Daily Archives: 2011-02-21

I’ve been reading Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy in the evenings for the past few days, and completely understand the excitement they generated – the writing is EXCELLENT, with voices so distinct that the many unmarked jumps in the narrative are a feature rather than a problem (think Faulkner, but more accessible), and a wonderfully complicated story, with none of the “How many pages will it take me to correctly surmise the entire plot” property of other recent pop literature (I’m looking at you Dan Brown). Thus far they powerfully remind me of William Gibson’s Bigend books, which I really liked as well, but with vastly more, more complicated characters.
EDIT: Just after I wrote the post I found the first irritating mistake among the sea of intriguing gratuitous detail: One of the characters threatens another, very specifically, with a Glock. About 10 pages later, a third character takes the gun and “flicked off the safety”- Glocks conspicuously don’t have manual safeties. Interesting that that is the first detail in 370 pages that I noticed a problem with, particularly since many of the others were about computers and other topics I’m more familiar with.