The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest is a fine conclusion to the Millenium Trilogy, tying up the loose ends that have carried over for three novels and kept viewers around the world panting for the next installment. Though the novel is complex, it is the best and most exciting of the three–and highly rewarding since it builds on all the action that has gone before, further developing the characters we have come to love. Lisbeth Salander, the focus of all three novels, is hospitalized and kept in isolation for virtually the entire six hundred pages here, but she is a looming presence throughout, and when it becomes clear that she will have to face trial for some of the murders in The Girl Who Played With Fire, Mikael Blomqvist, a mentor, finds a way to unleash her formidable, secret skills as a hacker. The final resolution is a bittersweet experience–hugely rewarding because the important issues are resolved, but immensely sad because there will be no more books in the series.
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Continuing the story of Lisbeth Salander which he began in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Swedish author Stieg Larsson creates a fascinating character study of a young woman with a terrible past, a young woman who also suffers from a form of autism. Salander, having worked with Mikael Blomqvist in the preceding novel, in which she used her formidable skills as a computer hacker to help him solve a major mystery, is on her own for most of this one. Blomqvist, in the meantime, has continued with his work running Millenium magazine, which has been working on an article about the sex trade, its connection with the drug trade, and the high-ranking police and political officials who are involved in it. When two of his investigators are murdered, Lisbeth becomes involved as a hacker to help solve these murders. She herself is wanted for murder.
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The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo begins with the arrival of Mikael Blomqvist on remote Hedeby Island. Blomqvist has been hired to do research for the biography of prominent Swedish industrialist Henrik Vanger and his large family, and he is looking for a place to stay where he can avoid attention. Blomqvist, a financial journalist for Millenium magazine, is due to serve a three-month prison sentence soon for libeling a man he accused of criminal activity. The temporary job he accepts on this remote island involves the search for Harriet Vanger, Henrik’s niece who disappeared from the island when she was sixteen–thirty-seven years ago. Despite searches that continued for many years, no trace of her has ever been found. Hired to help Blomqvist in his research is an assistant, Lizbeth Salander, a disturbed young computer hacker who is under the guardianship of the state. The novel becomes an utterly compelling can’t-put-it-downer, as the reader “travels” with Blomqvist and Salander, sharing their frustrations and their physical danger as they investigate Harriet’s decades-old disappearance.
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Jeanette Winterson’s beautiful and magnificently descriptive, impressionistic novel tells two interconnected stories from two different periods over a hundred years apart, each of them asking who we are as humans, what is our connection to the past, and what makes our lives worth living. On its most modern level, it is the story of Silver, born in 1959, “part precious metal, part pirate.” An orphan, Silver now lives with Pew, an old, blind lighthousekeeper, on an island in northwest Scotland. The lighthouse, we learn through Pew’s stories, was built by Robert Stevenson, father of Robert Louis Stevenson, who “escaped” the family business. In 1878, however, Robert Louis Stevenson visited the light and was fascinated by the story of Babel Dark, a local preacher, who became the inspiration for Mr. Hyde in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and whose story represents the second of the story lines. A rich novel which the reader will want to read slowly to savor, Lighthousekeeping marks a welcome return of Winterson to the compressed, poetic style of her earlier novels. (One of my Favorites for 2005)
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Often regarded as Conrad’s masterwork, Nostromo is also Conrad’s darkest novel, filled with betrayals at all levels and offering little hope for man’s redemption. A novel of huge scope and political intrigue, it is also a novel in which no character actually wins. All must accept the ironies which fate has dealt them. Setting the novel in the imaginary South American country of Costaguana, the story centers around a silver mine in the mountains outside of the capital, Sulaco, vividly depicting its allure and the price each character pays for its success. Rich in atmosphere, vibrant in description, filled with characters representing all walks of life and philosophy, and set in a country where revolution is a way of life, the novel is full of dark portents and bleak political outcomes.
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