Graham Roumieu for The Globe and MailThe Globe and Mail
It was time. With the huge success of Swedish crime novelist Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy- The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played With Fire and The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest - and everyone I know raving about the books the way teenagers talk about vampire movies, I decided to become The Man Who Has Finally Read The Books.
And having spent the past week in the kind of totally engrossed, stop-talking-to-me-I'm-reading mode, I can report that the books are the perfect reads for the beach or the cottage this summer.
"There's something about summer reads that scream 'ripping yarn,' " says Joanne Saul, co-owner of Type Books, in Toronto. The Larsson books fit the bill, she says. "I couldn't put them down. I read each one in basically one sitting. And I am not a thriller reader at all."
The books, about crusading investigative reporter Mikael Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander, a hacker with a dark past and a wickedly compelling character who is The Girl of all three titles, aren't without fault. There are pacing issues - the narrative can drag - and long expository passages where you're practically screaming "Get on with it!" And there are dollops of cliché throughout the series, like the dashing reporter whom women can't resist.
But despite these problems, like Saul and everyone else I know who has read them, I couldn't put the books down. At a friend's cottage over the weekend I often found myself wrestling with whether or not it would be rude of me to bust out the book and dive on in while everyone else sat around talking. "Don't mind me," I imagined myself telling the group. "I'm just going to read. You guys do whatever you want."
And even though the books started to become increasingly cartoonish, with villains you'd expect to see in a James Bond movie, they also kept getting better and better. Larsson lays out mysteries that you absolutely have to find out as soon as possible. Once you've read mention of "All the Evil," how can you not say to hell with bedtime and keep on reading? I couldn't.
Which brings us to what exactly makes for a perfect summer book. For one, it can't be too hard on the brain. If you want to read the Tractatus by the pool, go ahead. But you're crazy. Nor should a great summer book be too much of a downer. A history of slavery while you sit on the beach tanning? Seriously? My friend, you need a yarn. A ripping yarn. You need something with sex and violence and intrigue. In other words, you need the Millennium trilogy.
Given that more than 40 million of the books are in print around the world, I'm pretty much preaching to the converted here. But for those of you who still haven't read them, it's almost worth doing so just to decide for yourself what all the hype is about. Considering how many conversation are going to be about the books this summer, you'll want to weigh in.
And there is something very satisfying in reading about characters trudging through the frozen streets of Stockholm, slurping 14 cups of coffee a day, to remind you just how good you have it sitting in the sun, your brain on autopilot, a beer in your hand.
Just don't take it too seriously. One blogger, at bookmavenmedia.com, recently tore into Larsson for failing to follow the rule of "show, don't tell."
"One of the things I most detest about commercial fiction, even at its best, is that by telling us things it takes away our ability to feel those things, to imagine those things, and to react to them with authentic emotion," the blogger wrote.
This, to me at least, is like criticizing Ulysses for not having enough car-chase scenes. It's commercial fiction, as the blogger herself pointed out, after all. It's supposed to be kind of cheesy and shouldn't be held to the standards of high literature.
Go ahead and poke fun of Larsson's writing the way Nora Ephron recently did in The New Yorker, sure, but don't get all riled up about the faults of the trilogy as if you're trying to impress a prof in your comparative lit class.
Remember, school is out. It's summer. Save your trenchant literary analysis for the heavy books you'll be reading come winter. What you need now is sex and intrigue and mystery. It's time.