Too Late Or Too Early?

It’s exactly twelve minutes past five in the morning on my laptop time, and I’m doing what any sane person would do. It’s not my fault – I was reading.

I suppose reading is an understatement; I was so thoroughly engaged in my book that I forced myself to stay up until the morning hours just so I could turn the last page. Right now I have mixed feelings. On one hand, one cannot deny that the novel was, to some extent, a work of literary genius. I haven’t felt so captivated by an author’s writing style since last June, when I managed to finish a book in two days. On the other hand, I feel sick and disturbed. How could something so great be so disturbing at the same time?

Many of you might have heard about this novel before. It goes by the name of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, a detective novel originally written in Swedish by the late Stieg Larsson. I don’t want to spoil the plot for anyone who is planning to read it, but I would like to warn you in advance to

a) avoid reading the book at night

b) avoid reading it at all if vivid descriptions of gruesome, perverted killing mixed in with incest and rape is not your thing

If I would have known about point b in advance, I would have probably never picked up the novel in the first place. Larsson does a fantastic job of stretching out the storyline during the first 300 pages or so, and then speeding everything up before the reader has the opportunity to pause and think “Wait, this might give me nightmares”. In short, I don’t really know what to think right now, and will probably fall asleep soon enough. Good morning.