Category Archives: Books

January Round-up

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Well, here we are at the end of January and I’ve already stuffed one of my New Year’s resolutions: not to have more than three knitting projects on the go at any one time.

I was doing really well at first: I had an overdue baby blanket, a rectangular shawl that I cast on in December 2010 and I joined the Through The Loops Mystery Sock KAL. That’s three. Then during a post-Christmas knitterly meet-up, Ling of Socktopus threw me a skein of yarn that I’d been admiring but not dared to bring home with me and said that I could knit them a sample.

So I started that.

And then I felt the sudden urge to change my mind about my colour choices for a pair of colourwork mittens, which resulted in me having yarn that no longer had a purpose, so I decided that I needed a new hat.

A hat with what feels like a giant tassel.

Pattern: Wood Hollow Hat, by Kirsten Kapur (Through The Loops)
Yarn: Quince & Co. Lark in Winesap
Needles: 4.0mm

So even though I finished the hat, I still have four things on the go rather than three. And I’m about to cast on something else. It’s all gone a bit wrong, but I figured that maybe it’s okay, and it’s me being genuinely excited about knitting again. I fully aim to finish the overdue baby blanket before the end of February, though, so that should help clear my conscience… if I ever had one to begin with.

I did, however, finish spinning a bump of fibre. This braid here:

became this skein of yarn here:

Fibre: Spindlefrog Oatmeal BFL in Woodland
Specs: 4 oz, 130 yards, 11 wpi (DK weight)
Wheel setting: Spun at 1:13.7, plied at 1:9.5
Technique: worsted-spun, short forward draw

I pretty much threw this fibre into the wheel and waited to see what would happen. I’m currently in an odd love-indifferent relationship with spinning, where sometimes I’m happy doing it, and other times I sit there, staring at the singles on the bobbin, the fibre in my hand and genuinely think: “What is the point? It’s still crap.”

I know I can’t get better at spinning without actually, you know, spinning. But I constantly feel like I’m having to relearn a lot of things, and making the same mistakes despite all my trying. I’m probably overthinking it all, and I did find that the spinning was easier going when I had an audiobook to listen to, so I’m sure it will be better.

I thought just for fun I would do a post at the end of every month also rounding up the books I’ve read and the films I’ve watched. So for January:

Read: Full Dark, No Stars by Stephen King (from the library). I’ve always preferred his novellas and short stories, and this was a nice collection. I liked Fair Extension best, because it was simple, cheeky but horrific in its normality. 1922 I thought was the hardest to get through, but it was one of those stories where I kept checking how many more pages I had to go, not because I couldn’t wait for the story to end, but because I didn’t know how much more of the claustrophobic horror I could take before its conclusion. It’s that sort of good.

Still reading: Stories, edited by Neil Gaiman & Al Sarrantonio (Kindle). It’s my second read-through of Stories, though I never read the last story by Joe Hill, so while I can’t say anything about that one, I can safely say that my favourite stories in this collection are Gaiman’s The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains – there is a moment in this story where I had to exhale in satisfaction, because something that was at the beginning caught with something near the end – and A Life in Fictions by Kat Howard.

Songs of Love & Death, edited by George R. R. Martin & Gardner Dozois (hardback). I’ve only got through six of the sixteen stories so far, but it kicked off with Love Hurts, by Jim Butcher, set in the Dresden Files, so that was a great start. I really need to keep more short story collections around. These have been fun.

Watched: Thor, dir. Kenneth Branagh, 2010 (LoveFilm). We rang in the New Year with this, and it’s just ridiculous fun. It helps that Chris Hemsworth is rather nice to look at, and while that’s all well and good, I really want to see more of Tom Hiddleston. It tickles me that Kenneth Branagh directed this. Who knew he could come up with an Asgard that was so beautiful to look at that all Nick and I could say was, “Damn. We need a bigger screen for this.”

The Rock, dir. Michael Bay, 1996 (BBC1). I have a soft spot for this film. I don’t know what it is. Maybe it harks back to a time when daft action movies still had Don Simpson, and Michael Bay hadn’t got the idea that he might be the best thing since sliced bread. But I can quote this movie in too many places, and I own the soundtrack. I am not ashamed.

Four Lions, dir. Chris Morris, 2010 (LoveFilm Instant). A film is a great comedy about radical Islam when each and every time I laughed, I thought whatever God was in charge of this world would strike me dead. Within the first ten minutes Nick and I were quoting bits to each other and laughing like idiots. It’s bittersweet near the end, but as any good satire, it made me wonder about all the people out there who do think like Barry (Nigel Lindsay), or who are perfectly innocent like Waj (Kayvan Novak).

And there goes January.

The Simple Quietude of Reading

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When I was little, I read a lot. I was lucky, and was also read to for a time before my parents either felt I was doing all right on my own, or they didn’t have as much time anymore; I don’t remember which. My mother read me little Ladybird books, and books with nursery rhymes in – she always skipped over The Twelve Days of Christmas because she felt it was ‘too Christian’; I was maybe three or four, so I’m not sure I would have cared, and I missed out on a good counting rhyme – and my father read me cookbooks, in the hope that when I grew up I would cook for him.

My parents were quite happy to buy me books, whatever books I wanted. They were always insistent that I should be able to read, write and speak good English, especially my mother, so the fact that I was happy to read must have thrilled them.

But I never had a library.

I had school libraries, yes. But the books were pre-selected, and were still from the era of its British founders from 1893, and despite the fact that I was in school between 1986 and 1994, the books seemed to not change very much. There were rarely new books, very few current books, so it was hard for me to find something I actually wanted to read in my school libraries.

And because of the strict school rules, we weren’t allowed to carry in books that weren’t either textbooks or books that were from the school library. They would be confiscated, and you’d never see them again. Which led me to become my school’s Roald Dahl contraband dealer: I would sneak in books by Roald Dahl, secure them in hiding, and friends would borrow them, secreting them home and returning them to me when they were done.

(There were other dealers. There was definitely a dealer in Sweet Valley High books, and another in teenage horror fiction, but if we each knew who the others were, we never spoke of it. It was strange times, but perhaps schools in Malaysia were a little stranger then.)

Nick, on the other hand, grew up mostly in a library. He would find books he otherwise might not have found. He got shown books upon which he might otherwise have not have cast a second glance. He read so much and so widely, especially in science fiction and fantasy, that sometimes I could pull the name of an author I’d never heard of, and he would have read them.

His dad had started reading him The Hobbit when he was about five, so he tells me, and they moved on to The Fellowship of the Ring not long after. Not long after that, Nick took off by himself, to read on his own, and never stopped. I don’t think anyone in the Irish house ever did stop reading.

(The rectangular shapes of many of the Christmas presents are not accidental. I did marry into a reading family.)

Books in his home were not often brand new, but inherited, or got second-hand. They seem more precious that way, because I guess it feels to me that they had to be obtained, whereas I probably took for granted the ease in which I could acquire books. We have his dad’s copies of Stephen Donaldson’s The First and Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant – Dad, if you’ve been looking for them: sorry! – and they’re beautiful and battered and well-loved. A lot of our books look this way now.

Our two reading histories led to two different reactions when we found out that we were getting a new local library in Canada Water. A proper big library. Not a school one with its limited and locked-down books, not a university one filled with reference texts – though I loved my university library a great deal – but a real library.

Nick just smiled knowingly, as if this was always going to happen, like leaves falling in autumn. I was beside myself with excitement. My own library.

It was much more important to us, I suppose, because elsewhere in the country, many libraries were facing closure. Even libraries in London were in danger. And yet here we were, with a shining new library, complete with convention space, meeting rooms and soon a new outdoor courtyard. We are among the luckiest and most grateful people in the country, and we know it.

I took out my first real library book last week. A book not on a class reading list, or one that had the essay I needed to read before my next seminar. A book I wanted.

Nick came home to find me in my office, on my beanbag, reading. After dinner, the flat was quiet, because I continued to read. He was reading, too, at his desk.

It is the nicest feeling in the world.

Failures, Successes and Rewards

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It has been over a month since my last blog post, and quite a number of things happened between now and then. Also, quite a number of things didn’t happen between now and then, and I think that list is shorter.

I didn’t quite succeed in the whole weekly photo assignment thing, even with some guidance from Digital Photography School. I’ve used the new little camera a lot, though, and it’s really proving its mettle, which makes me very happy with it indeed.

I didn’t knit for three weeks in the run up to my exams. I had no idea how much I was missing my knitting until one day I’d learned one tree for winter interest too many and lost my mind and deeply wished I had a project I could do. It wasn’t that I didn’t have any; it was that what was around proved too much for the few brain cells I had left.

I didn’t blog very much at all. That is kind of self-explanatory.

I didn’t finish my Luciole shawl in time for Anne Hanson to see it at the Socktopus Cornwall Retreat. She did fondle the yarn, and admired what work I’d done – at this point, I only have 17 rows left to go, but I also only have 17 brain cells left – so when I finish it I will probably email her a photo of it, if I get good light and a nice setting to photograph her lovely design in.

That’s all the ‘didn’ts’. What I did, on the other hand:

I watched a heck of a lot of rugby while revising. God, I love the Six Nations.

I handed in three assignments for my writing course since I last blogged. That somehow feels phenomenal and impossible at the same time. I have no idea how that happened.

I learned about travelling stitches from the amazing Cookie A at the Socktopus Cornwall Retreat. I have photos of what we did, as well as photos from the class I did with Anne, but they’re going to need another post.

I revised so hard for my exams I can probably T-bud a rose stem. I can name trees for their various ornamental qualities. I can speak Latin. I have lost my ever-lovin’ mind. I also have now sat for my exams, and now I’m on half term on a break I never thought I’d deserve.

Which leads to what I’m doing now. I’ve spent today with coffee, short bread biscuits in the shape of owls, three back issues of The Garden and some sock knitting. Later this evening I’m going to be spending some time with a new toy, which I absolutely love.

A shiny new Kindle.

Nick and I read. A lot. Nick, actually, reads enough for both of us, as I’m easily distracted and always seem at a loss of what to read where and when. When the iPad came out, we had almost monthly discussions as to what tablet we would have, as there are far more options that just the iPad. After a lot of deliberating, and as an act of wanting to enable me to read more, Nick bought me a Kindle with a small piece of his bonus.

I now have choices in the palm of my hand. I have Cory Doctorow, some Jim Butcher, and the first book of the Malazan Books of the Fallen, which is a good thing because those books get bigger as the series goes on. I also have a couple of Margaret Atwoods, though annoyingly I can’t get The Handmaid’s Tale on the Kindle, so that’s going to have to be a regular book purchase. In fact, the few authors I would have loved to have on hand on my Kindle – Charles de Lint, Isabelle Allende, Angela Carter – don’t seem to be available. I hope their publishers do something about that, because I’m loving this thing.

As a treat to myself, I thought I’d treat my Kindle, so I bought this:

A nice Kindle cover.

But not just any nice Kindle cover. Oh no.

I love books. I love their shape and their smell and their varied sizes and I love the feeling of them in my hands. Holding the Kindle, no matter how good the adverts make it look, feels weird. With one hand it’s awkward; with two, somehow too close and small.

Then I saw Amy King of Spunky Eclectic tweeting about Kindle covers. At least, I’m sure it was her. And I found Oberon Design. And I had a little bit of Christmas money left over.

Soft, warm, etched leather.

Now this. This is a Kindle cover. It is beautifully hand-tooled leather, tanned by the amazing people at Oberon Design themselves, and it is still silky from the oils used to treat it. And it has transformed my Kindle into something so much more than a book. I can hold it like a book and read it like a book, but it has so many books within it and it looks like something out of a fairy tale.

What I have now, is a magic book.

It’s enough to make me a little bit giddy.

Here We Go Again

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It’s another New Year, and it already looks a little interesting.

I get exams for the first time in years and years. First set in February and the second in June. I have to aim for a commendation for things to look better for me, which means I have to study a heck of a lot more. But that’s okay, given how much I love my course, and that I appear to be well-assisted from all fronts thanks to Christmas.

The big one is from Nick’s mum, and the little one is very thoughtfully from my youngest brother-in-law. He has scored massive points with me. These are going to be fantastically useful, especially since I’ve worked out that I want to work with trees.

There are usually resolutions by this point, but in a way I don’t really need to bother. I’ve been working to a decent schedule at the gym since last – crikey, it’s last already now? – June so I don’t really need to convince myself to head to the gym, or to reduce the amount of Coke I drink, or any of that sort of thing. I’m not much good at giving up foods, especially not when more exercise simply means I essentially no longer fucntion as a human but as a collective swarm of hummingbirds.

And frankly, I like getting my arse kicked in the gym.

I have lots of knitterly things to look forward to. Lots of sock knitting will be in my future as between the pattern-only option of Knit Love Club 2011 and Cookie A’s sock club that’s about 18 pairs of socks right there. As well as all the older sock club socks that I haven’t done… At any rate, if it counts as a resolution, I’d like at least half a dozen new pairs of socks by Christmas.

Also, Knit Nation 2011. Right after my last batch of exams. The timing could not be better.

There is also the business of spinning, but I’m not going to set anything in stone for that one, because it will be self-sabotage, and more than anything I need to remember how to spin like a beginner again. It turns out the more I know the worse my spinning gets, so it’s time to get back to basics, really.

The other thing that’s fallen by the wayside is the photography. Luckily for me, I’d been a good girl and Santa – isn’t it funny how he’s also known as St. Nick? – brought me a new shiny, and the Digital Photography School had laid out a good plan for 53 weeks of photography themes.

The first theme is ‘newness’. Well:

This counts, doesn’t it? You should see the macro shots this little thing can do. It’s perfect as it’s small and unfussy enough that I can carry it all the time, and that’ll make achieving these little photography goals much easier and more fun. There will be days when the Big Boy will come out as well, but it’s hard lugging a Canon 40D about the place all the time.

Yessir. Lots of fun stuff for 2011.

I guess the best bit is that 2011 is a prime number. That’s pretty cool in itself.

Shhhh…

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Do not disturb. You might interrupt the magic.

Stories: All-New Tales Edited by Neil Gaiman & Al Sarrantonio