Holiday Of A Sort

When I got to the end of my first work-through of the Epistle of James on Wednesday, I determined to give myself a break for the weekend and not expect myself to achieve anything particularly productive. That meant reading the The Girl Who trilogy by Stieg Larsson (I know it’s supposed to be called “The Millennium Trilogy,” but there’s nothing particularly millennial about it and the books do all concern the main figure, “the girl” (inappropriately so designated, since she’s in her twenties through the main plot of the novels)), which held my attention through a couple thousand pages of concentrated reading and reminded me why “Swedish” was, in a more buttoned-down time, a code-word for “adventuresome sex.” Ahem! I hasten to add that the adventuresome sex interested me less than the suspenseful plot of the novels. Back on Thursday, on a whim, I invited Rich and Madhavi over for my internationally-known pesto pizza, so now I will devote much of my holiday time to cleaning, tidying, hoovering, rearranging, and generally undertaking the housekeeping that I customarily neglect.
 
Thursday also brought with it a funeral at St Mary’s, and with that the trivial awareness that I no longer fit into any of my suits (I had been thinking of going shopping for a new one this weekend, but I’ll put that off for a while) and the much weightier tidal surge of how I love and am proud of my family. I’m glad that the internet makes it possible to text-chat or even video-chat with them from time to time, but the sense of mortality appropriate to a requiem mass, and the reminiscence of spending time in the kitchen cooking or washing-up, bouncing jokes or songs around, revelling in the wonder of my dearly beloved wife and children, occasioned an interval of missing them that temporarily side-tracked me from my domestic responsibilities. Miss you, y’all.
 

4 thoughts on “Holiday Of A Sort

  1. I just read the first of the Girl Who, and I have to say I was sorely disappointed. The plot was (imo, natch) poorly constructed, and went conventional after promising unconventionality. As for the Girl in the Girl Who, I thought she was embarrassingly badly written — a set of superficial exaggerations. Self-indulgent writing. In my opinion!

    As for your pesto pizza, I am sure it is truly millennial.

  2. I guess I’ve been reading less satisfactory potboilers than you recently, David. (Don’t worry, authors, I won’t name names.) Then again, maybe I was more interested by the Swedish political history lessons. Hmmm, no; the names I knew I couldn’t pronounce? The way they kept calling unmarried women “Fröken”? No, I think it was just the comparison to the prosody of my daily reading material, biblical scholarship (comparable to Vogon poetry for its elegance).

  3. Read the “Girl Who…” series but have found the Henning Mankell mysteries, with Kurt Wallander, much better. More interestingly plotted with more interesting characters. The casual attitude to sex was similar to Stieg Larsson, though.

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