The One Night Stands Of Reading

In high school my friend Vanessa used to make fun of me for reading Airport Novels, books like Life of Pi or She's Come Undone or anything at all by David Sedaris. Basically any book lots of people were reading because lots of other people had already read it. The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is decidedly Airport in nature, wildly popular because of the story behind the author's death and also because the cover is just abrasive enough to be impossible to ignore. The story itself is really dark. Yeah, you might think the Swedes are all lingonberry jam and efficient furniture design but apparently that's just cover for the multi-generational incest/torture scandals and immense corporate corruption. It's a compulsively readable thriller but the writing veers into carelessness pretty often, the author sketching out scenes and telling the reader what to feel instead of bothering with character development or realistic dialogue. Still, all is forgiven because hidden among the murder scenes and rape sequences that would do Sade proud is a passage in which the narrator listens to the Eurythmics completely unironically. One more point for the Swedes.