Florida is nice. At least as nice as I remember it. I haven’t been back in a year and a half and it’s still hot as hell. Humid. Mom told me that the twenty-seventh was probably the hottest day of the year. I can believe that. Eighty-four degrees and humid.

I’ve collected three new books so far: James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces. David McCullough’s 1776. Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. I started A Million Little Pieces last night and I’m tearing through it. It’s dark. And funny. I wonder why people pissed and moaned about Frey making up—embellishing?—parts of the book. It doesn’t change anything. It’s still a damn good book.

I found a stack of books I’d given to my mom several years ago and I wonder why she never read them. Donna Tartt’s The Secret History. Jonathan Franzken’s The Corrections. Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White. There are a lot more, but I can’t remember, off the top of my head, what else was in the shelf. I’ll read The Crimson Petal and the White. I never finished it. I remember enjoying it so I’m not sure why I didn’t finish it. It had a very Dickensian feel to it. It’s one of those books that stays with you.

I haven’t been able to get back into Orhan Pamuk’s My Name Is Red. I’d misplaced it and wasn’t able to read it over the last two weeks. Maybe the time, at least for now, has passed. Or maybe it’s because A Million Little Pieces is so compelling that it overshadows any other books I’m reading. In any case, I’ll wait a bit before picking it up again. Maybe I’ll just start over. I didn’t get very far with it—seventy-five pages.

It’s so damn hot.