Books on Tape

I have found that listening to books on tape is a great way for me to multi-task while I'm sewing. This past week I managed to get through a lot of quilting (pictures to come soon) by listening to Steig Larsson books.

The first in the series is Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. In this book, we are first introduced to the characters. Here is the write up:

Cases rarely come much colder than the decades-old disappearance of teen heiress Harriet Vanger from her family's remote island retreat north of Stockholm, nor do fiction debuts hotter than this European bestseller by muckraking Swedish journalist Larsson. At once a strikingly original thriller and a vivisection of Sweden's dirty not-so-little secrets (as suggested by its original title Men Who Hate Women), this first of a trilogy introduces a provocatively odd couple: disgraced financial journalist Mikael Blomkvist, freshly sentenced to jail libeling a shady businessman, and the multi-pierced and tattooed Lisbeth Salander, a feral but vulnerable super hacker. Hired by octogenarian industrialist Henrik Vanger, who wants to find out what happened to his beloved great-niece before he dies, the duo gradually uncover a festering morass of familial corruption - at the same time, Larsson skillfully bares some of the similar horrors that have left Salander such a marked woman.

That one I "read" earlier in the year when I was still living at the castle. Great book, at first a little slow, but once you get into it it is hard to put down.

This only enticed me to download the next in the series to keep me "company" while I worked this past week. Here is the write up on the second in the series:

Fans of the intelligent page-turners will be more than satisfied by Larssons' second thriller, even though it falls short of the high standard set by its predecessor, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, which introduced crusading journalist Mikael Blomkvist and punk hacker savant Lisbeth Salander. A few weeks before Dag Svensson, a freelance journalist, plans to publish a story that exposes important people involved in Sweden's sex trafficking business based on research conducted by his girlfriend, Mia Johansson, a criminologist and gender studies scholar, the couple are shot to death in their Stockholm apartment. Salander, who has a history of violent tendencies, becomes the prime suspect after the police find her fingerprints on the murder weapon. While Blomkvist strives to clear Salander of the crime, some far-fetched twists help ensure her survival. Powerful prose and intriguing lead characters will carry most readers along.

This is a great second in the series and really kept me intrigued during my work. Larsson is really good at writing about despicable men and their stupidity. I won't spoil any of the book, but can I just say that the way he has some of the men in these books written really, really angers me because I know that there are people out there that really do think this way.

I've now downloaded the third in the series:

The exhilarating conclusion to bestseller Larsson's Millennium trilogy (after The Girl who Played with Fire) finds Lisbeth Salander, the brilliant computer hacker who was shot in the head in the final pages of Fire, alive, though still the prime suspect in three murders in Stockholm. While she convalesces under armed guard, journalist Mikael Blomkvist works to unravel the decades-old cover up surrounding the man who shot Salander: her father, Alexander Zalachenko, a Soviet intelligence defector and longtime secret asset to Sapo, Sweden's security police. Estranged throughout Fire, Blomkvist and Salander communicate primarily online, but their lack of physical interaction in no way diminishes the intensity of their unconventional relationship.

I've just started "reading" this one and it already has me hooked.