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!

Medium

I'm not sure how you define a reading slump. Usually I'd say it was one of those periods when you have lots of things that you could read, but you just can't get into anything. And I suppose that's been true for me, but I don't know if it counts when the reason I haven't been able to get into anything is because I've been so exhausted from work. Anyway, it doesn't really matter whether you call it a slump or not - I haven't read (or knitted) an awful lot since my last post. But my lovely boyfriend took me away for a couple of nights at the end of October, and promised me lots of time to spend chilling out with a book, which obviously necessitated having a bit of a think about what to take. I'd heard a podcast (You Wrote the Book, with Simon Savidge) interview with Val McDermid, and she sounded interesting, so I thought I'd have a bash at her Wire in the Blood series. I finished one before we left, and took the second with me, and I've just finished the third (reading time having reduced significantly since being back at work). And I think I'm not going to read any more of them. It's been a bit of a weird one, this. I've read a lot of books in my time, and usually one of a few things happens: either I love them; I find them to be enjoyable trash; or I don't like them and stop reading. But these were different. The first one was ok. It was well-written but residing firmly in the 'enjoyable trash' category, until I saw the big clunking plot "twist" coming from a mile off, at which point I was a little bit disappointed, because well-written crime novels should be a little more subtle than that. But hey, I'd managed to read all of it in a couple of days, and it was published 20 years ago, so it's possible that Val McDermid was still honing her craft - maybe it was worth seeing what the second one was like. And I enjoyed that much more, partly because it was one of those "opposite" crime novels where you already know who did it and you just have to find out how they get caught, thus avoiding big clunking plot twists. So, onto the third. And cue another problem, because the two main characters are now leading such different lives that getting them back together is a little bit contrived. And in order to make the plot work, they have to do really stupid things that I'm fairly sure people as good at their jobs as they supposedly are wouldn't do. And inevitably, they get themselves into danger and nearly get killed at the hands of the criminals. Again. I mean, seriously. If this sort of stuff happens to you on a regular basis, you're either rubbish at your job, which they're not supposed to be, or you have an unnatural, unrealistic amount of bad luck. It's the old Midsomer Murders problem. And I'm kind of... over it. The three books I've read weren't bad. But they weren't really enjoyable trash either. They were just... fine. Ok. All right. Distinctly medium. And if I'm going to spend some of my limited time reading, I think I want something just a little more extraordinary than that.

A post of two halves

Part One - Rejecting the Premise

Towards the end of a summer of excellent books, I picked up this one - One Summer by David Baldacci - from the pile of unread things. It came in a pack of 10 books that I bought on a whim a while ago, so I had no idea what to expect apart from a light read, but the blurb piqued my curiosity. Apparently the main character Jack has only weeks to live and is preparing to say goodbye to his family when his wife is killed in a car accident - who will take care of his children? Well, "something remarkable happens which gives Jack the valuable second chance he'd only dreamed of". Interesting, you think. Transplant? Drug trial? Oh no, dear reader. It takes quite a lot for me to throw a book down in disgust after 60 pages, but the premise of this one is just so blindingly contrived as to be ridiculous. I won't spoil it just in case you want to read it, but it did make me consider how important it is to have a solid premise for your novel, and how books with ridiculous premises get out there. Surely at some point when you're writing it, or at least at some point when you're publishing it, someone's going to ask you what it's about, and when you give them the three-line plot summary, surely that someone's going to say "Sorry, what now? Really?". But David Baldacci is evidently either so famous that no one dared say it, or someone said it, he ignored them, and the publishers figured they could sell it in packs of 10 books so people would buy it before they realised that the premise was... well, disappointingly dodgy.

Part Two - Stash Crisis!

A friend happened to mention the other day that she really wanted to have a go with a drop spindle. I happen to have a drop spindle, and some fleece to go with it, from the days a couple of years ago when I wanted to have a go with a drop spindle, so I said I'd dig it out and send it to her. I was pretty confident that I knew where it was. And even if it wasn't there, my stash of yarn and yarny things isn't that big, so there weren't many other places it could be. Indeed, it was in the second place I looked. However, in the first place I looked I also found a whole host of yarny things that I'd forgotten I had. Completely and totally forgotten. Nice things, don't get me wrong (isn't it always nice to find yarn you didn't know you had?), but the finding of them did lead me to have a bit of a stash-related crisis. How much yarn is too much yarn? If I don't go through the boxes of yarn I have often enough to have an accurate mental catalogue of what's in them, then do I have too many boxes? Should I weed out some of the stash? If I'm going to weed out some of the stash, which of the nice things do I get rid of? If I have a jumper's worth of yarn but absolutely no plans to actually knit a jumper, should I get rid of the whole lot? Even though it's really amazing yarn in a really beautiful colour that I coveted for ages and that (I think) someone finally bought me as a present? If I have a lot of yarn that I'm not using, it it ok to spend the yarn shop voucher that a very special person bought me as a present because he didn't know that I shouldn't be allowed more yarn? Does the fact that I'm planning to move house in the next year mean that culling the stash is even more imperative? So far, all I've managed to conclude is that it would probably be a good idea to go through the stash and log everything I have on Ravelry. That way a future stash crisis is much less likely. Though it doesn't really help with the problem of buying more yarn...

Knitterly types, how do you organise your stash?

Finished

May I present to you the 18 Hour Dice Bag?

 

I started it at 6pm last night, and it was finished before 12pm today, and I even slept in the middle. The quick finished-ness of it makes me very happy indeed. I even MacGyvered a 3-needle cast-on with a safety pin because I foolishly just grabbed a ball of wool and one circular needle before leaving the house, then realised that I have a house full of knitting-related bits and bobs for several reasons, and that two of those reasons are sewing things up (tapestry needle) and complicated techniques (extra knitting needles). Anyway, the cast-on worked, with a bit of necessary swearing, and the ends got woven in thanks to Asda, who apparently have all the equipment I need for sewing sails as well as weaving in ends (I'm not kidding - I live about as far from the sea as you can get in the UK, and the local small Asda sells, along with the usual sew-on-a-button basic kits, a set of 7 multi-purpose sewing needles "for use with canvas, carpet, leather, sacks, sails and upholstery."). The boyfriend is also happy, because now he has a dice bag that will make all the other geeks in the games shop jealous. Success all round!

In other finished news, All the Light We Cannot See was phenomenal. Lyrical and beautiful and heartbreaking and brave, and another one that you should definitely read. I don't want to say much more about it, because it's not the kind of book you read because the plot sounds interesting (although the plot is interesting), it's the kind of book you read because you open it to the first page in the bookshop and then don't want to stop. Up there with The Paying Guests as one of the best books I've read this year.

And hey, look, I've finished a blog post as well! Good things come in threes.

In pictures

Well, this is exciting. So far, all my posts have been composed on my Android tablet, which does the job nicely though it has several limitations, one of which being the difficulty in seeing the entire width of what I'm typing all at the same time (makes proofreading a bit of a challenge), and the other of which being a difficulty with images. The interface is the same - it is after all a web page - so it claims I can insert pictures, but then it doesn't seem to want to upload them, and although my best friend, who inspired this blog, says she just copies and pastes them, copying and pasting on the tablet isn't as simple as Ctrl-C / Ctrl-V.

You didn't need to know all that. Suffice to say that, as evidenced by the picture that will hopefully appear below this paragraph, I've given in and am writing this on a laptop, thus activating all manner of shiny features.



Ta-da! So, Alice Bliss. This is one of those situations where I'm going to sound a bit mad (those who know me in real life are now raising their eyebrows at "a bit"), because I'm probably going to end up talking about Alice as if she was a real person, and referring to the character when I actually mean the book. (I maintain this is partly the author's fault for naming the book after the main character.) So, Alice is an American teenager whose reservist father goes off to fight in Iraq, leaving her with a depressed mother and a precocious younger sister. She's well-written and sympathetic as a character, so although she does some pretty stupid teenager-y things, the things that happen and the way she reacts to them feel very real. I think this was helped by the fact that although Alice's father being away is a huge part of the story, it isn't the whole story - Alice still has to navigate being a teenager while he's gone, and although the way she deals with life is coloured by his absence, her life is still full of school and family and boys and all the things that exist for every teenager. It was a really good read. And when I'd finished it, I was telling my boyfriend how good it was and what it was about, and I said how the absence of Alice's dad was a big deal because he was such a good man and a good dad, and then as I said it, I realised that although the book is written in the third person, it's really Alice's point of view, and that when you're a teenage girl, if you're lucky, your dad is the best man you've ever met, and you do idolise him, and that missing someone often means you forget all the times when they were annoyed, or tired, or frustrated. So really, you spend the whole of this book building an image of a man who probably doesn't exist, and that thought adds a whole extra dimension to the reading experience. Read it. If there is such a thing as a good Summer Read, then this is definitely it.

Secondly, to follow up on my last post and capitalise on my new-found ability to post pictures, here's the haul I got from Waterstones:

                

(Plus a copy of Elizabeth is Missing so I can make other people read it - it's quite difficult to lend someone your phone for 10+ hours so they can listen to the audiobook!)

I've started the Maths book. It's fascinating, very well-written and very entertaining, though I keep having to re-read pages when it starts to make my brain hurt. The book on the Greeks is also very good for dipping in and out of. Peter Jones is the author of Learn Ancient Greek, which basically got me through a GCSE in the subject (hey, it got me out of a session of PE in order to read more books), and he really knows his stuff.

All the Light We Cannot See has been vaunted as one of the books of the year, so I really wanted to read it, but I made a false start a few months back in trying the audiobook narrated by Julie Teal. I'm not entirely sure why, but for some reason it just wasn't working for me. It turns out I'm not the only one though - my best friend said she'd had exactly the same problem so had bought the paperback, which turned out to be brilliant. So I bought the paperback, and it's turned out to be brilliant. More on that when I've finished it.

Oh, and I do occasionally do some knitting as well, but at the moment I have the wrong number of stitches at the end of the most complicated row of the little tiny fox feet, so I'm summoning the peace, quiet and patience to tink it, one complicated stitch at a time.