Despite the likelihood that they will probably not be kept, New Years Resolutions, at least a few of them, get made around here too. I will watch what I eat, stick with a regular gym schedule,  take a yoga class, join a book club, plant a garden. He will write every day, spend more time in contemplation, keep up with the fencing, do some careful exercise for his bad knee. As a unit, we will entertain more often, see more movies, drive into Halifax more regularly, and get back into the habit of making our own wine. And so on.

In a joint effort to spend less time consuming mindless re-runs and other forms of junk television, we have recently committed to at least an hour each evening of quiet reading in front of the fire. For me this comes complete with a lap throw and at least one cat sitting like a tea cozy on the arm of the couch, near enough that I can just make out the sound of her purr. It’s a Norman Rockwell picture that may or may not last until spring.

My large holiday novel, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by the late Steig Larsson, is drawing to a close and I’m still not quite sure what to make of it. A posthumous international sensation, according to the reviews, it was the first in a trilogy of thrillers written by the Swedish novelist before his sudden death at the age of 50 in 2004. I chose it after reading about Larsson’s career as a journalist, his lifelong fight against racism and right wing extremism, and his creation of a female protagonist, Lisbeth Salander (the girl with the tattoo) who cut very much across the usual grain. She’s a very angry, very punk computer hacker, for one thing.

The book is intellectually complex, tightly plotted and violent in the extreme. The investigative partnership that eventually forms between the male protagonist, Mikael Blomquist, a journalist, and Lisbeth Salander is like none other in the genre. The glimpses into Swedish life and Swedish law are fascinating, but there are so many gruesome crimes perpetrated against women and sometimes animals that the reader literally gets a chill, despite the correct political agenda.

Will I read the second volume, The Girl Who Played with Fire? Probably. But not until I’ve put something else in between. This might be a good time to return to the Picasso biographies or the Susan Sontag journals, where any ‘violences’ are not nearly so overt and the subject matter is somewhat closer to home. Sometimes a thriller can get too "thrilling" even for me.