OK, I get it.

I get what all the fuss is about regarding The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Sometimes I will pick up a book that has garnered a lot of press, just to see if it's worthy (oh geesh, that sounds high anf freakin' mighty).

I swear that every second person I ran into, knowing that I am a writer, said, "Oh man, you know what you HAVE to read?!" And before they even said it, I knew it was going to be a Steig Larsson book.

Someone even dropped one off at my house, so I could resist no longer (these books are like the Borg). 100 pages in, I wondered what people were talking about. I found it interesting, the writing was fairly good, not super deep, but very readable. 200 pages in I started to get it. It was the sort of book that I couldn't wait to dip into, find out what was happening. 300 pages in I knew my sleep might suffer. I'm almost finished now, and looking forward to reading the next. What I really like is the slow intriguing build that drew me in - it wasn't the huge page turner that I'd hear about, though to be honest I rarely like those. The characters get under my skin, in a good way, and even though the mystery seems like on plucked from Agatha Christie, I really want to find out what happened to that girl, dammit. And what's going to happen to Mikael and Lisbeth... and I think I need another fix right now. Okay, okay, I give up, I'm hooked.