The weather continues much the same ie nightmarishly hot, and the garden continues much the same too, ie weird: things are either growing with nightmarish fecundity or not growing at all with neither rhyme nor reason splitting the two camps, and strange green plants get bigger and stranger, and several exotic pumpkins are ripening which seems rather early in the season if you ask me. The corn is high, the sunflowers are higher, and down in the garden things sway and shift and slip and shuffle even when the wind's not blowing. If you were to tell me that some of those plants ate small animals I'm not sure I'd entirely disbelieve you...
Reading Black House today. It's odd finding oneself, whether one wants to or not, playing the game of 'spot the author' -- and knowing that, the way things work, whenever I'm sure who wrote what I'll be guessing wrong, like the people who "know" just who wrote what in Good Omens (a book I wrote with Terry Pratchett) always seem to have guessed wrong. Which means if I ever hit a passage in Black House that HAS to be written by King, I bet it's by Peter, and if ever I get to a section about obscure Jazz greats, I bet it's been written by Steve, just to confuse me.
Strange, though. It's set about 60 miles away from where I live, at just this time of year, in the heat, with the orange tiger-lilies blooming and blowing by the side of every road, just as they are right now. And it's as much as sequel to Low Men in Yellow Coats as it is to The Talisman. The whole book is written in the present tense, and I felt proud of myself for noticing that the mood and opening were in a weird way reminiscent of the similarly titled Bleak House but then they actually had someone read aloud and quote from the opening of Bleak House...
I mentioned in the last entry that I don't usually use Entertainment Weekly as a guide to music. I do tend to use UNCUT though -- they have these wonderful CD compilations on the cover and I keep finding new favourites through them. Thea Gilmore, Hamell on Trial and Black box Recorder were all first encountered on UNCUT compilations. (So thank you Michael Bonner, who put me on their mailing list.)