Random Stuff

Good news--if I wanted to run a 10K tomorrow--well maybe not tomorrow--but I could do it. I just go back from the gym where I ran 5 very slow miles on the treadmill. I tell myself that it is less impact on the treadmill and therefore OK to run. I feel good. Yeah!!!
I just finished The Cairo Dairy by Maxim Chattam. This title is the next selection for my book club. I usually have about 7 people come to book club. This title had 12 copies in our system so I requested them all. Next thing I know, I don't have any copies left on my book club shelf and I hadn't read the book yet. It seems that more people are interested in the book club--good news--and a few of the copies turned up missing when people looked for them in their library to send to mine. So I had to send up a distress call to my book club and ask people to return copies early if they had finished them. Thursday a copy showed up so I snagged it. I have to write the questions after all and I try to get them out to everyone a few weeks early.
At first I thought I wouldn't be able to get into the book but then it suddenly took off. There or two stories woven in one--Cairo in the 1920's and Mont-Saint-Michelle (which is off the coast of Normandy) in 2005. Curiously enough there is a pretty good recapping of my thoughts about good and evil. The main suspect asks the detective if he knows about the "rift of evil". "Is evil and entity or a corruption of our society...The rift of evil is a question that has been haunting our race since the dawn of civilization...are the worst criminals all that way because they have experienced the worst torments in their development to manhood, or is it because they wore born with this inclination toward violence?" (p.204) Good and Evil still seems to be the theme.
The book is well written and Chattam uses interesting descriptive similes: "Then the wind came and flattened itself against the glass behind her...pressing its face close so that it too could read the fabulous tale." And the ending is rather unexpected leaving the reader--or at least me--to ponder what really happened in the end--but the book ends with [Our truth] after all, concerns only us. And I guess it does.
I guess I enjoy ending that are someone ambiguous. One of my favorite stories is Rashamon where the detective is trying to sort out how a man was murdered. The detective interviews first the wife who tells a believable story and then the husband who has a different but equally rational story. The detective then has the opportunity to interview the ghost of the dead man. The ghost tells an alternate story not quite agreeing with neither the husband nor wife. Who is telling the truth? The point of Rashamon, much like the ending of The Cairo Diary, is that truth is not universal and may depend on whose point of view we are seeing.