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" In May we listed our Top 10 Summer Books for 2010. So for the next ten days we&amp;#039;ll be previewing excerpts from each. Today we&amp;#039;re in Sweden, this scene takes place when Salander is in the hospital recovering from the bullet wound to her head, after her father, Zalachenko, and his henchman tried to murder her. Zalachenko is in the same hospital, just down the hall.  Salander opened her eyes when she heard a scraping sound. It was as though someone was dragging something along the corridor. For a moment there was only silence, and she wondered if she was imagining things. Then she heard the same sound again, moving away. Her uneasiness grew.  Zalachenko was out there somewhere. She felt fettered to her bed. Her skin itched under the neck brace. She felt an intense desire to move, to get up. Gradually she succeeded in sitting up. That was all she could manage. She sank back onto the pillow. She ran her hand over her neck brace and located the fastenings that held it in place. She opened them and dropped the brace to the floor. Immediately it was easier to breathe.   What she wanted more than anything was a weapon, and to have the strength to get up and finish the job once and for all.  With difficulty she propped herself up, switched on the night light, and looked around the room. She could see nothing that would serve her purpose. Then her eyes fell on a nurses&amp;#039; table on the wall across from her bed. Someone had left a pencil there.  She waited until the night nurse had come and gone, which tonight she seemed to be doing about every half hour. Presumably the reduced frequency of the nurse&amp;#039;s visits meant that the doctors had decided her condition had improved; over the weekend the nurses had checked on her at least once every ten minutes. She could hardly notice any difference herself. When she was alone she gathered her strength, sat up, and swung her legs over the side of the bed. She had electrodes taped to her body to record her pulse and breathing, but the wires stretched in the direction of the pencil. She put her weight on her feet and stood up. Suddenly she swayed, off balance. For a second she felt as though she would faint, but she steadied herself against the bed and concentrated her gaze on the table in front of her. She took small, wobbly steps, reached out and grabbed the pencil.  Then she retreated slowly to the bed. She was exhausted.  After a while she managed to pull the sheet and blanket up to her chin. She studied the pencil. It was a plain wooden pencil, newly sharpened. It would make a passable weapon\u2014for stabbing a face or an eye.  She laid it next to her hip and fell asleep.  Excerpted from The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet&amp;#039;s Nest by Stieg Larsson Copyright (c) 2010 by Stieg Larsson. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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