Time to break out the down jacket

It's a gym morning, but "feels like 26" makes a cold bike ride.

Like it or not, winter is coming.

Book Review: The Girl who Kicked the Hornet's Nest

Finishing the third book in Stieg Larsson's Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series feels a little bit like finishing the last of the Harry Potter books.  On one hand, I wanted to be through with the last book so I could find out what happened to all the characters, but on the other hand, I'd been reading this series for so long, I wasn't sure what I'd do with myself after the last book was finished (answer: back editions of magazines I've been ignoring).

This book builds so heavily on the second that it's almost impossible to say anything about it that wouldn't 1. be totally meaningless to anyone who hadn't read the first two books or 2. give something away to someone who was still reading.  What I will say is that even though the characters were the same and each book in the series builds on the previous ones, it was a still a very different book from the first two.  More like the second than the first, but still different.

All in all, I give the series two thumbs up.  Yes, there are some disturbing parts in the first two books that probably didn't need to be quite as graphic, but the characters and story line were new and interesting enough to make up for it.  Also, the books are long so if you don't have a lot of time to read, I'd suggest trying to borrow from a friend rather than the library.  I felt like the last novel ended in a satisfying way that wrapped up all the plot points.  There was only one thing that I felt Larsson left unfinished in the last book, and I wonder it it would have been the subject of a fourth book had he lived to write it.

Now I have to catch up on magazine reading but I have three other books in the queue:

• The Blind Side 
• The Help 
• The Lady Tasting Tea 
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Is it cold where you live?  Reading anything good?