The Girl with the Bad Books

I have read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, recommended by everyone, and hated it. I am bored with the predictability of the off the shelf 1970’s proto-feminism.

There are five female characters in the book, 4 of whom have been raped or abused by a parent or spouse, the search for one of them is the main plot, and the fifth has a husband who is understanding in sharing her with her long term lover. A secondary and bizarrely unconnected plot revolves around the financial misdeeds of the evil Wennerstrom. 

For those unable to grasp the subtleties each part of the novel contains a helpful hint. For example: 

Forty-six percent of the women in Sweden have been subjected to violence by a man.                          

2001’s Lies and Damned Statistics by Joel Best tries to deal with the simple falsity of these statistics, trying unsuccessfully to track down any statistical source for the often repeated “1/3 of female college students are raped”. It is what passes for known fact, without support, without any known source and repeated and regularly believed. It is simply a lie.

The heroine is way cool. Impatient with police she sets herself up to be raped, tasers the assailant into submission and then tortures and mutilates him. You go, girl. I prefer Clint Eastwood’s, “Make my day” or Humphrey Bogart’s “Don’t do it” to Major Strasser – give him the option not to get shot, and then at least shoot him dead in self defense without the sadism.

The heroine is also omniscient and therefore omnipotent – God can hack any computer in the world. As to Wennerstrom she hacks him into financial ruin and then leaves him alone in hiding. Until, that is, she finds that he made inappropriate advances to his office staff, so she has him offed by a contract killer.

My goodness. The shallowness is only made worse by several obvious translation errors from the Swedish. I need to learn not to read best sellers.