Tag Archives: Stieg Larsson

Planning the kind of September where life is slow and oh, so mellow

Posted on September 1, 2010 by unfinishedperson | 10 Comments

My goal for last month was to read 14 books, with me actually making it to five. This month, my goal is to read five books, four of which I’m looking to finish by month’s end, including two of which I’ve already started.

Image via Wikipedia

The one, which I’m not going to finish is Bleak House by Charles Dickens, which I’m reading as part of a read-along with Amanda over at The Zen Leaf. By today or at least the end of this week, the goal was to have read through Chapter 13. We were to have read through Chapter 7 by last Wednesday or later in the week. I am only on Chapter 5 now. I hope by Friday to be through Chapter 13 and put up a post about my reading of it so far.

The other four books are:

Cover of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest

The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest by Stieg Larsson, which I’ve already started reading.
Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins, which I hope to get at the library tonight. I am next on the hold list and the first one on that list was the library director, so she knows I really, really want it.
Sad Cypress by Agatha Christie, which I’ll be reading for the Agatha Christie Reading Challenge.
What’s The Worst That Could Happen? by Donald E. Westlake, which I’m reading as part of my own personal challenge to read all the Dortmunder novels by Westlake.

Beyond that, who knows? All I do know is that the plan is to read mostly, although not exclusively (because of the aforementioned Agatha Christie Reading Challenge in which I participate), from the books on the bookcase in my office as outlined last month.

Last but not least, speaking of the Agatha Christie Reading Challenge, this month Agatha Christie would have been 100 years old on Sept. 15, if she still were alive. In celebration of that, the Agatha Christie Reading Challenge Carnival is having a blog carnival tour all month, starting today and running through Sept. 30 (click on link for full schedule). This blog will be one of the stops on the tour on Thursday, Sept. 9, with me as your host for that day. I hope you’ll stop by here and the other blogs along the way.

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Posted in Books, Midweek Review, Mind

Tagged AgathaChristie, Bleak House, Books, Charles Dickens, Donald E. Westlake, roy orbison, Stieg Larsson, Suzanne Collins, try to remember

Looking back on my reading in the month of August (TSS)

Posted on August 29, 2010 by unfinishedperson | 8 Comments

Image by Larry Miller via Flickr

Today’s post is brought to you by the number 5, because it’s the loneliest number that you’ll ever do…oh, wait a minute, mixing up my numbers here. Sorry, it’s early. But why the number 5, you may ask?

Simple: it’s the number of books I’ve read so far this month:

The Girl Who Played With Fire by Stieg Larsson
Godric by Frederick Buechner
The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
Faceless Killers by Henning Mankell
Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins

I’m still waiting for Mockingjay at the library. I’m on the staff there, but our library director trumped me — and only me (no other patrons waiting surprisingly and no favoritism, for the record) — on the hold list, so I have to wait.

Out of the five, my least favorite was the Mankell book, the first of the Kurt Wallander series. I hope the series picks up later, but I’m not rushing to read the second one. The other four all are neck-and-neck for being my favorite of the month, but I’ll break it down a bit more for you: The second of the Millennium trilogy by Larsson and the first of the Hunger Games trilogy by Collins probably edge out the novel by Buechner and the second of the Hunger Games trilogy, because of the first two’s qualities as a “page-turner.” I’d probably then rate Godric ahead of Catching Fire, because the former was so well-written, and the latter was a bit of a let down from the first part of the trilogy.

Speaking of “page-turners,” they were the subject of two of my posts this past month:

and speaking of Godric, it was the subject of this month’s Faith’n’ Fiction Saturday Round Table discussion, sponsored by My Friend Amy, in which I participated and posted part of the discussion yesterday.

Also this month I (technically, my alter ego, Unfinished Rambler) started a new series called Patron of the Week, which I choose from among candidates at the library where I work, and I added two new categories here on the blog: The Library and Facebook. In the latter category was my most popular post this month: Why Can We Defriend, which as of this morning is one hit ahead of the second most popular post of this month and the last few months: Rachael Ray and her Glasgow smile.

Among the reasons why I only read five books this month (so far) was Netflix, including over the last couple of nights, my starting to watch Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Season 2. I’ll leave you with the opening sequence of the season that features a cover version of the Blind Willie song, If I Had My Way (aka Samson and Delilah), which also was covered by other artists including, most notably, The Grateful Dead and Peter, Paul and Mary.

This version is done by Shirley Manson, lead singer of the group Garbage, who also starred in this season of the show.

Click here for the original song.

So how was your month in reading? What were your favorite/least favorite books of the month?

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Posted in Books, Mind, The Sunday Salon

Tagged Books, reading, Stieg Larsson, Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games, The Sunday Salon

It’s called The Pause

Posted on August 27, 2010 by unfinishedperson | 2 Comments

For this week’s Flashback Friday, where I use St. Ignatius of Loyola’s Examen as a guide, I will be looking back at not only this past week, but also this past month. So with that mind, I ask myself and you:

For what am I/are you least grateful this past month?

For what am I/are you most grateful this past month?

Least grateful

As usual, I have a hundred thoughts racing through my mind, not the least of which is I don’t have enough time to write this, because I have to go to work at the library. Wednesday, I took out The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest by Stieg Larsson from there and then on Thursday, I learned that I already was a week behind on an online read-along, sponsored by Amanda of The Zen Leaf, of Bleak House by Charles Dickens. This normally wouldn’t be such a big deal, but today and tomorrow I work at the library all day and then tomorrow after work, I leave for a retreat to Mount Saviour Monastery near Elmira, N.Y., where I am a Benedictine oblate. I will be there until Monday.

So my mind was, and still is to some degree, racing with thoughts: How am I going to be able to finish before Wednesday what amounts to 13 chapters of Dickens, which on a good day is only slightly obtuse to my 21st century reading eyes? On the flip side, I just started the Larsson book and was just starting to get back into the series, and, on top of that, when I go to the library today, I might have Mockingjay, the third part of the Hunger Games trilogy, by Suzanne Collins waiting for me on the hold shelf. How am I going to read all this? Wouldn’t it be wrong to go to a monastery for a scheduled retreat, just to catch up on reading secular books?

This entire month, to some degree, has been like this: getting caught up in the busyness of life, whether it be reading or checking off any other number of mental checklists (which now is “Write this,” “grab something to eat before going to work,” “grab something on the way to eat for lunch later,” “I don’ t even have time to finish this.”).

MOST grateful

So because of all that said above, I’ve decided this weekend truly will be a retreat. I’m not taking any of the aforementioned books with me tomorrow night, not because I don’t think I can’t have secular books with me. However, in the spirit of simplicity and charity, two of the principles of St. Benedict, I am making it easy on myself and being charitable to my peace of mind in not taking any of the aforementioned books…and in this case, distractions from the reason I am there: to retreat from the world.

In short, I am putting the world on pause.

So for what are you least/most grateful this past month?

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Posted in Flashback Friday, Soul

Tagged Benedictine, Bleak House, Books, Charles Dickens, Hunger Games, Mockingjay, Mount Saviour Monastery, retreat, Stieg Larsson, Suzanne Collins

Are “page-turners” always “pulp fiction”?

Posted on August 19, 2010 by unfinishedperson | 12 Comments

Image by cinderellasg via Flickr

Image by mandyseyfang via Flickr

Recently I read two books I rated 5 stars (or, in other words, “must-reads”): The Girl Who Played With Fire by Stieg Larsson and The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. Both of them, in my mind, were page-turners in that I could not put them down and had to keep turning the pages to see what happened next, as in The Coasters’ song “And Then Along Came Jones.” And then? And then?

Image via Wikipedia

And then the concept of page-turners got me thinking about other page-turners I’ve read. Most of them, I can count on one hand, with the most prominent one being The Stand by Stephen King. I don’t know if I read it in one night, but I doubt it took me more than a couple of days. While I still don’t think King is the greatest writer in the world, I do think he possibly is its greatest storyteller. As I’ve mentioned here on this blog previously, when I read a King novel, I imagine I’m sitting by a campfire and hearing a person weave a tale for me. Suddenly, before I know it, I’m hooked.

Off the top of my head, I couldn’t think of a classic book (by classic, I mean, at least 25 years old and most usually more than 100 years old) that I couldn’t put down once I started reading it, which got me to ask the question in the title of this post: Are “page-turners” always “pulp fiction”? So I put it to you, dear reader, are they? Can you name one or more classic books and by “classic,” using the definition I’ve given above, that you couldn’t put down after picking it/them up?