That girl

That girl is Lisbeth Salander. Over 40 million copies have been sold worldwide of three fat books, each over 600 pages long, describing her achievements and misadventures. She is described as a tiny, waif-like thing, tattooed, pieced, sometimes wearing 'goth' makeup and clothes. She possesses uncanny computing skills that she uses to hack into the most protected computers in Sweden and tax-free havens everywhere; she fights and defeats great hulking men several times her size, using a unique combination of martial arts and cunning. She has less than a handful of true friends and allies, and a large and diverse array of enemies seeking to kill her or lock her away forever in an asylum for the criminally insane. These enemies include recognized criminals, biker gangs, corrupt police and secret service agents, lawyers, financiers, among others. But she is a superwoman who vanquishes thugs, ruthless killers, assorted criminals and a sinister secret neo-Nazi network of black-hearted villains embedded in the Swedish secret police and intelligence services. She survives mayhem that would lay low the he-man heroes of comic book legends: in the climax of the second book she is shot three times (one bullet penetrates her brain) and survives being buried alive, because she is a comic book heroine and the female of the species is stronger, more intelligent, more, more every kind of good superlative, than the male. I devoured the first book of the trilogy as a fast read that took a few hours to skim its more than 600 pages, and skimmed the other two volumes in an hour or so apiece. No doubt I missed a lot of gory detail and tedium between the blood-and-thunder episodes. If I still were flying back and forth across the Atlantic, these three fat books would have kept me amused long enough to ease the boredom of a flight each way. As it is, I can only envy the author, or rather his estate, for dreaming up this unlikeliest of heroines and amassing a huge fortune from the sale of astronomical numbers of copies in goodness knows how many languages, not to mention movies in Swedish with American spin offs to follow. But dragon tattoos, playing with fire, and kicking hornets' nests aren't enough to make for longterm survival; the world will soon pass on to better books.