Addicted To: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

Or, rather I should say, Lisbeth Salander.  I stormed through Stieg Larsson's Swedish novel The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo in about a week, unable to put it down.  Now, I'm 100 pages into the follow-up The Girl Who Played with Fire.  Don't love it as much as the first one yet, but it's certainly still good.  More focus on Lisbeth and less on Mikeal.  In the first one, I was actually screaming.  Like, seriously shouting out loud.  If you've been underneath a rock as much as I have the last two years in regards to these books, pick them up and read them now.  You won't regret it!

In preparation for David Fincher's "The Feel Bad Movie of Christmas," I wanted to read the books before I saw his vision and adaptation.  The trailer is magnificent, (seen here) and, having now read the novel, looks to capture the sense of it pretty well.

I also watched the Swedish version, and though I'm not usually a stickler for film adaptations that change details from the book, this one did so so foolishly that it was distracting, and in many ways made the film less entertaining.  The pacing left something to be desired, and the film's final act dragged painfully.  Made me all the more nervous and excited for Fincher's adaptation (with newly-married Daniel Craig and The Social Network's Rooney Mara).

Above, you can already tell the stylistic differences between the Swedish version (left) and Fincher's version in terms of their depiction of Lisbeth.