The Girl Who Drank Too Much Coffee

I just finished reading The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, that Swedish mystery/thriller by Stieg Larsson that everyone was raving about last year. Currently, everyone’s raving about the second Larsson book that just came out, The Girl Who Played with Fire.

By “everyone,” I guess I mean the book blogs I read.

Despite all the hype though, or maybe because of it, I didn’t really dig it too much. I don’t think this was just me being a literary fiction snob, either. I’ve been reading a decent amount of mysteries and crime fiction lately, but this one strained my tolerance for cheesiness at times.

For one, the dialogue read pretty stilted to me, though I guess you could blame that on the translator. I’m also thinking of the Lisbeth Salander character, a twenty-something punk girl who can hack into anyone’s computer she chooses (don’t get me started on how computer hackers are treated like magicians in books like this), and of course falls in love with the hero, a middle-aged journalist who never does one unlikable thing throughout the whole kinda-too-long novel.

Mainly, though, I’m thinking about the coffee. I don’t know if it’s a cultural thing, or just a quirk of Larsson’s writing, but everyone is drinking coffee in this novel. All the time. Either drinking coffee, or putting on water for coffee, or talking about putting on water for coffee. I’m willing to bet that, on average, the word “coffee” shows up every five pages. Somebody get a Kindle and verify that for me.

And as a coffee fan myself, I’m trying to figure out how they were all preparing the coffee. French press? Moka pot? Drip? Sometimes the coffee seems to appear instantly, and sometimes a person “puts on the water” and then takes a shower while waiting.

And what variety of coffee? When two characters sit down and have a beer together, Larsson specifies that they’re drinking pilseners. But does Mikael Blomkvist enjoy Colombian coffee, or Ethiopian?

Yeah, sure, there was a disappearance of a young girl, and a series of murders, blah blah blah, but this was the mystery that kept me up at night. The coffee.

Roasting Coffee

This weekend, I tried roasting my own coffee at home. Naturally, I thought, the Interwebs will want to hear about this. So I took a ton of pictures of the whole process, and put them online for your viewing pleasure. Watch as the beans turn from a pea green to a burnt black, and my apartment fills with smoke!

First test, on a tray in the oven. I didn’t pull them out in time, so they got very roasted.

Second test, in a frying pan. They came out a little better this time.

And yes, I understand that nobody cares about this.