this book is surely tearing up the recreational reading circuit and once you get into the story you'll quickly see why. while not stylistically as clean and polished as a dan brown work, there is a certain ikea-like mood set in the tale and one that keeps you briskly working deeper and deeper in until you suddenly find yourself at the end.

if the author has a predominate quirk, it is this: he has some hangup or fetish for technology and includes details in a manner i can't believe his or any editor would let through. for instance, at one point in the story a character loses a computer and needs a replacement. the subsequent passage read:

Unsurprisingly she set her sights on the best available alternative: the new Apple PowerBook G4/1.0 Ghz in an aluminum case with a PowerPC 7451 processor with an AltiVec Velocity Engine, 960 MB RAM and a 60 GB hard drive. It had BlueTooth and built-in CD and DVD burners.

Best of all it had the first 17-inch screen in the laptop world wth NVIDIA graphics and a resolution of 1440x900 pixels, which shook the PC advocates and outranked everything else on the market.

with the state of modern technology, this stuff will sound impressive or relevant for about four months. hell, the machine was probably dated by the time the book went to the printers. to what advantage is this level of inconsequential detail allowed to be included? if you wanted to impress that the girl liked high end stuff wouldn't you be better served saying something like, she replaced her lost machine with the apple's latest release which would have made any technology minded person under the age of 25 drool with covetous envy.

altivec. powerpc. nvidia. bluetooth. 1440x900. 7451. 960mb ram.

i don't get it. at all. including such detail is only going to make the work prematurely date itself.

fact is when i sat down to write this review and thought back to this prose, i found the above passage in the 600 page text in less than two minutes because i remembered exactly where it fell on the page (next to the last paragraph in the bottom, left corner) given how befuddled i was by its inclusion.

oh well. aside from larsson's juvenile attraction for technology specs, the girl with the dragon tattoo is a nice winding ride with a more than enough attention-getting dips in the road along the way.