NEGOTIATING WITH THE HEAT

The 100 degree weather has sapped me of all desires except to lie on the tile bathroom floor with my cats and to use whatever's left of my deep-fried brain cells to read in one of two air conditioned rooms in my house. Fortunately I have two great books to keep me company: Margaret Atwood's Negotiating With the Dead (Anchor, $13) and Hilary Mantel's Beyond Black (Picador, $14).
Along with the short story master Alice Munro, Atwood is a a high priestess of Canadian literature. I've been a fan ever since I read her sci-fi feminist novel The Handmaid's Tale in high school. After several nominations she finally won the Man Booker Prize in 2000 for The Blind Assassin, and rumor has it that she has come very close to winning the Nobel Prize for Literature several times.
Culled from a series of six lectures she gave at the University of Cambridge in 2000, Negotiating With the Dead is an erudite and funny book in which Atwood sounds off on the art of writing. She starts off with an autobiographical essay that details her early childhood reading habits and her teenage discovery that there was no going back after she discovered the addictive joys of writing.
That's as far as I've gotten, but I'm looking forward to sitting in on more of Atwood's master class on writing.

When British author Zadie Smith signed my copy of On Beauty at a reading last fall, she recommended that I try reading one of her favorite authors, Hilary Mantel (who is also British). I started off with the highly acclaimed memoir Giving Up the Ghost, which never fully engaged me though it sported some lovely writing.
Still, I was intrigued when I ran across her latest novel, Beyond Black, at a bookstore. A darkly comic tale of the occult, it depicts the relationship between an overweight clairvoyant named Alison and a mildly-second-sighted woman named Colette who serves as Alison's business partner.
Moments are flat-out hilarious, such as the scenes with Alison's foul-mouthed, sex crazed male spirit guide. But Mantel also has a knack for capturing her characters' lonely inner lives, resulting in a mix of melancholy and absurdity that feels really true to life.