Happy New Year! One day is as good as any other, I figure, and today seems a good one to start MY new year. With the Ironman season the major focus of my life, December is a month for hiatus. I finished my last race, Ironman Arizona, with the feeling, “You can rest when you’re dead”. If you remember, I felt at the end of that race (less than ten days ago) that, even if someone were to put a gun to my head, and say, “Run, or I’ll shoot!”, I could not do it. Totally spent, and ready for some respite.
First, I had to get to get through the cold my depressed immune system let seep through. Not a flu, just a wimpy little URI, with some sniffles, weakness, a few coughs at night. Just enough to remind me to follow the program, and DO NOTHING for a week after the race.
And, I should give my brain a rest from all that, as well. So, today, several topics, which have nothing to do with swimming, biking, running, or racing.
This evening, Pres. Obama gave his valedictory on Afghanistan. 30,000 more troops, a time certain to wind the process down, and a strengthened commitment to Pakistan. Those on the right say, “Too little, too late,” while those on the left say, “Too much, too long.” I say, I voted for this guy because he’s one smart dude (about as smart as me, I’d guess), and he takes his time to consider things, think them through, and decide on first principles, and then act on them. That’s why I voted for him. So, really, anything he decides would get my support. I wanted him to be President to think about our future, and to make a few hard decisions about it, in a considered manner. He’s done that, and I’m not going to nit pick this sort of decision, where he has clearly put his entire heart and soul into the process. This is an occasion to let the leader lead.
And, he is too young to be worried about “another Vietnam”, which haunts those of us in our 50s and 60s. We saw not only the carnage in that sorrowful jungle, but also the rupture in our own country as a result of Presidents from both parties blindly pushing on out of honor and ego. Every war since then has been colored, in our eyes, by that decade of agony. The battles within and between generations over abortion, evolution, global warming all seemed to stem from the frightful time. But Barack Obama does not feel that the way we do; he can see more clearly as a result, and we should listen to him, let him lead.
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While in Hawaii, and afterwards, I finished two-thirds of a thriller trilogy which has swept across the literary world. Stieg Larsson was editor of a Swedish highbrow magazine Expo, and a journalist who specialized in exposing post-Hitler Nordic Nazis. For reasons we may never know, he turned his hand to the thriller genre, and produced three novels for publication. He died shortly thereafter, of a heart attack at age 50.
The three novels, which flow one from the other, center around a magazine editor, Mikael Blomkvist. Termed the Millennium Trilogy, after his magazine. I bought the first one, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, at the airport on the way to Kona. At first, I wondered what all the fuss was about. At nearly 600 pages, I worried that the stately pace I found in the first third of the book was a reflection of Larsson’s erudite, detail oriented writing style, leaning much more towards reflection than the singular momentum a true “thriller” needs.
But I soon discovered that those first two hundred pages were just the necessary set-up for the three books, and once the trigger was pulled on the actual plot … well, there was no stopping the story. By the time I got to the end of the second book (The GIrl Who Played with FIre), I was reading the last 200 pages or so in less than 24 hours. The third installment is not yet out in its American edition; but the British version is already for sale on Amazon.uk, should I feel the need to suck it down before its stateside July publication date. Personally, I’d like to delay until then, knowing it is the last bit of story we’ll ever see concerning Lisbeth Salander.
While Blomkvist’s is the primary point of view in these tales, Ms. Salander is clearly the reason we keep turning the pages. Think of the unique lead characters among mystery/detective fiction: Peirot, Marple, Scarpetta, Spade, Chan, Marlowe. Salander is the most bizarre hero we have yet seen. She is a ninety pound anoretic man-hating hacker with a photographic memory who has been declared incompetent by the Swedish government. She may also have a touch of Asperger’s. But we cheer for her despite all this, mostly because she has a crystal clear moral compass. Somewhere in her past, she suffered greatly at the hand of a man she should have been able to trust. She seems drawn to exposing “men who hate women”, and thus winds up risking her own life with some regularity.
If you love a complex story which grows tauter with every chapter, but demand an equally complex mind behind the story, with enough time to pause and think about what might be going on, these books will raise your spirits. No cheap thrills, hack writing or logorrhea here, just a well-constructed mystery story and multiple fully drawn engaging characters, flaws and all.