Another summer gone. Still alive. I noticed this year how quickly summer ended in Taiwan. I don't know if I noticed it before.

Summer for me in Taipei is when the thermometers in my apartment read 88-89 degrees, regardless of what it is outside. Air conditioning gets used, usually timed for an hour at a time, and otherwise the fan is on all the time, and is on all night. Showers are cold.

Summer ended when thermometers started reading 83 degrees. No more air conditioning, but still electric fan action, but not all the time. Timer turns it off after I turn off the lights to go to sleep. Showers are still basically cold, but with some hot water to take off the edge.

A typhoon is just brushing the eastern edge of Taiwan, not expected to hit, but has brought clouds, rain and a stiff wind, adding to the feel that summer's over. It's a super-typhoon. A few days ago when it was in the Philippines, the winds were blowing precipitation down on mostly sunny days in Taipei.

It perplexes me that I'm still alive, striving along with no reason to.

I read the entire Lord of the Rings this summer. I read it because I haven't found any new "meaningful" reads, i.e. relevant to my existential situation, and I'm just killing time now. I read it because HBO aired all three films over the course of three nights and I wondered how different the films were from the books and I recalled seeing them in the public library.

There are, indeed, significant differences in the first and third parts, but the second part, The Two Towers, is pretty faithful. Oddly, The Two Towers, in my opinion, was the worst of the films. Muddled and scattered, but works fine in written form. Go fig.

Since finishing the book, only the first film, Fellowship of the Ring, has been aired again and I watched it again, and I realized how clever the dark arts of adaptive screenwriting is. Mind you, I think the films are instant classics just because of the scope of the damn thing. And the books are very long-winded with paragraph upon paragraph of descriptions of Middle Earth geography and meals and lore that were kinda lost on me.

But the screenwriters were ingenious in sticking in bits that were described at length in the book as mere tidbits that only a geek who lives and breathes Lord of the Rings or someone who just read the book would notice. It's out of necessity, I know. Otherwise the films would be impossibly long. Large swaths are left out of the films, but when possible, if the screenwriters were able to insert some tiny detail, they did.

I'm waiting for HBO to air The Two Towers and The Return of the King again. The third part was the least familiar when I was reading the book, whereas whenever I hit a portion of the first two parts that was covered in the movies, the visuals from the movie immediately took over. That's how effective the movie visuals were.

I didn't note how long it took to finish reading the book, but it was a pretty long ass time. Just a few hours a day in the library. And, mind you, the book and the films are better considered different entities. The films are sumptuous and grand and epic, but are no replacement for reading the book.

After Lord of the Rings, it also occurred to me to read The DaVinci Code because that also aired on TV, and I thought if scholars on the gnostic gospels are mentioning it, I should check out what this popular novel says about them. I don't know why, but I've been surprised that even many of my college peers have no idea what the gnostic gospels are.

I thought maybe that work of fiction could be a fun introduction to the topic, but . . . no. First of all, the film is a verbatim adaptation of the book. If you saw the film, you don't need to read the book, if you read the book, you don't need to see the film. And simply put, the addressing of the gnostic gospels is not at all scholarly, but appropriate for a thriller.

And that's what I did this summer.