The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Almost simultaneously, I decided to get this novel as an audiobook and my friend told me I needed to read this book. Fate was now sealed. I would read the book with my ears.

The story built a little slowly at first. It took some time for the audio to pull me into the story. I had no real frame of reference to the action or location and my mind needed time to build the pictures in my head. But once I was about an hour in, the story shaped up and I was cruising through it.

I truly liked how this book was structured and how it involved more than just a murder. My main criticisms of mystery novels are that they focus almost exclusively on who was murdered and why. There are plenty of other crimes out there that can be equally as fascinating. If I did have a complaint, it was that the murder shaped up into a fairly typical presentation in modern stories. Also, I sussed out the main mystery rather early on. But unlike other novels, there was more to the story than that one point - a true saving grace. Some of these points did come out as a true shock and made perfect sense in their revelation.

This is an all around well-written novel. The characters are interesting, the plot comes together well, and the setting is new and intriguing. I wonder what the written experience would have been in comparison to the audio version.

On the audio version, Simon Vance is a well known name in the business. He's the primary reader on the version of DUNE that I am listening to now and I see that he read TIGERHEART by Peter David - I'll have to pick that one up. He does a very good job, but his women do sound very similar, so that when they are together it is a little hard to distinguish them.

Audiobooks require a little more discipline than written books. It's hard to stop mid-chapter and pick up again - you can't just back up a few sentences to figure out where you left off. You also need to store the character voices in your memory so you know who is speaking. Finally it seems to take longer. This book was around 17 hours in length. I probably would have taken just as long to read it, but I can't listen to the book on my iPod while also trying to interact with people or at work. This limits my listening time to commuting, walking the dog or working out. I could listen at home, but that would also require me to ignore my wife and daughter and be somewhat rude.

Still, I was impressed enough to get the recently released follow-up novel. I'll get to this one after I finish the next section of DUNE. I also need to read some books too. I'm getting woefully behind there and audiobooks seem to suck up my literary oxygen preventing me from focusing on anything else.