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Events
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Canadian Education Fair 2012Tis the season for education fairs and check out the Canadian offerings.
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Payless Warehouse SaleGrab books at all time low prices, starting from RM1.
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Financial Times Guides Technical..Dr Jacinta Chan will be speaking on how to identify trends in the market.
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Times Bookstores The Asia Villa Guide..Purchase a copy and you’ll be in the running to win a night’s stay at one of the villas..
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The Girl Who Played with Fire
By SH Lim
Author: Stieg Larsson
Time Out rating: 4/5
Vintage Crime; RM35.90
A great thriller (originally in Swedish) to have when you’re travelling and can’t stand the long hours in an airport. I finished this I-really-don’t-want-to-put-it-down book on an outbound KL-flight to London. And completed it before the plane’s tyres burned Heathrow’s tarmac. I skipped the onboard offering of videos-on-demand. Because Lisbeth Salander is a compelling heroine – a hardly five feet tall diminutive genius hacker – caught in a triple-murder investigation where she is the prime suspect. Her adventure in print is more graphic than movies on five-inch screens. She fights men bigger than herself – imagine Hell’s Angels bikers – and wins, simply because she’s smarter, quicker and not disinclined to fight dirty.
The novel opens with a prologue that details something horrible happening to Lisbeth when she was only thirteen. And that event sets the psychology of the protagonist who trusts no one and uses violence when threatened. When Lisbeth returns to Stockholm, she catches wind of a name ‘Zala’ and suddenly she’s on a quest to find this mysterious person. That name emerged in Mia Johansson’s doctoral-dissertation on the sex trade in Sweden which involved the smuggling of Russian and Eastern European women into the country. Lisbeth stumbled on the name during one of her hacking sessions. Then suddenly someone kills Mia and her boyfriend-cum-researcher, a journalist also writing on the same topic but for a magazine and book publisher.
The novel is written as if it were a movie, with quick cuts from one sequence of action to another, and then flashing back in time to provide the requisite background information so that you could contextualize the present scene. The writer also provides details in his description of roads and intersections in Stockholm that you could likely use directions in the book when visiting the city. The style of writing, although in translation, reads better than Dan Brown’s ‘The Da Vinci Code’. And Lisbeth Salander is a far more interesting character than Robert Langdon.
