I finished The Girl Who Played with Fire by Steig Larsson last night. The novel has absolutely no denouement. No tying up of loose ends or ruminating over the meaning of events. Climax, boom, the end. Of course, Larrson has the luxury of a third novel in the series to take care of all that business, but it would have been interesting to have at least a little bit of closure.
Found this on the Barnes & Noble web site today. Isn’t it a beauty? I’ve added some other images to the dedicated page for The Stephen King Illustrated Companion.
I started Mister Slaughter by Robert McCammon last night. This is the third of his Matthew Corbett novels, set in turn-of-the-century New York City. Turn of the 18th century, that is. 1705, roughly, when the population of NYC is about 5000. The attention to period details is only part of the charm of these novels. They’re also an attempt to retcon private detectives, postulating their existence back at that period, and the type of duties they might be called upon to perform, if they existed.
As I predicted, yesterday it looked like it was about to rain any second…all day long, without ever coming through. We had another spattering of rain this morning, but whether it will turn into something substantial remains to be seen. There’s been no declaration that we’re out of our summer-long drought, but rain isn’t as much of a rare commodity as it has been for the past several months.
Since there was nothing new on TV last night, I decided to watch the two-hour season five finale of LOST again. It’s interesting to watch with full knowledge of what is going to happen. One thing struck me as odd, though. When Locke, Ben and Richard reach the old camp on the edge of the ocean, Locke tells their entourage to take a break, that they will reach their destination before nightfall. The destination is the four-toed foot statue, although they don’t know it at the time. That means the statue is only a half-day walk from the camp at best, but when we first saw it, it seemed like it was on the other side of the island (reached by sailboat) and the group heading for the fake Others camp based on Michael’s information took a long time to get there. It seemed wrong that the statue was so close to camp.
