Nice Best Exotic Pet photos

A few nice Best Exotic Pet images I found:

Steig Larsson Book


Image by Earthworm
When you are a bonafide published author people want to know who your favorite author is and they don’t mean Naomi Klein. Because in the world of books it is always about fiction. Luckily Martine turned me onto Steig Larsson, a Swedish writer whose books are the most talked about in Europe she told us. This is the second in the trilogy that she just loaned me after her annual trip to France. It’s a British edition.

She gave us, earlier this year, his first book in the trilogy, "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo". It was just my kind of intelligent book filled with socio-political awareness and not afraid to be pinned to an exact time in current history. The characters are well rendered, interesting, decent people who are the vehicle for this awareness; lots of interesting empowered women also included.

The Swedish terrain was refreshingly exotic to me. The details of financial corruption, in the vein of disaster capitalism, that opens the first book, revealed a perspective that understands how the world works. This was the hook for me and his pet beef, exposing the prevalence of violence against woman, was fine with me too. But best, of all was the character of the title, the Girl, not your standard girl at all so one is spared all that emotional internal dialogue. In fact one is spared the whole puritan ball of wax that comes with an American sensibility as unconventional sexual relationships abound as if they were the mature normal scheme of things. Martine claims that such openess in relationships is the norm in Europe.

And he spins a damn good yarn. The second book is a bit over the top with the yarn spinning and less on the socio-political awareness, but still as suspenseful and this is a mystery novel series.

American fiction writers talk about wanting to write something that will be timeless so they don’t commit to details of current politics or technology, claiming that this will give them the ability to mythologize their story of universal human whatever. Most of these writers are not up to the task of mythologizing and their human concerns seem never to rise above a romance novel or a character marked by psychological trauma. These writers also don’t seem to read non-fiction thus their created world seems to cling to an idealized one kept alive by other fiction writers and the tried and true classics deemed safe by academia.

Mystery novels are rarely considered literature, anyway, but it seems to be the medium that offers the most opportunity for stuffing in a lot of facts about how the world works. I also liked the ones about Bangkok by another European living in Asia, John Burdett.