The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (by Steig Larsson)*

My friend Elizabeth burned this audiobook for me, and my friend Sony loves it also, and a lot of people love it; I'm sorry to say I do not love it.

It starts with like three CDs worth of boring Swedish financier business, and then it gets into a plot that's interesting (if completely implausible and slightly predictable and maybe gratuitously focused on sexual violence against women) and then it ends... and then... there are three more CDs worth of boring Swedish financier business.

I can't help but think if Steig Larsson had lived, maybe people would have dared to tell him that hey, your plots need to go somewhere, and maybe it would be great if you didn't bore people to tears at the beginning and the ending of your book. And if your characters were just a tiny bit more realistic, that would be grand.

I do enjoy the Swedish touches like the crazy sandwiches everyone eats all the time (lingonberry and liverwurst and dill pickle, anyone?) and how people are just like "yeah, we're swingers!" and it is all okay and Swedish. But it left me with no desire to listen to the next book in the series. Which is a bad sign, considering that I voluntarily listened to Dan Brown.