"Vast dumps of unnecessary detail"

In the new New Yorker, Joan Acocella speculates about why people seem to love Stieg Larsson's novels. I read the first one ("The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo," if you've been far from any bookstore for the past couple of years) last fall. Jeff and I have enjoyed the wonderful acting of Noomi Rapace in each of the first two films. Jeff's just finishing up the second book, "The Girl Who Played With Fire," and as it's in our Kindle library, I will probably read it too.

But I didn't care for the first book at all. Any book in which the author tells you the memory specs for a computer (even an important computer) or describes the fruits of an IKEA shopping trip (much as I love IKEA) is not my kind of book. Yet even with their flaws, people are devouring these novels...with their "cheap thrills," "women warriors," and "punk fairy" heroine. Add to that a less-than-snowy-white picture of modern Sweden, and you apparently have a blockbuster in the making--even if you don't live to see it.

Meanwhile, Per Oscarsson, the actor who played Lisbeth Salander's "good guardian" in the films, appears to have died in a house fire at his home in rural Sweden late last week.