Operation Lit-ra-tchoo-rah (part I)

Funny how I realize only now that I have never, not once, talked about books on this blog. Chronos and I both love reading and since we use FG as a sounding board for everything else in our lives it's only appropriate that we do so too for this.

Because it's my our blog and I we can write about whatever I we want, this 'un will be about our my favourite books. (Easy to confuse pronouns.) I tend to go overboard when describing books, so this'll be a five-part series--every item gets its own post. In no particular order:

1. The Millenium Trilogy by Stig Larsson
Okay, so the writing style is nothing special--the author was a financial reporter before he became, very briefly, a novelist--but the story is fking amazing. In plain and simple terms the first book is a murder mystery, the second a crime novel, and the third a courtroom drama. However, those labels don't come nearly close enough to to accurately describing these works. If you look up "genre busting" you're going to get the text of these novels as your definition.

More to the point, the reason I love these books so much is because of antisocial hacker character Lisbeth Salander. She is unforgettable. She takes every stereotype accorded to a traditional female heroine and turns it on its head. Tall, physically powerful blond Amazon? Scratch that; she's skinny, elfin, 24 years old in her first appearance but passing for a teenager without blinking an eye. Rough but happy childhood with a father/mother who continues to inspire her? Actually, she was abused from an early age by her terrifying father, wrongly institutionalized at the age of thirteen, and then declared legally incompetent and psychologically unsound. A victim who breaks down crying and needs to be rescued? Hell no! She gets (SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER WON'T RUIN THE BOOK BUT WILL REMOVE A LITTLE TENSION FROM THE BEGINNING SO READ AT YOUR OWN RISK) savagely raped by her guardian in the first book--not once, but twice. And what does she do? She pops out the secret video she took of the act, breaks into said guardian's house, uses it to blackmail him into leaving her alone for the rest of her life, and (just in case we think she isn't deadly fking serious) tattoos a declaration of his crimes on his stomach in two-inch-tall blue letters.

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why you don't mess with Lisbeth Salander.

~Mnemosyne