The Girl Who Played With Fire (and Kindle iPhone app review)

May 30, 2010

One glance at the contents of my iPhone and you’d see that I’m the sort of sucker who downloads anything and I’m always willing to give something a go, so I downloaded the Kindle iPhone app quite a while ago and The Girl Who Played with Fire, the second in the The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo series featuring Lisbeth Salander, the girl with Asperger’s, a mysterious past and a tendency to kick back. A quick play with it made me realise that although the Kindle app on iPhone is better than the only other iPhone e-reader that I had so far tried, the stand-alone The Left Hand of God app (which I think was a free first three chapters and I didn’t even get to the end of the first chapter because the page control was so clumsy), I still wasn’t going to get through this book at a great rate of knots. If anything because the best place for me to read is the bath and I ain’t about to take my iPhone into the bath with me (which basically says about me then that until they invent a waterproof e-reader, e-books are always going to be second best for me). So whilst I’ve been reading The Girl Who Played with Fire, I’ve had lots of other paperback books on the go at the same time, books meant for the bath but crept into other reading times as I became more interested in them than in Larsson. It also doesn’t help that with a paperback book you obviously can’t check your twitter, e-mail or RSS feeds and sometimes picking up my iPhone for a few pages before my head hit the pillow meant my finger was straying from the Kindle icon to another icon instead. However the very negatives caused my trying to read on my iPhone, also proved a bonus, as I’m never normally that organised if I’m out somewhere to take a book, whereas I always take my phone and over the last few weeks I’ve had quite a few appointments where I’ve been sitting waiting in waiting rooms on my own and being able to whip out my phone and read has been lovely.

So, as a result I’ve read The Girl Who Played with Fire quite piecemeal and consequently there were a few scenes when I had trouble remembering which bad guy was which. It was also slightly disconcerting that a bad guy character that Salander devoted quite a lot of time to at the beginning of the book turned out to have absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the story (I kept reading expecting to find a link and never did). However Salander as usual is a wonderful, unusual heroine and the final, relatively close to the end, revelation as to what exactly “All That Evil” was, was a surprise I hadn’t seen coming. I will be reading the next book.

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