The downside of an audiobook is that you can't really skim the tedious parts. It happened to me at the end of Wicked and it's happening to me again about 90 percent of the way through The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. The characters are just explaining and explaining things to each other, about corporate fraud, about how email and firewalls work, about this other character's motivations... on and on and on. If I had the book I could flip through the pages and get the gist of it, but when you are listening you have to hear it all.
OK, I realize I'm responding to a year-old post in a thread about what we should have read last year, but I just got done reading "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo," and really liked it. I've got the next one, "The Girl Who Played with Fire," but haven't read it yet. My wife just finished it and said it was really good, too. I see the 3rd one, "The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest," comes out in May. If I like the 2nd one, I'll probably get the 3rd one, too.
But I have to say that it was hard enough keeping everyone straight while reading the first book. I can't imagine trying to do that while listening to it. Even reading it, at one point, I got really confused by the fact that there was a male character named "Birger" and a female character referred to by her last name, "Berger." But the book did deal with genealogy, so that probably made it worse in that respect.
That aside, it was quite a good read - a good mystery. And the computer stuff wasn't too unbelievable, which can be a pet peeve of mine. They even try to enlarge a digital photo at one point, and it just gets blurry! That was awesome, because it never happens that way in fiction.
Anyway, if you didn't read it last year, it's worth a read this year.
