I Finally Get Around to Responding to Your Comments (and an announcement)

As those of you who have been kind enough to comment on my posts (and aren't spambots) probably know, I am absolutely terrible about responding.  The cases where I have responded are few and far between, and I apologize.  So, here and now, I'll respond to some.

On the post 100 Years, 94 books:


Julia Jones wrote (way back on February 22nd, 2013):

Hi Matt. I've just published Fifty Years in the Fiction Factory which is a study of a anonymous hack writer of best selling periodical fiction - all instalments, never published between covers. Therefore quite different from books on your list - different class of reader for one. The interest we share, however, is the correlation between mass popularity and social change / public obsessions. The PhD on which I based my book + all research materials are available free at www.fiftyyearsinthefictionfactory.com or via my website www.golden-duck.co.uk 
One piece of advice which I'm sure you don't need, is don't sneer at your material or it's readers. So easy to be intellectual snobby about popular fic. So wrong.

I try to avoid sneering, but I'm not above calling out fault where I see it.  There's plenty of pop fic that I enjoy or at the very least is competently written (some early Clancy or Grisham or Ludlum).  I will and have called out people for lazy or lousy writing, and, at least in the case of Grisham's The Appeal, I called out fans, or at least a specific group of fans.

On February 26th, 2013, Mike wrote:

Glancing down this list, it's hard to miss the impact of Hollywood on the popularity of books. Or is it Hollywood's fascination with the most popular books? I think it's the former.

Which came first, the chicken or the egg?  

On August 28th, 2013, Emma Lavoie wrote:

Thank you so much for the wonderful book! I finished it a few days ago and cannot get it out of my head. It is pure magic. It was everything I hoped it would be and much more. Thank you so much. You are a great writer... EL James.

I think you have me confused with someone else.

On April 14, 2014, Munboy wrote:

Love the idea and look forward to reading your reviews... One thing, though. The background is horrible and makes your site extremely hard to read on my phone.

I am so sorry it took me forever to get around to fixing this.  

In response to 1929: All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque:

Jennifer R. Hubbard wrote:

I've read this twice and think of it as one of the "War is bad" books. But by now, that message has been said and shown so many times. I'm thinking now the real question for literature to address is not, "Is war bad?" or "How bad is war?" but, "Since we've all been saying that war is bad for so many years, how come we keep engaging in it? What's the attraction? Why do we keep sticking our hands in that fan blade even though we know it's going to be a gory mess?"

That's a great point.  I think Remarque does ask this question, which was especially relevant in a war without any clear moral or philosophical underpinnings.  The soldiers were all average folk who didn't particularly want to be there, but found that they had no choice.  I think another question that Remarque asks, and continues to be asked by other writers, is "what does war do to people and society?"  

Paul Gottlieb wrote:

I recently read this novel. I think I expected a lot of noble, sentiment, but what I got was an incredibly vibrant book, full of life, action, and an almost cinematic realism. Yes, the book is anti-war, but it succeeds as an anti- war novel because it imbues it's characters with such life that you feel the tragic waste in every loss of life. I had never imagined that a novel this old--and a "classic" to boot--would be so filled with life!

There are plenty of classics that are incredibly vibrant, but the ones that are often touted in high schools and colleges are the ones that are far more formally structured and, for lack of a better term, crystallized.  Check out Henry  Miller's Tropic of Cancer or Dalton Trumbo's Johnny Got His Gun.

In Response to "Truman Capote and David Frost Talk about Sex, Love, and Friendship:

spacepotatoes wrote:

It was interesting to see Capote's thoughts on friendship. I read a Vanity Fair article not too long ago about Capote losing several good friends just a few years before this interview because of the way he used them in his writing.

He certainly did.  For years he had been promising to present his magnum opus, but never produced anything.  Eventually, his agent convinced him to publish pieces of what later became Answered Prayers, most notably (and infamously) La Côte Basque 1965 which presented intimate details of high society figures.

In response to 2005: The Broker by John Grisham:

Paul Gottlieb wrote:

I'll bet that when you started this project, filled with youthful enthusiasm, you didn't anticipate that you would end up slogging your way through the swamp of Grisham, Dan Brown, and--worst of all--Tim Lahaye and Jerry Jenkins. A trip through the sewers of Paris would be more be a more pleasurable experience!

You're right, and possibly psychic.  You posted this three days before I flew from Porto to Paris.  (Which meant I arrived about 12 hours after the Charlie Hebdo massacre)

In response to 2008: The Broker by John Grisham:

Paul Gottlieb wrote:

I am not a John Grisham fan, and I think your review of “The Appeal” is mostly spot on. But I have to take strenuous exception to one point you made: To anyone familiar with the real-life behavior and attitudes of the Walton Family, The Koch brothers, or West Virginia coal magnate Don Blankenship, the portrait of Carl Trudeau seems like an accurate, perhaps slightly flattering, depiction of a modern Oligarch. Compared to his real-life counterparts, Lex Luthor seems relatively harmless, perhaps even just misunderstood.

The problem is that Trudeau is constantly performing, even when he's completely alone, he acts like he's in a bad soap opera and is desperately trying to get the audience to understand that he's the bad guy.  Even the Koch brothers must have hobbies besides evil monologizing.

In response to 2010: The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest by Stieg Larsson:

yellojkt wrote:

The level of sexual violence and the authorial wish-fulfillment place on the main character can be a bit off-putting.

True.  I guess after reading Gravity's Rainbow and American Psycho, this series is less shocking to me, but you're right.  The wish-fulfillment is more forgivable, but yeah, this novel is an investigative journalist writing about a crime-solving investigative journalist.  

I'd like to thank, en masse, everyone who wished me well.   I'd also like to thank a few commenters specifically for consistently providing interesting and thought provoking posts (even if I've been too lazy to respond to them).

Capewood has been reading through the list, and posting his thoughts on the book's original review pages.  If you're reading this, there is a free (and legal) copy of So Big online at openlibrary.org (this is the internet archive's library site).   The link is 

https://openlibrary.org/works/OL2646769W/So_Big

Paul Gottlieb, Allen Knutson, Jennifer R. Hubbard, yellojkt, and Man of la book:  I'd like to thank you also for following me for so long and for your wonderful comments.

And my mom reads this and always mentions how she doesn't want to leave comments because she thinks it would be embarrassing for me.   It's not embarrassing, and you can make up a username if you want.  

Now, for the announcement.  

As you probably realize, I'm getting close to the end of my list.  And the question you're probably asking is: What next?   Well, here's the answer.

By the time I finish the last book in the bestseller review series, I'll have a weekly Monday-Friday post schedule.

Monday: Alternates between "From Page to Screen to Screen" and "Raiders of the Public Domain"

I'll explain what those are after the rest of the schedule

Tuesday:  Links from around the web

Wednesday: Mini-essay, anecdote, etc.

Thursday: What I'm Reading/Watching

Friday: Before and After Quiz.

Anyway, as for what those things on Monday are.  

As I've been doing this project, I found that not only were a lot of these novels given film adaptations, but many were given multiple film adaptations.  So this got me thinking about source material that had been adapted to the screen numerous times.  So, From Page to Screen to Screen will look at novels, stories, and plays that have multiple film adaptations, and will include reviews of the films and a decision on which is the best adaptation and which the best film.  The first installment will be on Ernest Hemingway's short story "The Killers," and the two film adaptation: the 1946 Lancaster/Gardner film noir and the 1964 John Cassavetes/Angie Dickinson film with Reagan as one of the villains.  

"Raiders of the Public Domain" will be an original piece of long fiction, published serially.  I won't give anything away now, so you'll just have to wait and see.   

The Library of Babel

Borges' famous story/thought experiment is coming to life.

If you're unfamiliar with the story, stop what you're doing and pick up a copy of Ficciones right now. But assuming that's not feasible, a brief summary of the story/thought experiment.  Imagine a library that contained every possible book of a certain character length. There's no organizing principle to the library, the books are distributed randomly.  Every possible permutation of characters is present.  Everything that ever had been written, "Everything: the minutely detailed history of the future, the archangels' autobiographies, the faithful catalogues of the Library, thousands and thousands of false catalogues, the demonstration of the fallacy of those catalogues, the demonstration of the fallacy of the true catalogue, the Gnostic gospel of Basilides, the commentary on that gospel, the commentary on the commentary on that gospel, the true story of your death, the translation of every book in all languages, the interpolations of every book in all books."    But, mostly, it would be pure gibberish. Several  hundred pages of random letters, numbers, and punctuation marks. 

Writer/programmer Jonathan Basile has created libraryofbabel.info, which, though not yet complete    "[a]t present it contains all possible pages of 3200 characters, about 104677 books."  But this is not a mere random text generator.  "We do not simply generate and store books as they are requested - in fact, the storage demands would make that impossible. Every possible permutation of letters is accessible at this very moment in one of the library's books, only awaiting its discovery."

Which means that, somewhere on this website lies code that will generate not only every sonnet ever written, but every sonnet that ever could be written. I'll leave the metaphysical questions aside to ask a much more pragmatic one.  Does Jonathan Basile now hold the copyright to every sonnet not yet written?  I guess this leads to a more technical question of whether or not code that generates a piece of text is enough to constitute copyright of that piece of text (I'm not a lawyer, and I'd hate to be the first lawyer to handle a case like this).  The Library of Babel is one thing as a thought experiment, but as an actuality it's, well, mindblowing.

2011: The Litigators by John Grisham

The Author:

John Grisham (1955-    ) was born in Jonesboro, Arkansas, the son of a construction worker. At the age of twelve, his family moved to Southaven, Mississippi.  He graduated with a B.S. from Mississippi State University in 1979.  He passed the Mississippi Bar exam in 1981, and received his J.D. from the University of Mississippi.  In 1981, he married Renee Jones, with whom he had two children. 

Grisham began a successful law practice in 1981, starting in criminal law, and moving to more lucrative civil law.  In 1984, he was elected to the Mississippi State House of Representatives, a position he held in addition to running his law practice.  A case he witnessed while in the state legislature led him to write his first novel, A Time to Kill (1989).  He had trouble finding an agent and publisher.  He eventually found both, and a limited run of 5,000 copies was printed of his first novel.  In 1990, Grisham resigned from his position on state legislature and retired his practice.  In 1991, Doubleday published his second novel, The Firm.  It was a massive commercial success, as were his third and fourth novels, The Pelican Brief (1992) and The Client (1993).  His fourth book, The Chamber (1994) is the first of eleven novels to become the number one annual bestselling novel in the U.S.

Since 1989, Grisham has published a total of 29 novels, five children's books, and a work of non-fiction.  His family splits its time between homes in Oxford, Mississippi, Charlottesville, Virginia, and Chapel Hill, North Carolina.  Grisham also serves as a board member on the Innocence Project. 

The Book:

Length: 385 pages
Subject/Genre: Lawyers/Legal 'thriller'

This is it.  The last goddamned one.  Let's get this over with.  The Litigators is about a group of litigators (what a shocker).  You start with two low rent ambulance chasers (cf. The Rainmaker) and a successful up-and-comer at a big firm who quits after finding his job meaningless (cf. The Street Lawyer).  They get themselves involved in a big ol' class action lawsuit (cf. The Rainmaker, The Runaway Jury, The Appeal).  There's some wackiness (cf. The Brethren) and a bunch of misfits being misfits while trying to make a living practicing law (cf. The Brethren, The Rainmaker).  There's a case, there are twists in the case, people keep secrets, some people lose a lot of money, some people make a lot of money (cf. every damned Grisham novel after The Chamber).

This isn't Grisham's worst novel, but it's nothing more than a mixture of his decent novels.  The problem now is that I have pretty much nothing to say about it that isn't itself a repeat of an earlier Grisham review.  I could see it being entertaining if someone hadn't read ten more of these freakin' things in the last several months, but I don't have that luxury.  It is thoroughly, relentlessly, and all and all average.  It is neither remarkably good, nor remarkably bad.  It is exactly what I would expect when someone says 'Grisham novel,' nothing more, nothing less.  Maybe the reason this guy sells so well is that by the time the next book comes out, his readers have forgotten his last one.  (I know I'm being rather harsh, both on Grisham and his readers.  This is just me venting frustration.  Eleven of them, for crying out loud!)

Look, it was okay.  I might have even enjoyed it a bit if it didn't feel like I'd read it ten times already.  It's the type of book that a Grisham fan would like, in that it's perfectly standard fare for Grisham.  If that sounds like something you'd like, then go ahead and read it.  Or read any other Grisham novel for the exact same result.  I don't care.  I'm just glad to be done.

Bestsellers of 2011:

1. The Litigators by John Grisham
2. 11/22/63 by Stephen King
3. The Best of Me by Nicholas Sparks
4. Smokin' Seventeen by Janet Evanovich
5. A Dance with Dragons by George R. R. Martin
6. Explosive Eighteen by Janet Evanovich
7. Kill Alex Cross by James Patterson
8. Micro by Michael Crichton
9. Dead Reckoning by Charlaine Harris
10. Locked On by Tom Clancy and Mark Greaney

Also Published in 2011:

The Round House by Louise Erdrich
The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides
Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer
The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach
Pym by Mat Johnson
1Q84 by Haruki Murakami
Swamplandia! by Karen Russell
The Pale King by David Foster Wallace

Friday Before and After Quiz #5

If you don't know the rules, see the first quiz.



1. A 6th century B.C. guide to doing battle against alien invaders.



2. After discovering the secret to transparency, a detective infiltrates a secret anarchist society.



3. A traveling sideshow freak/cult leader has a doomed relationship with a wealthy but troubled Harvard student.



4. An 18th century Irish seaman sets off with his dog in search of America.



5. After his father dies on 9/11, a young boy follows a series of clues leading to a mysterious operation on Devil's Tower.



Scroll down for answers!







1. The Art of War of the Worlds: Sun Tzu (6th c. B.C.) and H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds (1897)

2. The Invisible Man Who Was Thursday: H.G. Wells' The Invisible Man (1897) and G.K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday (1908)

3. Geek Love Story: Katherine Dunn's Geek Love (1989) and Erich Segal's Love Story (1970)

4. Gulliver's Travels with Charley: Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726) and John Steinbeck's Travels with Charley (1962)

5. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close Encounters of the Third Kind: Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005) and the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)

What I'm Reading/Watching

I finally got around to reading Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye.  Salinger's ability to simultaneously show Holden's perspective and a more objective adult perspective is extraordinary and reminds me of some moments in The Sun Also Rises where Jake's denial takes center-stage.  Holden personifies the adage that "we judge others by their actions and ourselves by our intent."

Saw the Avengers sequel.  It's a solid action/superhero movie, and I admit to being a bit of a sucker for those.  

Season three of Orphan Black is getting underway on BBC America, and it's one of the best sci-fi shows currently on the air (and Continuum looks like it's getting the ax, so the competition is narrowing).  

Started listening to the podcast: The History of Philosophy without Any Gaps (well, Western philosophy anyway.  But, like, all of it).  The episodes are generally 15-20 minutes long, so some guys like Aristotle or Plato get a dozen episodes apiece, but all the lesser figures still get at least half an episode, and their often very interesting.  Anaximenes, for example, thought that humans couldn't have been created in their original state, because no one would have been there to care for the children.  Hence, the first humans gestated in the belly of a fish before erupting at adulthood.  Anaximander thought the Earth was surrounded by a sphere of fire, and the light we see from the sky was due to a thinning and thickening of the air.  While it's easy to laugh with hindsight, the reasoning leading to these conclusions is fascinating.

Another post about post-apocalyptic fiction

Last week, I wrote a post about the Guardian's article on the modern popularity of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic literature.  I recently read this article by NPR (titled "Does Post-Apocalyptic Literature Have a Non-Dystopian Future?"), which is worth a read, as it has some good info on the genre at the moment.  NPR's article is better than the Guardian's, because NPR at least realizes that Cormac McCarthy didn't invent post-apocalyptic fiction.  However, as good it managed to be throughout, NPR failed to stick the landing.  Their conclusion reads:

Post-apocalyptic books are thriving for a simple reason: The world feels more precariously perched on the lip of the abyss than ever, and facing those fears through fiction helps us deal with it.

Really?  More "precariously perched...than ever?"  More so than, oh, let's say the Cuban Missile Crisis and the height of the Cold War?   Which was pretty close to the publication date of Shute's On the Beach (1957), Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle (1963), Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959), Jackson's The Sundial (1958), Ballard's The Wind from Nowhere (1961) and The Drowned World (1962), Boulle's Planet of the Apes (1963) or Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove (1964). Quick question: besides the Kubrick movie, what do all of these have in common? Answer: They were SF/Horror novels. Hey, you know what wasn't mainstream in the 1950s and 1960s but is now? SF/Horror novels. There are more apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic novels now because authors aren't worried about no one being willing to buy them, or of being pigeonholed in a marginalized genre. 

What McCarthy did was prove that there was a market for post-apocalyptic fiction that wasn't firmly nested within the market for science fiction and horror.  The NPR article, and much criticism in general, thinks that popularity of a genre must be due primarily to the culture surrounding it, and to that culture only.  There's a lot to be said about why we like post-apocalyptic literature, and there's plenty to be said about what types of post-apocalyptic literature we read now, as opposed to 50 years ago.  The problem that NPR and the Guardian both have is that they look at the rise in popularity of post-apocalyptic fiction, and start with the assumption that there is something about this generation's experience that makes them more prone to writing/reading about the end of the world than were the generations before us.  It ignores that popularity is in no small part dependent upon availability, which is itself dependent on popularity.  

But even with all these caveats, it seems odd to give McCarthy sole credit for sparking this trend.  In the same year The Road was published, we also had Max Brooks' World War Z, Stephen King's Cell, Will Self's The Book of Dave, the TV show Jericho and the movie Children of Men.  And that's coming on the tail of Spielberg's The War of the Worlds, The Dawn of the Dead remake, Atwood's Oryx and Crake, part of Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, Vaughan's Y: The Last Man, 28 Days Later, The Matrix trilogy... and this is only going back to the beginning of this century and ignoring the countless genre potboiler post-apocalyptic novels.

2010: The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest by Stieg Larsson

The Author:

Karl Stig-Erland Larsson (1954-2004), better known as Stieg Larsson, was born in Västerbotten, Sweden, where he lived with his grandparents.  As a teenager, he began editing science fiction fanzines.  In 1977, he moved to Stockholm, where he continued his involvement with the SF community, while working for a news agency.  He joined the Communist Workers League and was known for his journalism and activism exposing white-supremacist and totalitarian groups.  He founded the Expo-foundation, which researched right-wing extremist groups and published exposés of their findings, which led to a steady stream of death threats.  He co-wrote four non-fiction books, Extremhögern (The Extreme Right) (1991), with Anna-Lena Lodenius; Sverigedemokraterna: Den nationaella rörelsen (Sweden Democrats: The National Movement) (2001), with Mikael Ekman; Sverigedemokraterna från insidan: Berättelsen om Sveriges största parti utanför riksdagen (Sweden Democrats from the inside: The Story of Sweden's Largest Party Outside Parliament) (2004), with Maria Blomquist and David Lagerlöf; and Debatten om hedersmord: Feminism eller rasism (Debate on Honor Killings: Feminism or Racism) (2004), with Cecilia Englund.  (N.B.: Title translations are done through google translate, so no guarantee on accuracy.)

Larsson started writing fiction as a hobby in 2001, and was partway through his third novel when he approached a publisher.  Larsson died unexpectedly of a heart attack in 2004, before any of his novels were published.  The first novel, Män som hatar kvinnor (Men Who Hate Women) (2005) was translated to English by Reg Keeland and retitled The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2008).  His second novel Flickan som lekte med elden (The Girl Who Played with Fire) was published in Swedish in 2006 and English in 2008.  His last complete novel, Luftslottet som sprängdes (The Aircastle that Blew Up) was published in 2007 and translated into English 2010.  

The Book:

1st American edition/
Cover Design-Peter Mendelsund

Length: 563 pages
Subject/Genre: Conspiracy/Suspense thriller


The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest is the third and final book of Larsson's Millennium Trilogy. (Yes, I read the first two before writing this review.)  If you want to read the trilogy, and haven't read the first two books, stop reading now to avoid spoilers.

Mikael Blomkvist is an investigative reporter for Millennium, a small monthly magazine specializing in investigative reporting of the financial world.  He's tricked into publishing a story he can't prove about the corrupt financier Wennerstrom and is convicted of libel, destroying his credibility.  He's then hired by Henrik Vanger to investigate the disappearance of his favorite granddaughter decades earlier in a classic locked-room (or, rather, island) mystery.  Blomkvist eventually makes contact with Lisbeth Salander, who had been tasked with investigating his background by Vanger.  Salander is an incredibly intelligent but introverted hacker who, despite being in her 20s, is a ward of the state for mental deficiency.  Her guardian and surrogate father has a stroke, and her new guardian, Bjurman, sexually abuses her.  Salander gathers proof of this abuse, and tortures/tattoos Bjurman in revenge, blackmailing him with the evidence.  Anyway, Salander and Blomkvist solve the mystery, Salander falls for Blomkvist but realizes she can't have him.  They find evidence to prove Wennerstrom's guilt, and Salander steals millions of dollars of Wennerstrom's dirty money before running off.  End book one.

In The Girl Who Played with Fire, we start to get some back story on Salander.  After the Millennium launches an investigation into sex trafficking, the reporter and his fiance are murdered and Lisbeth is the prime suspect.  The gun used in the murder has Salander's fingerprints on it and was used to kill Bjurman.  Bjurman had previously reached out to an unknown entity to destroy Salander.  This unknown entity is a man named Zalachenko, Lisbeth's father.  Zalachenko was a prominent Soviet spy who defected to Sweden in the 80s.  To keep his identity secret, a small special unit was formed within the Swedish security police (SAPO) known only as "The Section".  There duties involved covering up any crimes Zalachenko committed, including his consistently beating Lisbeth's mother.  Unable to find help from the police, a twelve year old Lisbeth attacked Zalachenko by throwing a molotov cocktail in his car.  To keep her quiet, she was locked up in a psychiatric ward and declared incompetent.  This novel focuses on the investigation of the murders and the sex trafficking trade.  Salander becomes public enemy number one, and has only limited contact with Blomkvist.  The murders, we discover, were committed by Salander's half-brother, Niedermann.  Zalachenko shoots Salander in the head with a .22, but she survives and nearly kills Zalachenko.  The novel ends with Niedermann subdued and Blomkvist finding Salander, who's in bad shape but conscious.

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest deals with the fallout from the previous novel.  Salander and Zalachenko are both recuperating in the same hospital, and plotting to kill each other.  "The Section" is desperate to cover up evidence of it's existence and wrongdoings.  Blomkvist begins investigations into the Section.

Honestly, this was a well-plotted mystery/thriller.  Except for the slowness at the beginning of the first novel, the whole series was solid.  The characters manage to play to a type without being caricatures.  It can be a bit preachy every now and then, but it's infrequent.

There hasn't been much Swedish lit on the US bestseller lists, and the Millennium trilogy is an interesting specimen, if only because so much of the series is not super Swedish.  Much of the first novel could just as easily have taken place off the coast of New England and the latter two could replace SAPO with MI5/6.  There are definitely aspects of Swedish culture and history that are addressed, but since the novel fits into the mystery/thriller genre so well, those aspects just form part of the background.

Like I said, we don't see much Swedish pop fic in the US,  but that's changed a bit, in no small part due to Larsson himself.  The genre known as Scandinavian Noir or Nordic Crime has been growing in popularity over the past several years, with Jo Nesbø being one of the best known.  It's an interesting case of a genre crossing national borders and language barriers.

Of course, a series this popular has made its appearance on the big screen.

All three novels of the Millenium trilogy were adapted to film in Sweden in 2009.

The series stars Noomi Rapace (Prometheus) as Lisbeth Salander and Michael Nyqvist (John Wick, Europa Report) as Mikael Blomkvist.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was adapted to film again in 2011, starring Daniel Craig (Casino Royale, Skyfall) as Mikael Blomkvist and Rooney Mara (The Social Network, Her) as Lisbeth Salander, and directed by David Fincher (Fight Club, The Social Network).

As a whole the Millenium trilogy is an above-average crime thriller, definitely worth a read unless you can't stand crime thrillers.


Bestsellers of 2010:

1. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest by Stieg Larsson
2. The Confession by John Grisham
3. The Help by Kathryn Stockett
4. Safe Haven by Nicholas Sparks
5. Dead or Alive by Tom Clancy
6. Sizzling Sixteen by Janet Evanovich
7. Cross Fire by James Patterson
8. Freedom by Jonathan Franzen
9. Port Mortuary by Partricia Cornwell
10. Full Dark, No Stars by Stephen King

Also Published in 2010:

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
Imperial Bedrooms by Bret Easton Ellis
The Thousand Augusts of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell

Sources:

"Stieg Larsson." Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2012. Literature Resource Center. Web.