Here comes the rain again

The weather broke with a violent thunderstorm and torrential rain on Thursday night, which was such a welcome relief from the relentless heat that I ran outside into the courtyard and stood in the rain, letting it pour all over me. Although my office has air conditioning, not every part of my library does, and in any case it is a forty-five-minute walk from my house. It's been exhausting working these past few days as a result. But after the thunderstorm, things cooled down — it rained all day yesterday (trapping me in the house with an excellent book — what a hardship!), and for much of today, so other than unavoidable errands I've stayed at home as much as possible.

Given I'm about to go away on holiday, I tried to read all the remaining library, and otherwise borrowed books in my collection, finishing two lent to me by notasapleasure, and one that Matthias had borrowed from his own workplace. The former were Helen Oyeyemi's collection of short stories, What is Not Yours is Not Yours, all of which are strange, unsettling magical realism tales, linked by the presence of keys which unlock various physical and metaphorical things, and a short, lyrical story by Mathias Énard called Tell Them of Battles, Kings, and Elephants (translated from the French by Charlotte Mandell), which is about Michelangelo in Istanbul, designing a bridge for the Ottoman sultan Bayezid II, but is also about creation, immortality, and memory. The final book was a collection of essays by Alice Bolin entitled Dead Girls, and I found it mixed in quality. The title essay — about that genre of American story that begins with a dead, murdered white girl, and exposes the dark heart of a town and community (think Twin Peaks, Veronica Mars, Pretty Little Liars, True Detective, etc) — is excellent, as is the one on survivalists, fundamentalists, serial killers, and vast, unsettling American landscapes. The other essays, mainly concerned with Bolin's aimless years living through a series of dead-end jobs in LA, wondering what to do with her life, are less interesting.

We also managed to make it out to one of the outdoor Cambridge Shakespeare Festival performances, of Henry IV, Part 1. These happen every year, and are a nice way to spend a warm evening, although I do find myself wishing they'd be a bit more adventurous with their choice of plays. They normally do the usual suspects: Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and a handful of the most well known comedies and tragedies. That was partly why we opted to go with a history play. In any case, the production was fine, the evening was warm, and we ate a very nice picnic in the garden of the college where the show took place. They're doing Part 2 in August, and we'll probably go to that too. Given I saw Henry V at the Globe earlier in the summer, it seems to have been a year for Shakespeare's history plays.

Other than that, and watching (finally) the Fyre Festival documentary on Netflix (which had me raising my eyebrows and clapping my hand over my mouth in horror from the very first minutes), I've voted in the Hugo Awards (I have very strong opinions in some categories, and in others I really don't mind which finalist wins), cooked a bit, and tried to venture back onto Twitter without having a panic attack about the ongoing catastrophe which is British politics. So far my mental health is holding firm, but we'll see...

I know some other people here are Hugos voters. Have you made your decisions yet? Which categories are proving the hardest for you?