Stieg Larsson Unseats Malcolm Gladwell on Amazon’s Most Highlighted Books of All Time List

By Jason Boog 

griltatoo23.jpgHere at GalleyCat Reviews, we are obsessed with the art of underlining passages in digital books.

After months of domination by William P. Young, Dan Brown, and the Bible, the hardboiled work of Stieg Larsson has finally cracked the top five on Amazon’s Most Highlighted Books of All Time List. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo unseated Malcolm Gladwell, rising to #4 on the list.

This milestone comes on the heels of news that Larsson has joined Amazon’s new “Kindle Million Club”–selling one million books on Amazon’s device. Fans of Larsson have highlighted some fascinating quotes. 171 Kindle users have already underlined this sentence: “He surprised himself with this sudden burst of emotion after almost forty years.”

Back in April, Amazon launched a “Popular Highlights” section that showcases the book passages underlined by Kindle readers–a 21st Century twist on literary quotation. Check out more strangely popular passages from The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo below.


47 Kindle users liked this sentence: “It doesn’t matter to me what you believe, and I’ll always love you. But I think you should continue your Bible studies.”

Oddly enough, 99 users highlighted this passage: “Dragan Armansky was born in Croatia fifty-six years ago. His father was an Armenian Jew from Belorussia. His mother was a Bosnian Muslim of Greek extraction.”