ABSTRACT
Recently I noticed that my friends and colleagues in Vienna, Cape Town, and Chapel Hill had all been reading the same few books; moreover, that they had shared this reading with my neighbor the plumber, across the road in the south Swedish village where I spend the summer. And then, on a flight somewhere, far from home, when I glanced sideways at what the man in the seat next to mine was reading, it was again one of these same books. They have been reviewed respectfully in the New York Review of Books, and parodied in the New Yorker. 1 I am referring to the “Millennium Trilogy” by the Swedish writer Stieg Larsson: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest.
