Summer Reading, and Other Wastes of Precious Brain Cells

The heat wave was finally starting to break, and now there's more heat in the forecast. Urrghh. For the past week I've been keeping the TV and computer turned off as much as possible, since we don't have AC. It was too dang hot to even think, so I went on a summer-reading binge: Death Du Jour and Bare Bones by Kathy Reichs, and I'm currently reading Villa of Mysteries by David Hewson. I liked Reichs's character, forensic athropologist Temperance Brennan, but the two books I read ended in almost exactly the same way: She gets knocked out and ends up in a darkened, unguarded room from which she easily escapes. Hmm. Isn't that what always happened to Nancy Drew?
The Hewson book is much darker, the characters barely even likeable. It involves bog people, which is cool: We saw some of the bog people at the Museum of Civilization a couple years ago. Some of them could be my ancestors, I suppose. All in all, a better read. I also picked up Hoax by Robert Tanenbaum. (It was in the sale stack at Cole's, so I don't have the highest hopes for it.)

After dark, when all the concrete and office windows stop reflecting so much heat, I crank open the window and put a fan on the coffeetable. This is when it's finally "safe" to turn on the TV. Sadly, it's also television's darkest hour. On Fridays, there's a steady stream of UFO/real-life demon possession & haunting/kinky middle-aged sex "documentaries", heavily butchered reruns of Sex and the City on TBS, the gross-out adult cartoons they don't run during the week, and of course. . . the nanny/nutritionist Gestapo shows. You've seen these, right? Somehow, an ordinary middle-class family gets talked into allowing Nanny McPhee's sister into their home to tell them how horribly they've effed-up their tots and how to do damage control before they sprout into mass murderers. Or the family reluctantly accepts a nutrition Nazi into their home and lets her rip them a new one every time they purchase a hot dog. On Honey, We're Killing the Kids, the parents even have to watch a very suspect digital age-progression of their children, which invariably makes the kids look surly, bald, and fat. Then they're shown what their children will look like if they eat lots of fruit and don't play videogames: Movie stars. Yeah, right. Doesn't make for great entertainment.
Behind-the-music shows are sometimes mildly entertaining. Sometimes. Other times you have hour-long shows about Shakira, in which friends and music execs describe the crushing blow to the music industry caused by the theft of half-a-dozen of Shakira's written songs, when her Dad's luggage has stolen. I don't think they wanted to admit to themselves that the thieves clearly wanted the luggage. It's not Hemingway's frickin' suitcase, people.
Ok, enough. I should never spend so much time writing about Friday-night TV. It's bad enough that I watch it. ;)

I'll get back to the Grail stuff and my regular reading next week, after the holiday.