The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo Or The Most Disturbing/Boring Book I Have Read

Saw the trailer for the American version of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson the other day, and it got me wondering how the movie will work.  I have read the book and it was the weirdest mix of disturbing imagery, major violence, and a lot of really boring blahness. Keep in mind, I am not a squeamish person, about violence or sex especially if it has a point, this book just seemed to use it in place of well everything. The book focuses on two main characters Mikael Blomkvist who is a publisher for an independent magazine called Millennium who is persona non grata for losing a libel suit against Hans-Erik Wennerström a billionaire investor.  The other character is the title character Lisabeth Salander, who is by far the most interesting character in the book.  She is a genius computer hacker who has been in Sweden's child social system for many years.  This book essentially tells the story of Harriet Vagner and her disappearance from her family home many years ago.  Blomkvist is hired to write the biography of the family as a cover to investigate Harriet's disappearance.  Salander gets hired by Blomkvist to help with the research and they eventually end up as uneasy lovers.  One of the main subplots is Slander's time in the System and the horrific brutalities she endures after her original case worker and protector Holger Palmgren has a stroke.  Her new "guardian" Nils Bjurman is a sick and twisted man who forces Salander to perform demeaning and painful sex acts to gain access to her own money.  After a couple of episodes she sneaks into his apartment and gets her revenge by tattooing "I am a sadistic pig, a pervert and a rapist" on his chest after recording one of the abusive sessions for blackmail. The reason she was placed in custody in the first place is revealed in the next book.  The disturbing violence continues as we learn more about the Vagner's history.  Turns out that Harriet's father and brother sexually abused her to the point that she arranged to disappear of the family island, never to return.  As they investigate Blomkvist and Salander discover a journal of Harriet's listing names of missing women.  Turns out that her brother Martin (who until now seems like the normal, stable one) has built himself a twisted playroom in his basement where he keeps kidnapped women to act out his twisted fantasies on, and then murders them.  At the climax of the book Salander saves Blomkvist's life, Harriet is found and the mystery is solved.  All of this disturbing action takes up about half the book.  The other half is devoted to long exposition on the political and financial history of Sweden and all the complicatedness that was part of the initial libel suit that placed Blomkvist in the position he was in.  It was weird to read a book that was so boring and so disturbing at the same time, it was one of those books you wanted to get to the end of just so you knew the mystery was solved, but at the same time was tempted to just skip to the end.  The exciting parts were very exciting and the boring parts were very very boring.  It was kind of like taking an upper and downer at the same time.  I think the book suffered in editing, the author died while the books were still in manuscript form and I think it would be interesting to see what he would have kept and what he would have gotten rid of if he had lived to work on the final edits himself. The mystery itself was pretty good, I think I would have liked it more with some better editing.  I think I will try and  watch the Swedish version of the movie so I can compare it to the book and the American movie and see how they portray all the sexual violence and get through the long winded exposition.  Let me know if any of you have read the book, or seen the movie. Let me know if you think I am being to hard on the book, or if you too found it a really long read.
Update:  Swedish movie wasn't half bad, they cut a lot of the exposition about the economy and such, and didn't show to much of the childhood torture of Harriet.  Noomi Rapace who played Lisabeth Salander was not bad, even if she looked a little old for what I had in my head, but all in all I liked it, even forgot that it was in Swedish after a while.