Temperature Too High

I can't bear it. It is currently 37°C (feels like 43°, apparently) and I am melting into a pathetic little puddle. I have the use of one of those portable AC units with a tube that you can throw out of your window. I'm happy I have it, but it is, dear reader, not enough.

My brain feels like a sludge, and so I have given myself permission to spend a full four hours reading today (or, possibly, playing a video game - I'm working on Yokai Watch right now). This is the only way. I am allowed to slump, and I think I must. I just watched the scintillating 2014 movie Gone Girl, and I knew I had to finally read the book, too. That will be my beautiful pleasure in this repulsive hellflame.

What I like most about it, a few pages in, is the wonderful excuse to be grandiose and literary and gorgeously crazed right from the get go, in writing terms, through the simple but iconic narrative excuse afforded to the book: making its main characters writers. Perfect. They can be as writerly as Gillian Flynn dares to make them, because they are writers, which means their heads are filled with writer sensibilities. I love that. I'm always disappointed when writer characters in books don't utilise that built-in permission to be overly literary - like in the awful People we Meet on Vacation by Emily Henry, which I recently read.

In that story, the protagonist is a travel writer, but we only get to see the tiniest glimpse of her writing, and it feels supremely false as a result. The book also commits the cardinal sin of telling us super pointedly that this character is a really talented and good writer, but we see no evidence of this, to the extent that she comes off as a total hack, completely unsuited to her cushy career. It amounts to a seven-year-old's fantasy about what being a travel writer is. The book is hollow in every possible way, but I won't get into the depths right now. I just hate when a writer character is a writer for no damn reason. You'd think the writer of a book, when writing about a writer, would actually like and care about the details of writing, and what that means for a person who does it. But no, not for Emily Henry. For her, it's just a flat, cute, cardboard cutout aesthetic of a life worth living. How tragic.

Angry.

Anyway, back to Gone Girl I go, with a tall glass of water filled with yummy ice cubes. I will survive this heat wave, and I will destroy the sun with my own hands. Or something.