Positive thinking

Well dear blog, I've been trying to think positively about things, so let's go with this in response to the length of time between my last post and this one: at least I've got my 2017 New Year's Resolutions sorted.

Resolution 1: Get back to blogging regularly. 
I really enjoy having that record of what I've been up to and what I've thought about it. And if I do it then I can stop feeling guilty about not doing it.

Resolution 2: Read. Make time. 
One of the reasons I haven't been blogging is because I've been in a bit of a reading slump. However, my saving grace in all this is that in September I joined my local Waterstones book group, and have therefore managed to read a book a month, so I can blog about those if nothing else. So far we've read Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout (excellent, beautiful, not exactly cheery), Beside Myself by Ann Morgan (pacy, complex, not exactly cheery), and Madness by Roald Dahl (short stories, wonderful, not exactly cheery). January's choice is The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern, which I've wanted to read for ages, so I need to get on with that over the holidays, and we've chosen the one for February as well, which is sitting ready on the shelf upstairs but I can't for the life of me remember the title. I've also listened to a couple of the Number 1 Ladies Detective Agency books by Alexander McCall Smith on audio, which have been excellent - the narrator is absolutely fantastic. And I'm looking forward to Christmas, despite the fact that our plans seem to involve driving the length of the country four times in as many days, because we've chosen an audiobook to listen to on the way that we can both enjoy, so I'm going to get to read The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers, which I've resisted buying a hard copy of for a while, so well done me.

Resolution 3: Craft. Make time. Use what you already have.
I went on a bit of a knitting frenzy over the summer. We went on a very lovely holiday to Sweden (much-needed after some unexpected adulting) and found a very lovely yarn shop in Gothenburg, so I obviously had to buy yarn, with which I made a gorgeous Rain Outside shawl. Somehow I managed to go from casting on to wearing it in a month, and it's been a staple of my autumn / winter wardrobe (the beauty of the internet is that I can pretend that I have such a thing and you won't know any different!). I then cast on an equally beautiful Brickless shawl, which stalled slightly for various reasons, not least of which was that the gorgeous yarn (Malabrigo Rios) comes in skeins and the ball winder that my lovely boyfriend ordered for my birthday took 6 weeks to arrive!
In the meantime, I decided to test-knit a shawl for a designer after seeing a post about it on Instagram, which was a great adventure. It turns out having deadlines is great for my productivity. (It's the Farlam shawl by Clare Devine - knitsharelove - details on Ravelry.)
Then a friend's mum organised all of us to crochet a square for a blanket for her, which necessitated me learning how to crochet, and suddenly crochet became a thing in my life. The friend who taught me started me off with a square that I could keep adding to as a scrap blanket, so I rummaged through my stash and found a whole load of small scraps of yarn dating back about 10 years to when I first re-taught myself how to knit. It was great - the blanket kept getting bigger, I was enjoying the memories... but then the little scraps of yarn started to run out, and the colours were becoming less varied because I was running out of some of them, so I had to go rummaging a bit more, and find some of the balls of yarn that weren't really scrap, but were leftover from projects I'd finished or abandoned. And actually, I'm really enjoying using them all up - it seems much more productive than leaving them to languish in a cupboard. I started musing in spare moments about the different stalled projects I've got and whether I was really going to finish them. I thought about the sofa throw I've mentioned on this blog, and realised the fundamental difference between knitting and crochet: knitting is lovely, but you really have to commit to doing at least one full row at a time. You can't put it away mid-row without worrying you're going to lose stitches, which makes large projects a bit tiresome because they require you to sit for long periods of time to make any headway. But because crochet only works off a single stitch, you can stop whenever you like. So the sofa throw yarn has been recycled... it's still going to be a sofa throw / blanket, but it's now a big crochet square that I can keep adding to whenever I like, and it's growing pleasingly fast. I'm going to try and do that more this year - complete projects, or find a purpose for the yarn I already have.

That said, I have asked for the yarn for a new crochet project for Christmas - but it is for a Crochet-A-Long starting in January, so I hope that's going to be my motivation to complete it.

Resolution 4: Plan. Do. Repeat.
I don't think I'm ready to announce this one to the world yet, mostly because I don't have any fixed ideas about how to achieve it, and it's quite deeply tangled up in a lot of anxiety, but I'm putting it here because I know what it means, and maybe by writing it down I might encourage my brain to start coming up with a more concrete yet achievable sort of plan. Positive thinking you see.

On bookshelves and books

Oh, blog, how I have neglected you. Hopefully you'll understand that it's all been in favour of (mostly) greater things: since the last post, the lovely boyfriend and I have moved house (and bought more bookshelves!), and both of us have applied for and been offered new jobs, so it's all been a bit hectic. Still, that's not really an excuse!

So, I suppose I should start with a note about the bookshelves. As is my wont, I was stressing about how to organise them - there were his books, and my books, and the books we both had copies of, fiction, non-fiction, poetry... you get the picture. Plus, to quote the lovely boyfriend, "If you take two people who didn't have enough bookshelves for their own books, and move them, their books and their bookshelves into the same house, there still won't be enough bookshelves." So whatever system I came up with was going to have to be flexible on the basis that an unknown quantity of new bookshelves would need to be added into it, and I didn't fancy reorganising the whole lot every time that happened. Normal people are probably frowning in slight bemusement at this point, but hopefully one or two of you understand the mental anguish associated with book organisation. I froze. (It had been a stressful few weeks.) The lovely boyfriend jokingly suggested that we should organise them by colour, in rainbow order (it had been a stressful few weeks for him too)... and lo and behold, for want of a better idea, that is how they've ended up. I quite like it. I like that we've discovered, through this system, that most books (or at least most of the ones I buy) are blue, black or white. I like that this means I now get really excited when I find books with a bright yellow spine. It's a bit sad, I know, but the small things make me happy.


Furthermore, now I have bookshelves and a bedside lamp, I've been reading a bit more, which also makes me happy. I finished The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell, which was AMAZING. Beautifully written, exquisitely crafted, characters with oceanic amounts of depth - just stunning. Definitely one of the best books I've ever read, and very much worth the effort of getting hold of a copy. I can't wait to get my hands on the sequel, Children of God. I've even started listening to one of Mary Doria Russell's other books, Doc, on audiobook, because I loved her writing that much, despite the fact that it's about Doc Holliday (of O.K. Corral fame) which wouldn't normally be a subject of any interest to me at all. It's pretty good, I have to say (and I can highly recommend the southern accent of Mark Bramhall, who narrates it, to anyone who likes that sort of thing!).

After The Sparrow, I had a brief encounter with A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving, but got bored after 100 pages when I realised that he'd already told me the plot, and I wasn't particularly interested in the characters. I might pick it up again one day. It's well written, but it probably suffered in comparison to the book I'd just finished!

When I got bored with Owen Meany, I picked up The Danish Girl by David Ebershoff (the book that they turned into the recent film starring Eddie Redmayne, which I still haven't seen). I can't say that it was on the same level as The Sparrow, but it was really interesting and well-written enough not to put me off. I know some people don't like books with film tie-in covers, but in this case it meant that I didn't think too much about the author, who I realised about halfway through the book also wrote The 19th Wife, which I didn't enjoy as much at all, and I'm glad that wasn't there at the beginning to put me off. The Danish Girl is about the Danish artist Einar Wegener, who comes to realise with the help of his wife that he is transgender, and about his struggle to live as a woman called Lili Elbe. I think the thing I liked most about it was the way Ebershoff made Lili into a completely separate character, so that when she was there, Einar was not. It really made it clear just how much Lili was a separate identity, and you understood that Einar had to "die" in order for her to live. Cleverly done. If I ever get round to seeing the film, it'll be interesting to see how they get that across.



After The Danish Girl, I indulged in A Snow Garden by Rachel Joyce, which is a collection of absolutely delicious short stories, gently linked by characters and hints of characters and themes of winter and Christmas. Utterly delightful, as are all of her books. (In fact, when I bought it, I had a conversation with the bookseller at the till about how wonderful a writer we both think she is.) It's maybe a bit too warm and sunny to get the most out of it now, but I highly recommend hoarding a copy until it snows and then cuddling up with a cup of tea.



Following that, I fell into The Buried Giant, by Kazuo Ishiguro, which I've been looking forward to reading for a very long time now - since it was out in hardback, if not before. It's about an old couple, Axl and Beatrice, in a sort of mythical Dark Ages England, where a mysterious "mist" seems to mean that no one can remember anything. I got really into this one - the beginning was excellent, and I like Beatrice and Axl as characters - but then, approaching halfway through the book, most of the story started to be told through dialogue, and the dialogue is just... wooden. I'm not going to claim this is because Ishiguro is a bad writer of dialogue, because I know for a fact he's not, but I think he was aiming for a sort of "legend in translation from Middle English" style which just doesn't work for me. I might try the audio, in the hope that someone else can put in some of the expression that I couldn't get from the text alone! I do kind of want to know what happens, but I think it's going to have to be on the backburner for now.

At the moment I'm reading The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair by Joel Dicker, which is excellent, and which I wouldn't have known was translated from French, so kudos to Sam Taylor, who translated it. I'm not finding it quite as thrilling as it was lauded to be yet, but it's definitely a good pacy mystery and I want to find out what happens, so fingers crossed it keeps it up!

Not much is happening on the yarn front, so I guess that about wraps up this post. Until next time.

Foxes, swallows, elephants and sparrows

I feel like I should start with an apology for the lack of blogging over the last couple of months, although that does sort of suppose that someone out there is reading this thing! But assuming you are, lovely reader, I'm sorry - it has been, and still is, an intensely stressful time at work, and my partner and I are also in the process of moving house, and Christmas happened, all of which have conspired to ensure that I haven't had a lot of time to read or knit lately, never mind blog about it.

However, I did find time over Christmas to finish the Little Tiny Fox Feet, a year after I started it, and despite the occasional fiddliness and tinking and bodging of annoying mistakes, it was definitely worth it. Click on the link for pictures!

Having not learned my lesson, I've since started a new scarf, which I won't post pictures of because it's going to be a present for someone. In keeping with my semi-tradition of choosing knitting patterns with techniques I haven't tried before, it's in brioche stitch, which makes for a nice double-sided finish, and so far I'm really enjoying it. It's taxing enough to be interesting but not so taxing that I can't watch a film or have a conversation without losing track of my stitch count, so it's got one over on the fox feet already. And the whole thing is practice for a brioche stitch shawl I've got my eye on, if I'm not sick of it by the time I get to that.

In reading news, audiobooks have come to my rescue in this busy period. At the moment, until we move, I don't have a bedside lamp, which has somewhat scuppered my habit of reading before bed, meaning I wasn't reading much of anything at all. Then I discovered that the Audible app on my phone has a sleep timer feature, which I thought I might use so I could still "read" before I went to sleep, but it proved tricky to listen to anything too interesting because I was missing ten-minute chunks when it continued playing after I drifted off! So I compromised on Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome - an old favourite with a plot easy enough to catch up on if you miss a bit - and I'm now on the sequel, Swallowdale, which is just as good.

In the car on the way to work, I've also been listening to Elephant Moon by John Sweeney, about a group of schoolchildren and their teacher trying to escape Burma in the Second World War, loosely based on real events. It proved an excellent listen, being a gripping adventure with an extremely nasty baddy and sympathetic goodies, and a large quantity of peril thrown in for good measure. Highly entertaining.

And finally, any spare half hours I get (when I'm not knitting) are currently being donated to The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell, as recommended by Ann Kingman on the brilliant Books on the Nightstand podcast. I can't begin to tell you how much I already love this book. It's science fiction, but that doesn't really do it justice. If you can, get hold of a copy or download the Kindle sample and see for yourself. I'll post more about it when I'm finished, hopefully soon, from my new house, big enough for more books, and more yarn!