Reading

It is so hot that I have had a hard time writing. My fingers keep slipping off the keys. I am greasy. I can't see the keyboard because of the thick cloud of sweaty steam coming off my chest. How hot has it been exactly? I'm guessing something in the thirties, 33 or 34. Benjy, Lev and I couldn't get a cab today and when I asked the cabbie who finally stopped what was going on he said it was the heat, everybody was taking cabs.
I am reading The Family by Iris Leal. I had never heard of her or the book. I bought it because I wanted to read an Israeli novel and it was the smallest one I could find. I looked at a bunch of different things by Amos Oz most of whose books I read at one point or another in English, but there were a LOT of words in most of them -- hundreds, maybe thousands -- and so instead I settled on this which I read by the paragraph with a dictionary at my side. I have been writing down the words that I have looked up in the front cover. Here's a partial list.
"lie/deceive
lacking ?
absorb
nostalgia/longings
prefer
compete
grip
stock
storm"
The third from last in my list (she uses it on page 12) is the verb "hitmogeg" which means melt. (She uses it in a metaphoric sense. The narrator says that the family of the title is melting over her sister in law and brother in law, but I am not sure what it means? Are they sick of them or are they sort of fawning over them?) Anyway ani mitgogeg. I am melting in a non-metaphoric sense. I wish I could say whether I recommend the book, but I would have to understand it first.
Another literary note: my "gis" (brother in law, word number one in my front cover list), Menachem, left a copy of "Skeleton Crew" a short story collection by Stephen King in the appartment. It has a picture of a demonic little monkey on the front cover which really bugged Ariela, to the point that she would turn the book over if she came across it lying around. Let me just say that Skeleton Crew sucks. Sorry Menachem, (sorry Stephen King too). There are a few scary bits but mostly not. They are however ridiculously readable and I finished the whole book in a sort of dutiful way, including the notes at the end which provided the most genuinely horrifying bit of the whole book; he mentions in passing that his short story "The Raft" (originally titled "the Float", which conjures up images of a man-eating glass of rootbeer with ice-cream) earned him TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY DOLLARS back in 1970 from the skin mag that he sold it to. Now, anybody who has sweated out a short story and pedalled it around to three dozen magazines and then finally counts him/herself lucky to get it published in The Cocquitlam Community College Literary E-Journal for the big reward of TWO FREE COPIES will shake with real horror at that.