Words for Wednesday: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played with Fire

I finished The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and it was quite good.  I also went to see the English version of the movie and highly approved of both Danial Craig and Rooney Mara as the main characters.  There seemed to be a lot of one-liners added to Salander's part that I don't remember from the book but that were very funny.  It was obviously very graphic but in a good way- after all, the women characters kick ass.

 I didn't like that the film version took out relationship with Cecilia and took out Anita all together.  I also hated (spoiler alert) that they changed the hiding location of Harriet from Australia to England.  It was much more believeable that she had "disappeared" when she was on a different continent/hemisphere.  I also thought that someone would have put "two and two together" when Anita and her husband died.

Something that I didn't like in the book and the movie was the whole money transfer and Wennerstrom take-down at the end.  While it was great to see Salander become "get the money," it felt like the story was finished when Harriet was found.  The mystery in Hedestad felt original but the money transfer just felt like another heist film.  And to have time for the money transferring, they cut out a lot of the island mystery.  We got hardly any history of the Vanger family.

But enough of that, on to the sequel.  When I started reading, The Girl Who Played with Fire, I was a little disappointed that it first started out slow and, like the first novel, was talking a lot about math and day to day drivel that seemed to drag.  Then I became discouraged by the fact that the story seemed to be trying too hard to bring Blomkvist and Salander into similar ground.  But then the whole new murder mystery kicks in and all of a sudden the book is gripping and interesting.  Haven't gotten too far, but it is turning into a great read.  I am not a fan of crime/thrillers at all but love this series.