Books and Humidity

The sunset was spectacular tonight, especially after the thunderstorms we had. But the heat finally broke with the storm, thank gods. I was red-faced and wilting all day in the humidity. Gee, can we say non-drought tolerant? Kidding. But I am overjoyed for the cooler and less humid sleeping conditions tonight, even if tomorrow will be just as bad. As long as the nights cool down and there’s air moving, I stay pretty happy.

I finished The Hunchback of Notre-Dame today. Once you get past the diatribes of architecture, the novel is pretty good. Romantic almost to a fault, but the ending is great. I don’t feel deprived or anything having not watched the Disney version first. But Esmeralda is kind of an airhead over Phoebus, who doesn’t deserve the love from such a lovely girl, lovely in body and spirit. Strangely (which was probably what Hugo was going for), the only character whose soul matches the beauty of Esmeralda’s own is Quasimodo’s. So it makes him that much more tragic. (Yeah, I know. Five years of college and that’s my initial analysis. Oh well. I was a reader before I was an English major and will be a reader long after.)

So I started Pamela by Samuel Richardson and gave up on the Tao of Horses, trading it for Storey’s Guide to Training Horses and The Mammoth Book of International Erotica. I’m also rereading The Nick Adams Stories by Hemingway and still plugging away at the Bhagavad Gita. I feel a text like that deserves some consideration instead of an avid cover-to-cover read. And if that’s not enough books for ya, I finished Laurell K. Hamilton’s A Caress of Twilight yesterday and started Kim Harrison’s Every Which Way but Dead today. Hey, gotta supplement those classics with some brain candy. I get my 25 pages of Richardson in and a hundred pages in Harrison. Seems fair to me.