator, shall we? Oh, and keeping with the status quo set by The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, it took 200 pages for this book to finally pull me in. In fact, for the first hundred pages or so, I was completely at a loss as to where the story was headed.

Is this going to be about some super hurricane/tornado named Matilda? Bjurman? Zala? Perhaps a 503 page spread advertising IKEA furniture? For a moment there, I mistakenly thought it I had picked up my old algebra textbook. At least this time the police were involved. It made things a little bit more realistic. And I definitely did a double take (those are always fun), when reaching for my water glass as I read the most important line of the book. Now I know why so many people were anxiously waiting for the third novel in the Millennium trilogy to be released… this book just ended. Without any sort of wrap up or tying of loose ends. On to the next!

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

“After putting down the telephone the eighty-two-year-old birthday boy sat for a long time looking at the pretty but meaningless flower whose name he did not yet know. Then he looked up at the wall above his desk. There hung forty-three pressed flowers in their frames. Four rows of ten, and one at the bottom with four. In the top row one was missing from the ninth slot. Desert Snow would be number forty-four.”
– Prologue, pg. 6

“Armansky’s star researcher was a pale, anorexic young woman who had hair as short as a fuse, and a pierced nose and eyebrows. She had a wasp tattoo about an inch long on her neck, a tattooed loop around the biceps of her left arm and another around her left ankle. On those occasions when she had been wearing a tank top, Armansky also saw that she had a dragon tattoo on her left shoulder blade. She was a natural redhead, but she dyed her hair raven black. She looks as though she had just emerged from a week-long orgy with a gang of hard rockers.”
– Chapter 2, pg. 32

“She frowned. Blomkvist’s strange behavior in the courtroom had presented an interesting challenge, and Salander did not like aborting an assignment once she had started. People always have secrets. It’s just a matter of finding out what they are.” – Chapter 7, pg. 102

“As far as he could tell, she had been looking towards the corner of the building that housed Sundström’s Haberdashery. It was a perfectly normal corner of a building, where a cross street vanished behind it. What did you see there, Harriet?” – Chapter 16, pg. 237

So those were some of my favorite quotes from The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

I have heard that Larsson’s Millennium trilogy is supposed to be the Lord of the Rings of mystery novels. Maybe I have forgotten how bad this genre is, but I wasn’t that impressed. First off, it annoyed the heck out of me that it took 200 pages for the two main characters to meet. Not that Salamander (you can’t describe a character as lizard-like and then name her Salander) got much page time, despite the book’s misleading title. Although, I’m glad the publisher changed it from Men Who Hated Women, because that’s just plain stupid. Also, the author is clearly male – the casual sex thing Blomkvist had going with Berger would never fly in the real world. All women are jealous. At

least he got that right at the very end with Salamander …even though the age difference made me cringe (another inaccurate male fantasy). My last and biggest gripe: How freaking cliché can you get? They both independently discover who the killer is at the same time, stupidly refuse to involve the police, and then one of them confronts him ALONE leaving the other to save the day? Yeah, we’ve never seen that happen before. EVER. Of course, I’ll still be reading the next book just because Larsson never explained what ‘All The Evil’ meant and I want to find out what Robert Lindberg has to say for himself on his M-30 next Midsummer’s Eve.