The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest is the final book in Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy and really? It could have been 200 pages long and I would have loved it. I enjoyed it, but it seemed to me like it was several hundred pages of set-up for maybe 100 pages of delicious, page-turning denouement. I felt like it took forever to really get going. When it got going, it was great, but it felt like it too a million years to get there.

Interestingly, I think this might make a better film as the focus should be on the stuff I really enjoyed and not the bits that dragged on a bit.

It's good, just not as good as it could have been or as good as the other two entries in the series.

The Girl Who Played with Fire is the second book in Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy. It's my second favorite book in the series, which ought to give you a clue about this series' diminishing returns. Which isn't to say it's not good. It is, it just falls far short of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.

Part of that for me is the nature of the mystery. The combination of the extended locked room mystery, the family secrets bubbling beneath the surface and the incredible payoff of the first book, pretty much anything that follows will pale in comparison and in this case the very nature of the mystery has changed. It's like picking up one of those serial killer series and all of a sudden the protagonist is out hunting down white collar criminals for embezzlement. Sure, the "men who hate women" angle of the original book's Swedish title is heavily at play in this volume, but the focus shifts from the personal, and much more satisfying, individual stories of Dragon to a "meta" story of governments, conspiracies and defectors. It's like switching from Thomas Harris to John Le Carre or something. Not necessarily bad but not what you'd expect or want.

Okay, enough comparisons… Taken on its own merits, this is still a damn fine book. The characters are fascinating and the complex mystery is enough to keep the pages turning. So, if you go in with slightly lowered expectations, you'll have a winner on your hands.

Holy moley, I'm a few weeks behind on reviews. I read this before the Tour and it's almost Vuelta time…

Anyway, yeah, I read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

Like crack it is.

This is a very readable book. This should come as no surprise as it's a best seller and has spawned movie franchises on two continents (I'm assuming the American version will be enough of a success to see the two sequels through to completion,) but just how good it is surprised me. It's an intense, surprising story full of great characters- the kind of book I'd stay up until 4:00 to finish (which is exactly what I did.)

So, yeah, check it out.

Me? I've got this queued up on Netflix. Got to start in on the movie versions.

I'd never read any of Murakami's work before What I Talk About When I Talk About Running . I'm not sure what kind of introduction to his work the book is. I'll learn that when I get into his fiction…

Anyway, this is a phenomenal book about life and running. I've trained for two races over the past year (a full marathon and a half) and I've run regularly on one of the routes he talks about in the book (the Charles River path) so I was an easy mark for this one. Still, he delivers in an easy, conversational style. He's passionate about running clearly, and takes it very seriously, but he never strays into fetish territory where running takes on improbable import, so the book has a nice, pragmatic balance.

My favorite bits, maybe surprisingly, were the anecdotes about total suffering. The description of his impromptu Athens to Marathon "marathon" and especially his chapter on his ultramarathon (a metric century- 100KM/62miles) were especially engrossing. My enjoyment stems from a little bit of empathy (running long distances hurts- sometimes a little, sometimes a lot) and a whole lot from his ability to get the pain (and in the case of the ultramarathon, slight madness) onto the page. His descriptions are vivid. They bring the heat, pain and suffering to life.

Definitely worth checking out. It's a slim volume, but it pays off in a big way.

Nerd Alert!

Read all about it here…