Reading List : The Millennium Trilogy

In March sometime I picked up this book with an intriguing title "Girl with Dragon Tattoo". The book had been all over the bookshops for several months and finally I succumbed into buying the book. It was by an author I had never heard of or read...and I find myself increasingly picking up authors I have read and liked. This, largely because in the past few years there has been such a proliferation of new authors who have written unreadable books (will talk about them some time later). But this new author from a distant land (in a country where English is not native to it's writers) aroused enough curiosity to make that investment of Rs 499/-. But once I started I could not keep the book down...I read it as soon as I got home from college, I read till 3.00am!!! It's a FAT book (554 pages in tiny print). The book by Steig Larsson blew me away. Even after reading it stayed with me. The characters intrigued me and I could not wait to know them better. The book is a translation from Swedish, but more than the language it is the characters that caught my imagination. They are well etched out, full some and with loads of "character". It is a rare book today that catches both the character and plot effectively.

After that the next two books of the Millennium trilogy as this series is called, the Girl who played with fire and The Girl who Kicked the Hornet's Nest' followed and both these books too continued to have the same magic as the first one. His development of his two main characters Lisbeth Salander and Mikael Blomkvist is absolutely brilliant. They are both non conventional, smart and very "today" kind of characters.

It was with deep sense of loss that I discovered that Steig Larsson had in fact died soon after he had given the trilogy to his publisher. He never saw the phenomena that his books have become. And as a reader I feel sad that I will not be able to anything else by him. It's truly to all of us his ardent admirers and followers. But he will continue to live through his characters Lisbeth Salander and Mikael Blomkvist.

Next I will tell a bit more of another astonishing book I picked up from a first time author, this time from our neighborhood - Bangla Desh.

Cheers...keep reading, keep healthy, keep enthused!!!