Too true Edward Docx. Too true.
As you will know, I quite enjoyed The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, but Docx is right. That sort of stuff isn’t literature as such, it’s an excellent mimicry of the real thing. It’s the reason academics invented the literary canon: to distinguish between talented writers and writers who can follow instructions. While novels like Larsson’s are pleasant to read and may be interspersed with quite clever and unexpected twists and turns, to the trained eye, they follow a distinct formula that after a while must become tiresome. I suppose that’s why I try to read a variety of things; I don’t want the enjoyment of a genre to become ruined through over-reading.
