Wednesday, August 31, 2011

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo


I finally got around to reading Stieg Larsson's mega best-seller, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. For a while it was hard to get my hands on a copy: while we have multiple copies, the book was so popular that they were always checked out.

The plot revolves around two characters, a reporter and an asocial computer hacker, the eponymous tattooed "girl." The reporter is hired by a wealthy industrialist to write his biography, but there are strings attached and skeletons in closets. Mayhem and mystery ensue.

Verdict: B+. It is an engaging page-turner that keeps you guessing until the end. But like all books in this genre it requires some suspension of disbelief. You should also be warned that this is an extremely violent book and most of the violence is directed against women. Fans of the book might argue that this was necessary for character motivation, but it wore thin after a while and could have been toned down without affecting the book negatively.

-Paul


If you like Stieg Larsson try these authors too:

Arnaldur Indridason
Jo Nesbo


Wednesday, August 24, 2011

Booklamp and Reading Recommendations

A new site called Booklamp claims to use a sophisticated software to analyze patters in a book's content. It then uses this information to match a book or author you like to other books or authors that you might like. There are many sites that claim to do this and some do it better than others. I tried a few searches and Booklamp seems to work pretty well. But it is new, so we will have to wait and see. Check it out.

-Paul