March 2009

Summer's here. Mélie, this wonderfully chaotic old woman with a touch of the con artist about her, can't wait to have her granddaughter over. Nothing else matters—not even those test results collecting dust in the corner. What she wants is simple: time with the kid, laughter, no drama.

Millennium part two. The hunter becomes the hunted. After cracking the Hedestad case, Lisbeth took a year off and traveled the world. Meanwhile, Blomkvist kept grinding at the magazine. Now they're both back, and everything's about to go sideways in the worst way possible.

Walt Kowalski is your textbook grumpy old bastard: racist, bitter, hates everyone. Ex-Ford worker, Korean War vet. Watching his neighborhood decay and fill up with immigrants he can't stand. Then something shifts. Sometimes redemption comes in the ugliest packages.

Walked into my local library last Saturday and barely recognized the place. Flandre branch had been shut down for renovation for a year and a half. Long overdue, honestly—it was falling apart. But what they've done with it now? Total game changer.

Millennium part one. Who hasn't heard of Mikael Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander by now? Blomkvist's an investigative journalist who runs the magazine Millennium. Published something explosive, got burned for it. That's where it starts. And then there's Lisbeth.

Lise returns to Martha's Vineyard to claim her inheritance: a big house by the ocean. She knows this place—spent summers here when she was young. After her father died, the young French woman left and never looked back. Until now.

Classic American cars gleaming in the sun. Colors so bright they hurt your eyes. Nature that's almost, but not quite, wild. Just some visuals from the trip.

Needed a Cuban novel for my Cuban vacation. Something easy though—learned the hard way that reading by headlamp in a sleeping bag isn't exactly conducive to deep literary immersion. This detective story fit the bill perfectly. Set in Havana, atmospheric as hell.

Back from Cuba yesterday. Slept twelve hours straight. What I'm taking away: the light and the colors, the music and the rum, dream beaches and lush tropical forest. But mostly the revolution, still alive and kicking. Cuba lives a hundred miles an hour on revolutionary time.