The Girl who Played with Fire

I read the first of the acclaimed Dragon Tattoo series more than six months back, but it wasn’t until my sister finished the next two that I got my hands on the copies she sent me. 

What a fantastic book! It’s been some time since I read a novel into the wee hours of the morning. But I found this one heart-stoppingly exciting. Unlike the first, it plunges into action from the beginning itself. I loved the bit about Lisbeth devouring a geeky book like ‘Dimesions in Mathematics’. It added another dimension to her character. 

In The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, a considerable portion of the book went by in detailing Michael Blomkvist’s scandal regarding the Wennerstrom affair. We’re barely introduced to ‘the girl’ in the title. To me it felt like I’d hardly gotten to know her by which time the novel rolled to an end. 

The second book, and I believe the third as well, are all about Lisbeth Salander. Until the final scene, the book kept me riveted and inspired me to pick up the next one immediately. 

There is an enigmatic bit towards the end where it appears that she has stumbled upon some solution to Fermat’s theorem, which has driven mathematicians wild over the years. I wanted to know a little more about this. It appears she has found the solution, but not a mathematical one, more an interpretation of Fermat’s original words. 

For the mathematically inclined, there’s a good discussion of it online here and some detailed methods here. 

I started the third but had to abandon it halfway when the Flipkart shipment carrying my copy of Mockingjay arrived. Hope to finish that first before starting on Millennium III.