Finally some rain
The drought was beginning to make me anxious, and when I'm anxious it spills into other areas. I lightened the load for summer so I could do other things and have something of a life enjoying the summer weather. I love biking and long hikes and puttering around in the garden. But I also have plenty to enjoy on rainy days.
Which reminds me, I've been reading more than internet law and information management materials.
Frederik Backman, the author of A Man Called Ove and My Grandmother Asked Me To Tell You She's Sorry has a small novella called And Every Morning The Way Home Gets Longer and Longer. If you haven't read the first two I mentioned, you should! But this novella is one I just read last night and it's beautiful. You can read it in one sitting. I've read a few books about letting go and also aging, but this is told a little differently and I actually felt like thanking the author for writing it.
I started reading The Kitchen House by Kathleen Grissom but had to give up finally about halfway through. Her writing isn't exactly bad, per se. She takes you back to that era, and we already know from history that the things in the book absolutely happened. I don't even have a problem with the black main character not having as much a voice as the white. The white girl/woman was the "main" protagonist, and I think with the author being white, there probably would have also been people finding it problematic that she was trying to be the voice of the black girl/woman. I see that a lot, and the ones complaining aren't always wrong. My main issue was she couldn't seem to stick with just one or two lines that worked together. Hell, even three. But keeping up with all the varying tragedies was beginning to feel like whack a mole. Or (gasp!) real life. Fiction needs to have reprieve, I think, or it starts to feel like misery porn. There were so many people facing so much tragedy that you couldn't get emotionally invested in any of them. Maybe my expectations were too high? I'd been meaning to read it for years.
The Other Emily by Dean Koontz is another quick read I managed to fit in so far this summer. It's okay. I didn't not like it. Much like Stephen King often has a progressive main character, Koontz really ties in his "Libertarian" views a lot. I hadn't known that about him, but it's not really distracting from the story so much. Anyway, I had vowed to never read Koontz again, but I think he's honed his writing and this was alright. Not the best book I've ever read, but certainly not the worst way I could have spent a few hours.
I'm currently reading The Wife Upstairs by Rachel Hawkins, a modern re-imagining of Jane Eyre. This isn't reimagining in the vein of Jasper Fforde so much as modern housevives of Alabama. This looks like there will be plenty of toxic rich people doing crazy shit you'd only get away with in Alabama. We shall see. Hopefully she managed to throw in a few likeable characters I can root for.