Girls with Dragon Tattoos Love Boxed Wine

Our perception of Best Sellers is apparently somewhat jaundiced. We've come to expect Da Vinci Codes,  or perhaps a few hundred pages of Tom Clancy putting info on the latest nightvision scopes and his Cold War Hangover Fever Dreams into a shaker, or various tales of how rich women finding themselves, bearing the sticker of Oprah's Book Club. We are not Oprah's Book Club, we are the Guild of Franzia--our souls are as hard and black as our livers.So it's a bit of a shock that best-selling sensation The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, praised by mothers and BYU folks alike, sits comfortably on our shelf with the rest of the urban despair and death camps.

Why has this harrowing tale of graphic rape, incest, and murder become such a huge hit with a mainstream audience? That we could not answer--perhaps we've underestimated the airport readers of the world--but we could say that the original Swedish title, Men Who Hate Women, wouldn't have gone over as well. Is the novel exploitative? Consensus from both sides of the gender line was "No". The crimes inflicted on Salander and Harriet were too vicious and brutal and just plain gross to come off as titillating at all. There was no slasher film ethos on display in Dragon, just a cold, horrid parable of the expression of power.

Salander came off as clearly the best character, as we discussed the curious circumstances of her social status, mentioned her origins as Pippi Longstocking homage, danced around spoilers from later books, and commiserated over her problematic relationship with author-proxy Blomqvist. Just how Mary Sue was Blomqvist, though? From his absentee fatherism to the way the text seems to go out of its way portraying how his status as a fashionable modern European puts him utterly out of his depth dealing with the Nazi past and dark isolationism of Old Europe, Blomqvist's creator Stieg Larsson comes across as being healthily self-deprecating in his proxy character.

And, as tradition mandates, we ragged on Blame, and how much better Blomqvist's perspective on his prison time was than whatshername.