I know this is a thread for "recommended books" but I'm hoping to add a "not-so-recommended" post for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Recently suggested to me by a friend, but I personally found it to be overrated, bloated, and disappointing.
The glaring issue is that the book is, at a minimum, 150 pages too long, as Stieg Larsson just goes on and on and on about every minor character and every insigificant detail, and plot lines that are irrelevant to the main story. We really don't need to know what Mikael Blomkvist had for lunch everyday. Characters are built up for entire chapters as being essential to the plot, only to fade into the background never to be heard from again. Just when something gets interesting, he goes off in another direction for 40 pages before coming back to it. I have no issue with long books, but I do have an issue with unnecessarily long books. And considering how much time they spent building up the murder mystery and the other plot lines, everything was suddenly resolved a bit too conveniently and easily, to the point where it was unrealistic. I spent the last 100 pages just waiting for the book to finally end.
Now, it's not all bad. It's unfortunate this wasn't better edited, because there is an interesting premise here, and Larsson certainly wasn't a wholly untalented writer. To be sure, the "good" in this book is very good, and there were times when I was really pulled in. Cut the book's size by about 30% and you've got something here. But to me, this book wasn't nearly what it was cracked up to be, and given what a chore it was to read, I wouldn't recommend it if you were considering reading it.
