Two 3.8-mile city rides. 94 degrees, though maybe less at 4:00. I miss fireflies, but we also don't have deerflies that feast on joggers. I miss peepers but not the bugs the peepers live on. 94F is brutal in New England, but here's it's just damn hot. Here, sweat works. I do have a sweat rash on the underside of one breast. In an ideal world, no body part would touch another: no buttcheek overhanging the thigh, no breast touching the ribcage. Heat and friction are not so enjoyable in this context.
This is really good, much better than Blind Assassin, whose snaring of the Booker Prize I don't understand. Blind Assassin was really incoherent, for me. It shared with Oryx and Crake a protagonist not quite in tune with its surroundings, which is interesting, and there are shades of her other books as well. Probably unavoidably with Handmaid's Tale, since it's a futuristic dystopia, and with one specific tidbit about the main character's mother (Offred sees her mother, now and Unwoman, in her training at the Red Center; Jimmy sees his mother in footage of a protest long after her disappearance). Offred's Scrabble words, which all had to do with beds and procreation as well as using the high-score letters, also echo in Snowman's occasional flashes of vocabulary: I would have to look it up to confirm but I am pretty sure Offred uses "valance," as this character does as well. Atwood uses Tony Fremont's knowledge of war from Robber Bride to inform Jimmy and Glenn's game of Blood and Roses, which is a nice touch. Oryx sounds sometimes like Xenia and sometimes like Roz ("Oh honey, you need a new table!") and the vegetarianism reminds me of Edible Woman.
I am really glad I attended CGK's class presentation on Alias Grace, because it hadn't made much sense before then, not even with seeing Margaret Atwood herself in between my initial reading and that class. Blind Assassin I just didn't like. This sounds much more like Atwood to me and I am well pleased.
Oh, and one of the baby shower diversions was to wear a photo sticker of whichever parent you thought the baby would resemble. If it looked like the father, its hobby would be fantasy baseball, if it looked like the mother, it would have to read all of Atwood's books by the age of 11. I did not hazard a guess there. I did mark a square in the baby pool: the weight was hard to guess because she looks huge but I wanted to be merciful, but the date was easy because she wants it born early and one of the early dates was 29 July, a favorite date of mine with, for once, no real-life significance. PSA's and my anniversary, though I assigned that occasion to that date, out of the week we spent together, because I was already fond of it rather than its being on that date that any first thing happened.
Later, fin.
Margaret Atwood and her names, Margaret Atwood and her vocabulary and vocabularies. Her most brilliant coinage here is foetility. I looked up mephitic and mastitis. Queynt is not in my Tenth, but it is in my Chaucer. Again, a high-scoring Scrabble word with sexual overtones. Leman is not high-scoring but it does mean mistress. I had to look up fungible, which I shouldn't've'd to do but did and it didn't mean anything like what I thought. Pullulate is another completely unfamiliar but thematically perfect word, as is pistic. And so she strings together words: fungible, pullulate, pistic, cerements, trull. Succulent, morphology, purblind, quarto, frass.
Best book in months.