Month in Review and of Things to Come

The End of Times are upon us and it has nothing to do with my recent reading of Doomsday Book.  Today marks the fifth straight day, as in five in a row, of 100 degree and higher heat.  I've know for awhile now that I'm going to hell, I just thought I had more time.  Long as I can take my books with me I think I and suffer eternal damnation; and really, it can't get any hotter...

I bought a few books this month.  All under two-hundred pages in an effort to make some progress in getting my number of books read this year up.  Of course of the other end of that equation is having to read a few books, which I'm still struggling to do.  At the year's halfway point I have no delusions of meeting my repeat goal of last year with fifty books read.  I read Doomsday Book by Connie Willis, and Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury.  I may have been to harsh in my words with the former as I enjoyed it only wanted much more of the good stuff.  I was heartened that hear from someone else that Fahrenheit 451 is high school reading material regardless of the author's intended audience.  Which in turn got me think about young adult fiction and how much I like it for it's general simplicity as opposed to plot convolution of adult fiction; particularly fantasy.  More than anything else about Bradbury I was blown away by how contemporary the book was sixty years later.

My other purchases for the month included Buddha in the Attic by Julia Otsuka and Montana 1948 by Larry Watson.  I'm currently reading Otsuka and while I knew this book was going to be good, I had no clue it was going to be as good as it is.  I'll be finished shortly and posting my thoughts.  I've knocked a few more pages out of the short story collection I'm working on, but nothing remarkable to talk about.  The near six-hundred page Pathfinder RPG rulebook has also occupied a bit of my reading this this month, but needless to say, I'm enjoying all of that.

Looks like I'm becoming a nerd again...

Apropos of nothing, there are a lot of concerts coming up that I need to go to and limited funds to draw on to see them: Stevie Vai, Ted Nugent, The Shins (a maybe), Derek Trucks, some version of The Allman Brothers Band and one rumored show this fall that I'm not at liberty to speak of just yet.  I'm too old for amphitheaters and arena shows so that cuts down some of the acts, but still.  
 
I foresee a lot of free time in July so if I'm not on the lake with my friends as much as possible I'll try to accomplish two things: read more, and not melt.