Reading Recommendation: The Girl Who Played with Fire

June 8th 2010 at 5:50 am

Well, this is the second Stieg Larsson I’ve recommended.   I’ve already bought the third.  And again become sad there will be no more.  These are good, well-written thrillers.  They’re paced in a way that a reader stays interested and yet can breath out from time to time.  They are in an exotic place, and they contain characters that grow.  There’s a lot of other novels that also have those things.  But none of the others has Lisbeth Salander.

I decided to poke about a bit.  Lisbeth has her own Wikipedia page (spoiler alert). She also has a fan page on the Internet.  That’s probably because of the movies (the page features the actress that plays Lisbeth).

Now, to make it even better, Lisbeth is not the only important character in the book.  She is the most compelling, but the other main character (Mikael Bomkvist)is also interesting.  He has a Wikipedia page, and the actor who portrays him has a fan page, but there is no fan page for the character.  The relationship between the two is fascinating.  And so are most of the supporting characters.  This is a deeply plotted book with excellent setting and line by line writing, but it’s over-the-top strength is all character.

As a writer, this is a clear statement about the importance of character.

Filed in Reading Recommendations. You can subscribe to the RSS feed for this entry to keep track of comments. You can also use this URL to trackback.