Too Hot to Blog

Another heat spell heat hit, as it is wont to do this time of year. It was much too hot to blog. Needless to say, I had to remove the winter comforter from my bed. One night it was so hot I couldn't stay in my room, just laid on the couch in the living room in a state of miserable semi-wakefulness while I listened to the dog howling next door and the occasional truck rumbling by.

I had one bearable afternoon working on my art journal at my friend Christina's house. Her living room wasn't air-conditioned, but she had the blinds pulled down and the curtains closed, which protected the room from the punishing sun, and she had a powerful fan going. She was in a cheery mood because she'd spent the weekend in Monterey where it was cool and foggy. Sigh.

I got through the rest of the week by reading. I started out at the bottom with romances, read two by Amanda Quick. Hers are light-hearted in tone and involve psychic abilities. I then proceeded a step up the literary ladder to Robert Barnard, an excellent mystery writer that I highly recommend. As The New York Times Book Review put it: "One of the deftest stylists in the field...goes about it with a quietly malicious sense of humor." Finally I crossed the line into literature by reading The Missing of the Somme by Geoff Dyer though when I say "crossing the line," I am not being entirely accurate as he likes to blur the lines between fact, fiction and personal memoir. He's written books in all three genres and he enjoys mixing them up so he's hard to classify. Novelist, diarist, journalist, historian, critic, comic, travel writer?