The Millennium Series: 6 Masterpieces of Modern Geopolitical Fiction

Jim Murray

5 years ago · 2 minutes of reading · ~10 ·

Ose

COUCH POTATO

~ CHRONICLES ~

2020 EDITION

A lot of people talk about bingeing on TV series. Here’s a book series that you can do the same thing with. It’s called the Millennium series. It was the brain child of Swedish author Stieg Larssen, who died quite suddenly in 2004 after writing the first three in the series, which each became runaway international best sellers.

After a lot of legal wrangling with the estate, the series was turned over to another well known Swedish writer named David Lagercrantz, who basically picked up without skipping a beat and has so far produced three more in the series with another one on the way.

The Millennium in the Millennium series is actually the name of a news magazine, the editor of which is one of the main characters. But the story really revolves around another character names Lisbeth Salander who is one of the more interesting characters I have come across in modern literature. She’s a punk and an extraordinarily gifted computer hacker, with a deep dark past which powers the story.I’ve never been big on giving away plots, and I won’t do that here for sure. These books are, first and foremost geopolitical thrillers with characters that are beautifully rendered. Secondly, the translations themselves are extremely well done and IMHO capture the essence of what Mr. Larsson set out to achieve, when he conceived and started executing this idea.

There have been a couple of movies made from the the books in the Larsson series and a couple of other attempts at capturing the whole trilogy. They were were OK, but now there are rumblings of serializing the entire series on Amazon, which would be a much better format for telling these stories.

Having said that, however, it’s been my experience that some books were really meant to be read, and the Millennium series falls squarely into that category along with the Lord of The Rings trilogy, the Harry Potter series, The Dune series by Frank Herbert among others.

So for those who might be interested in taking on this literary binge, here are the titles. They can usually be found in larger second hand book stores. Obviously it’s best if you read them in order.

The Larsson Books

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

The Girl Who Played with Fire

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest

The Lagercrantz Books

The Girl in the Spider's Web

The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye

The Girl Who Lived Twice

If you want to read some more about these books, you can check out this Wiki page.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_(novel_series)

Jim Murray is a writer, a reader, a sports fan and a TV watcher who has been writing about the sports & entertainment worlds since1998, which is when he created his first blog, The Couch Potato Chronicles. Jim is also a former ad agency writer and art director and has run his own creative consultancy, Onwords & Upwords, from 1989 until just recently when he closed it and began simply working under his own name. He lives with his wife in the beautiful Niagara area of Ontario and works with a small cadre of companies that are trying to make a difference in the world. Jim currently writes 2 blogs...Skinny Dipping In The Lava Flow and The Couch Potato Chronicles.

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Comments

Fay Vietmeier

5 years ago#3

Jim Murray I read one but it was years ago. Thanks for sharing this. A "literary BINGE" is a life pleasure IMHO ... the books are almost always better. I have added this to my list. I recommended elsewhere Dianna Gabaldon's The Outlander series (8 books thus far about 1K pages each) and this has been a series on STARZ & HULU I hope the miles are gentle ;~)