unreliable narrator

In the summer, the book budget gets inflated.  I read a lot anyway, and in summer I read constantly, simply because I love it and there is suddenly all this extra time in which to do it.  One day I will shrivel like a raisin because I spend so much of the summer in a lawnchair reading.  In the sun.  We all know that sun in bad for us; so why does it feel so good?  I blame my Egyptian relatives, whose blood still must seek heat even as it disperses its way through North America.

The last few books I have read have been somewhat awful, which hasn't stopped me from continuing to read the genre.  I like non-fiction books, memoir type books, especially the kind that are meant to teach the reader something not previously known.  In that vein I read Fierce Conversations, which has made the rounds among our staff, recommended and purchased by the head honcho.  Yuck, what an obnoxious piece of garbage.  Then I read Songs of the Gorilla Nation, a book about an autistic woman learning to understand her fellow humans better through her interactions with gorillas.  This was a pretty interesting book which taught me more about gorillas than I had previously known, and I would have liked it more if the story had not be interrupted every so often by the author's lousy poems.  Now I am reading Confessions of a Sociopath: A Life Spent Hiding in Plain Sight.  So far I'm not finding the confessions particularly engaging.  So she uses and manipulates people to her advantage… I'm not sure what is meant to be interesting or shocking about it.  People do that; most of us learn to spot those people when we are still in elementary school.  Don't we?  The author strikes me as having an unrealistic and grandiose sense of her own importance and ability to impact others.  I suppose this is a symptom of psychopathy.  

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Yesterday Shawn and I went to see Southpaw, a Jake Gyllenhaal movie about a boxer.  Pretty formulaic, but it was pleasant to spend an afternoon together anyway.  J is in the States now at a horse show, and we are enjoying our empty nest.  If only she had taken her cat with her.  The poor cat is terribly lonely without J, and in his desperation for affection, he has begun hanging out with me.  He lies behind my head across the back of the couch, purring in my ears while I read.  It's not altogether unpleasant, although I am not a huge fan of cats.  He's rather sweet, and I could probably learn to love him if he would stop leaving hairballs everywhere and pay me back for all the damage he has done to my house over the years.

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M. has gone home for the summer.  He comes from a place near to where I come from.  And he posts pictures of it, the long straight highway under the enormous sky, fields and fields of canola on all sides. It gives me a certain ache that is hard to describe because it is so mixed in its composition.


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