Millennium Trilogy: The Man Who Loves Women

Well, to add insult to injury, after my poisonous nightmare the night before, I woke up at 11:30pm last night and couldn't get back to sleep for four hours. I'm beginning to wonder if something is eating at me, but if anything is, it's at a level invisible to my conscious mind.

Anyway, since I was awake I finished reading The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, the third book in Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy. (Thanks to ron_drummond for sending me the first book and therefore getting me addicted!) I saw the three Swedish theatrical films, the American film of the first book, and the Swedish mini-series version of the trilogy before reading the books, so I was to a large extent reading the books against the movies. I think the books are more successful than the mini-series at building up from, as it were, the personal to the political (i.e., up to the level of a government conspiracy), although the mini-series does a good job of honing the books down to a dramatically satisfying story arch.

However, I'm not going to tackle the whole trilogy here, and instead I'm going to focus on something that has bearing on a discussion surliminal and I had about the character of Mikael Blomkvist in the American film of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. ( Cut for SPOILERS. )