books

Doesn’t seem to be a shadow in the city

It’s been an exceptionally hot week, with temperatures in the 80s and 90s, and the humidity in the don’t-go-outside-if-you-can-help-it range. There’s hope that will break tonight, with some thunderstorms, but that remains to be seen or felt.

This morning, I took my car in for its yearly inspection. The mechanic estimated I drive only about 1000 miles a year. Which may be generous, actually, and only be so high thanks to the work trip I took to Maryland this past fall.

It was a fairly unexciting week otherwise. Lots of work, lots of sweaty commutes. On Friday, I finished reading The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell, which I thoroughly enjoyed. There are a lot of beautiful passages the book, but this, from fairly early on, might be my favorite:

Creation never ceased on the sixth evening, it occurs to the young man. Creation unfolds around us, despite us, and through us, at the speed of days and nights, and we like to call it “love.”

Reviewing an earlier post, I see it took me about three weeks to finish the novel, which is a little dispiriting. It’s long, but not ridiculously so, just shy of 500 pages in paperback. I’ve actually only read 20 books in total since the start of the year, 14 if you exclude comic book collections. By contrast, I’ve watched 43 movies. (And that doesn’t include things like Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, which I spent a good chunk of Friday afternoon re-watching.) I don’t regret the movies, but I do often wish I was a quicker reader, or that I gave more time to it. This evening, I started Barbara Cleverly’s The Last Kashmiri Rose, so we’ll see how that goes.

Of course, this evening I also watched another movie, the extremely odd, extremely violent Suspiria. It’s very strange, and often aggressively so, and while I can see a lot to admire about it, I’m not sure it’s my cup of tea. Scott Tobias of the AV Club wrote of the movie:

Atmosphere and style dominate his thinking to such a degree that Argento…can be forgiven for his inattention to niggling concerns like acting or storytelling.

And that’s the week it’s been. No writing group tomorrow, so maybe I’ll get some more reading done. Maybe I’ll get some writing done.

Sunday

My lovely four-day vacation, during which I didn’t even once glance at my work e-mail, is pretty much at an end. I don’t return to the office until Tuesday, but the work e-mail will have to be re-opened again tomorrow.

It was a pretty uneventful long weekend, the 4th of July holiday (and the fireworks that have commenced that and every evening since) notwithstanding.

I watched a couple of movies, Death Race, which surprised me by being dumb but entertaining, and also Dredd, which was pretty much just dumb. It shows a few glimmers of being something other than a dark and generic sludge, mostly near the end, but it continues a long tradition of Karl Urban making no real impression on me. (Seriously, the only thing I’ve ever really liked him in are the Star Trek movies, where he’s basically just doing a very passable DeForest Kelley impression. Here, you never even see the top of his face.) I also re-watched Rushmore this morning while I did the Sunday crossword. I’d forgotten how good that movie is.

And that’s pretty much it. No writing group this week, although I chipped away a little at a short story, not making much progress, but needing to get back into it all the same. (I’m thinking I may start doing “morning pages” again tomorrow.) And I spent a good chunk of the long weekend listening to the audiobook of Stephen King’s The Drawing of the Three. I’d read it a few years ago — read the first four Dark Tower books, in fact — but I’ve wanted to get back into the series, and I’ve really been enjoying listening to it.

Oh, and I gave the dog a quick bath this afternoon.

A quiet (aside from the fireworks) set of days, pleasant (aside from the heat and humidity) but now, alas, at an end.

Tuesday

I can’t really claim to be having the most productive of weeks. It seems like just about everything I need to do needs something else to be done first, frequently by someone other than me.

Then again, this is an exceptionally short work week for me. I worked from home yesterday, and today and tomorrow are the only two days I’ll be in the office this week at all. Thursday we’re closed for the 4th of July, and I’m taking the Friday after that off as well. We’re not even on summer hours this week, thanks to the holiday.

I did manage to finish putting up the newest issue of Kaleidotrope over the weekend. There’s a lot of great fiction and poetry this issue, and I had a great time writing the fake advice column. Check it out, won’t you?

Meanwhile, I finally got around to checking out the first episode of the Under the Dome miniseries, and I’ll just say what I said over Twitter: as an adaptation of the novel, it’s a complete (albeit curious) failure. Though it’s obviously not trying — at all — to be a faithful adaptation. So it has to be judged more for what it is. Which is a kind of okay, mostly, but not very remarkable TV series that shares the same starting point and some character names as the book. There’s a part of me that wants to continue watching it just because it’s like a strange parallel-universe version of the novel. Alas, there aren’t a lot of other parts of me that want to continue watching.

Wednesday

No free pizza today, alas, and in fact it took me about fifteen minutes just to get out of the building this afternoon at lunch.

See, the building has this “green initiative,” whereby they try to use less electricity, particularly during the summer months when city blackouts are more likely. And the building’s management is to be commended for this…except when they accomplish their eco-friendliness by shutting down half of the elevators during the busiest time of the day. I watched many, many elevators — or, rather, the same two elevators, but many, many times — go up and down, too full for me to squeeze on. And eventually, a bunch of us just took the stairs, even though we’re not supposed to. It apparently triggers a silent alarm in the lobby, or that’s what I’ve been told, and they’re meant for emergency purposes only. But I’d probably be waiting there still if I hadn’t taken the stairs.

I had high hopes that when I got home this evening, it would be to a new air conditioner and an easily activated new cell phone. But both took several hours, the AC installation guys not arriving until almost 9 PM (after many phone calls and promises to my parents throughout the day), and my phone would not activate until I spent forever and a day chatting with tech support online. Luckily, both were finally working around the same time, and now I have an air-conditioned bedroom — a little chilly right now, actually — and a shiny new smartphone.

That’s something.

Meanwhile, started reading The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell, for a change of pace.

Tuesday

Remember that company scavenger hunt I took part in last month? The one my team won, even though I lost them somewhere between the first and second clues? The one that landed me a couple of free beers, a golden whistle (that’s right), and bragging rights even though I did practically none of the work and only a fraction of the running that my teammates did? (I mean, I gave ten bucks to charity to participate, but that’s it.)

Yeah, today it got me free pizza for lunch.

I’d forgotten that there was a pizza party for the winning team, assuming of course I ever knew it, and the scavenger hunt itself was over a month ago. But it was a nice lunch, and good pizza, and an unexpected treat. Of course, when my teammates (and the HR person joining us) all started comparing their cell phones, I could only say, “Well, I have an iPhone on order. Because I do; I upgraded last Friday, finally ditching my current phone (which I have never much liked) for something shiny and new. But because I couldn’t get the website to accept in-store pickup after it had located the store for me — it’s right around the block from the house, almost literally — I’ve had to wait for it to be shipped. And so I didn’t have a phone to take out and compare. If the pizza party had happened on Thursday…well, that might have been another story.

Other than that, it was a busy day. I didn’t quite finish doing the thing I desperately hoped I would finish, but I think tomorrow I can put it to bed. Which will be nice.

Meanwhile, this evening I finished reading Neil Gaiman’s short novel The Ocean at the End of the Lane. As I noted on Twitter, it may be the strangest, truest, and best thing he’s ever written. I liked it a lot.

And that was…wait, it’s seriously only Tuesday? Gah.