Author: Stieg Larsson
Translator: Reg Keeland
Publisher: Vintage Crime, 2010
Originally published by Norstedt, 2006
It’s official: I’ve contracted a case of Millennium Trilogy Madness. I had a copy of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo laying around my office for like a year before I read it. What finally motivated me to pick it up was a one-day showing of the Swedish movie at the Gene Siskel Film Center, which I wrote about here.
But now that I’ve finished the second book in the trilogy, The Girl Who Played with Fire, I’m chomping at the bit to get to the third, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest. The second book is “better” than the first, as people have have told me. What is “better” about it for me is the thrill you get when you like characters in a story and have the opportunity to be with them again, to learn more about their pasts, and see where they are in the present. Things in the first book make more sense after reading the second. I imagine that the third will also shed more light on the first two.
Before I contracted it myself, I saw The Madness in the eyes of customers at work who briskly walk up to me with shoulders and head leaning slightly forward in excitement and ask where the new Stieg Larsson is. Not the Dragon one, not the Fire one, but the third one, the last one. Depending on their disposition, their faces either fall or get more animated when I tell them its coming out on May 25th.
I also read an article in The New York Times back in December about how some independent bookstores were bucking tradition and ordering quantity of the book from the UK publisher–where the book has been available–to satisfy customer demand. This, no doubt, annoys the US publisher, but made their customers happy and put some extra cash in their registers. I enjoy hearing about book fever, but thought that perhaps those bookstores and their customers needed to relax a bit. Have some patience. Enjoy the anticipation.
So what did I do after finishing The Girl Who Played with Fire? I let an idea float around in my mind for the afternoon and then sat down and ordered my own copy of the long awaited third book from Amazon UK. The paper back is already out in the UK so with shipping and handling it only cost about $17. It should arrive any day now. I’ve been checking my front porch regularly. Its like Harry Potter all over again.