Chugging Along

...the Chevron Scarf V.2, that is. Slowly but surely. The hat? Sort of stalled...I hate those Bryspun needles. The Mystery Stole...put aside until I have the strength (and mental acuity) to tink back six rows or so and figure out what I did wrong. The socks? Stewing in their own juice. So, the knitting? Not really going all that strong. Though I did get all the ends woven into my log cabin blanket. I think I will be putting on an attached I-cord edging but the blanket has already been pressed into service in the rather chilly t.v. room. It's nice and cozy.

I should probably rename this blog...Two Pointy Sticks and a Heck of a Lot of Books.

Current Reading

I finished Susan Hill's The Pure in Heart last night. She certainly doesn't believe in easy endings. Good book, though I imagine it'll frustrate a lot of readers.

Today I brought Dan Simmons' Hyperion to work with me. It's a paperback and I've been hauling hardbacks all week, so I thought I could use a break. It's got a lovely cover.....

Really...nasty, spiky humanoid with unlikely anatomy stands amidst the misplaced sea anemones and watches full-rigged schooner sail through the grasslands? What's not to love? But this is the same Dan Simmons who wrote The Terror, a really great read (if you have your woolies on...that book is cold!) and A Winter Haunting, which was a cut above your normal ghost story. So I am hoping for good things. It's close to 500 pages of pretty small type, so if it is good I'll be in my happy place all weekend.

(It sort of worries me that this cover looks so familiar. I got this one from Amazon a week or so ago. I am now wondering if there isn't already a copy of this book lurking somewhere in our house. Sigh.)

I'm So Easily Thrilled

Woot! I got an e-mail back from Adam Rex, the author of Smekday. No signings planned for Baltimore at the moment, alas, but I am strongly tempted to call The Children's Bookstore and put a worm in their ear.

Oh, visit the website: The National Capsule Project

Love the running Boov!

You know one reason I loved this book? I mean, it's funny...it's well-written...it contains fully fleshed out characters with all their quirks. But most importantly...no wizards! No magic! No multi-tome epic trying to ride Rowling's coat-tails. (Not that the Potter books aren't fun, but I hate it when they are held up as the be-all-and-end-all of children's books. I've only, I'll admit, read the first two and listened to the next one (or two...they sort of blur for me) and I probably would have loved them as a kid but, dare I say it, I don't think they are all that wonderful. There is so much else out there worth reading.)

Back At Work

I have a dilemma. Well, sort of a dilemma. I’m knitting away on the Chevron scarf V.2 (I frogged the one I was doing in the Mirasol Hacho - the love for the little dashes of color did not outweigh the folding and the not-so-softness and the not-enough-color-differentiation-ness) and I’m on the second balls of each of the two colors I’m using. I have four balls of each. I am thinking that I really need to use three balls of each to make the scarf a good length…especially given the width of the sucker. (For some reason, wider scarves need to be longer to me to look right…to balance the proportions.) But that would leave me with only two balls of yarn…one of each color. With which I could do…not much. And would make the scarf pricier than the usual scarf I do for Readervillagers….

Ah, heck. Writing this all out helped. I’m just going to keep knitting until the scarf looks right. That’s the only way I’ll be happy with it. And I got the yarn at Webs' Closeout sale for heaven’s sake.

There, that’s solved.

Current Reading

I finished There Is Room For You last night and got into a little crying jag. It’s a beautifully written book about mothers and daughters and the unknown sides of families. And gives one a great portrait of India, both in the present (well, 1992) and in the last days of the English rule …clearly communicating the chaos and crowds and poverty but still making it seem understandable that someone could fall in love with it.

But in one of the last scenes…the main character, Anna, is in the airport in Calcutta to meet her mother, who was born in India to British parents, and her brother. And her seeing her mom and realizing how she’s aged but how much she needs to see her and giving her a hug…well, it just tipped me over the edge.

Anyway…I’d recommend the book. But you’ll probably want to hug your mom when you’re done.

Fortunately for my mood, the mailman bought a pile of boxes from Amazon and Powells yesterday and, while most of the objects therein were Christmas presents for others, there were two books for me…and one of them was The True Meaning of Smekday. I had read a review of this kid’s book in the NYTBR and the review had made me laugh out loud so I had high hopes for the book. The reviewer also said that readers who loved Terry Pratchett would be fans of this book. Well, that sold me.

So I started Smekday last night and let me say…the reviewer did not lie. It is a bright and funny book with (so far…I’m only on page 155) a great spunky heroine, an endearing alien side-kick, a cat and a flying car, more aliens, a tribe of lost boys living in the (deserted) Happy Mouse Kingdom…oh, just buy the book and read it.

The illustrations are great, too. Kaethe, this book is a sure fire hit for you and the girls. Oooh, Erica, you guys might like it too.

Later

I finished Smekday. I loved it. I wish it wasn't finished. Make sure that you don't miss the last illustration in the book. I finished the book and immediately shot off an appreciative note to Adam Rex. I hope he's working on something else. What a fun book!

Bleargh....

Mr. Pointy Sticks and I are both home from work today with a stomach bug of some sort...Rachel's also feeling queasy. No fun.

I was thinking about having Poetry Tuesday here on the blog. But you run into copyright infringement issues and I don't want that. In fact, the poem I posted last week probably shouldn't still be up. So, instead of posting a poem, here's a link to a poem I found and really liked:

Constellations

Let's see if that works.

Currently Reading

I finished up The Various Haunts of Men last night. Whoa! Some ending. I was fully planning to start the next Susan Hill but this morning, lying on the couch feeling icky, I just didn't want to get up and get it. So I reached out to the coffee table and picked up Charlotte Bacon's There Is Room for You. It's about a 35 year old woman, getting over the death of her father and her own divorce, who travels to India, the country where her mother was born and raised. Very good so far (about a third of the way through).

Susan Hill

So there I was last night, all finished with Land of the Blind, wondering what to read next (none of the books already in progress appealed to me (what a surprise!)), when my eyes fell on The Pure In Heart, a new Susan Hill novel that I got recently. "Wait a second, wait a second, what ho," I thought, "I have The Various Haunts of Men out in the living room." (Not only did I know that it was in the living room, I knew exactly where it was in the living room, which is always a crap-shoot.) Various Haunts comes before Pure in Heart, so I thought I probably ought to read it first. Since I knew where it was and all.

Susan Hill never disappoints. I ran across her years (as in decades) ago when I bought a copy of The Woman in Black without knowing much about her. And I loved it. I read some others of hers, all eerie, spooky stories. And then there was a book about her farm, nothing at all like the others, but wonderfully written. And now this mystery series. If you don't know Susan Hill yet, check her out. This mystery is a good British police novel, with some creepy overtones. (Plus, it's nice and fat at over 430 pages.) And it's gripping.