The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
How is the attention span?
More of a story about a crime drama than a crime drama itself, "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" follows a journalist sucked into a strange proposition to discover the secrets behind a decades-old suspected murder that took place in the middle of a highly dysfunctional family gathering.The book is set in Sweden and for an American reader, the Swedish proper nouns (towns/people) were a bit tough to follow, particularly in the context of trying to keep details straight for what I thought was a crime drama. It turns out those details aren't terribly necessary to the story (whose over-detailed nature seems to be a subject of some criticism), so just reading through casually was a better idea.For my taste, the book was a bit long and tedious in the first half, although it definitely picked up towards the middle and was quite exciting through the conclusion.Be warned that the subject matter contains some violence, including rape, incest, and battery of women. It isn't overly graphic, but the subject matter could definitely be disturbing for some.All in all it was an interesting read. I'd recommend reading it as a story rather than a crime drama, in as much as tracking all of the details and trying to solve the crime as a reader was a detriment to the first bit of the book for me. But reading it casually provided an interesting story with plenty of excitement towards the end. 