Four books and a hashtag

So, I promised to share what I've been reading since the return of my reading mojo this summer. All the books I've finished so far have been excellent, so apologies if this turns into a bit of an "It's so good!" fest, but here goes.

First up, The Wonder by Emma Donoghue. I picked this up in Waterstones because I wanted The Essex Serpent and it was on buy-one-get-one-half-price, so obviously I needed another one. I loved Room, so although I didn't enjoy The Sealed Letter (another of Donoghue's historical novels), I thought I'd give this a go. I was staying with my best friend that weekend, not into the book I'd taken with me, so I started The Wonder that night... and then picked it up again in the morning, somehow breaking my terrible anxiety-induced reading slump (see my last post for ramblings on that). Which is strange, because of all the books to break a reading slump, this one kind of stagnated in the middle. However, the premise was intriguing enough to keep me going - Lib, a no-nonsense nurse who trained under Florence Nightingale, is summoned to a village in extremely rural and religious Ireland to try to ascertain whether a girl who appears to be starving herself but suffering no ill effects is a miracle or a liar. Of course, being a no-nonsense nurse, Lib is determined from the outset to prove that the girl is somehow getting some food into her, but as time goes on she begins to question her role in the situation. Although I think this is maybe laboured for a bit too long, the ending is certainly page-turningly gripping, so altogether a solid 3 stars.

Next, The Book Thief by Markus Zusak. This is one I've had on the shelf for many years (I think it belongs to the aforementioned best friend) and I've seen some mixed reviews of it. Those who love it seem to really love it, and those who don't seem to be put off by the fact that it's written in an unusual way, (it's narrated by Death, who interjects little facts in various places and likes to repeat himself a lot). If you haven't heard about it by now, or seen the movie (which I haven't), it's about Liesel, a young German girl in World War Two. She isn't Jewish, her father isn't a soldier, she lives in a fairly ordinary town, and this was actually the thing I liked most about it - it offered a perspective on the war that you don't often get in books. Obviously the war and the Holocaust come to touch her life, but in small personal ways, so even though it's not told from her perspective, I really felt like I was experiencing it through her eyes. I quite enjoyed Death as the narrator, and the unusual literary devices, and by the end I really couldn't put it down, so 4 stars from me.

Then a more recently published pick - Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi (another loan from my best friend, who is an excellent supplier of books!). I loved this. It's a tiny bit frustrating at first, as each chapter is told from the point of view of a different character in a different generation, and at the beginning I felt like I wasn't getting to find out the end of the story, but the point is that it's one long continuous story that plays out over the generations, and I loved seeing the differences as time passed. I also really appreciated the opportunity to find out more about the stories of Africans who weren't shipped to America as slaves, but who instead suffered under colonisation. This was a new perspective for me - a really interesting exploration of identity, and confrontation of the various different roles that the British played in African history, something that was really glossed over in our history lessons at school, which I think just perpetuates the issues. I'd like to read more books from diverse perspectives, and more people should read this - it's well-written, interesting and important, and I can't really recommend it more highly than that. 5 stars.

Finally for this post, To The Bright Edge of the World by Eowyn Ivey, chosen by my best friend for my birthday last year because we both loved The Snow Child. (As a result, I'm very lucky to have a beautiful hardback edition signed by the author.) It's about an expedition into the unexplored interior of Alaska in the late 1800s led by Colonel Allen Forrester, and about his wife Sophie, left behind at the barracks, all told through letters and journal entries. Like The Snow Child, there are wonderful and also really dark elements of magical realism in this, and although it's quite quiet (plenty of dramatic things happen, but because it's told in letters and journals, you're kind of one step removed from the drama), there came a point where I realised that I was really quite attached to these characters and wanted to know what happened to them. I read a significant portion of it for #cosyreadingnight, which is a fantastic concept invented by the Booktuber Lauren and the Books that I happened to discover was a thing on the morning before it took place, on a weekend when I had the house to myself and could therefore read for three blissful hours completely uninterrupted! The idea is that people cosy up with candles and snacks, follow the hashtag and read all at the same time, sharing what they're reading with each other. This sounds obvious, but how often do you set aside a whole evening just to read? Well, I'll be doing it a lot more often from now on! To The Bright Edge of the World was also a perfect choice because it's all about snow and ice, and there's nothing guaranteed to make me feel more cosy. Looking at my reading journal, I've given this 4 stars, but I might upgrade it to 5... it's not as important as Homegoing, but I really enjoyed it.

I've also finished two audiobooks recently, but I'll save those for another post. Currently I'm taking a break from historical fiction and reading Flight Behaviour by Barbara Kingsolver. (I did start The Girls by Emma Cline, which has come highly recommended by lots of people, but I just couldn't get into it.) How about you - what are you reading?

Books vs brain

I've seen a lot of articles recently entitled something like "Seven reasons why knitting is good for your mental health". No surprises there. But I don't see a lot of articles about the relationship between reading and mental health - something that's become painfully personal to me over the last year - so I've decided to fill the gap.

Firstly, the title. Following convention, it should be something along the lines of "Seven reasons why reading is good for your mental health", but if I was following convention then I shouldn't be writing this at all, because the stigma surrounding mental health would quite like me not to bother anyone with my mental. Well, hard cheese. I'm going for this:

Why mental health is good for your reading, and why reading is good for your mental health.

Ok, so it's not that snappy, but again, hard cheese.

So, why is mental health good for your reading? Well, it's very difficult to concentrate on a book when your thoughts are racing at a million miles an hour. Even if you manage to get your thoughts about everything else to pipe down a bit, then you get the thoughts about reading itself. For the last year - really since I stopped being able to update this blog regularly (not really a coincidence, now I think about it) - every time I've tried to pick up a book, my brain has gone down a rabbit hole along the lines of "But is this the right book? Will you enjoy this book? See, look, it's not immediately a page-turner. You were too tired to read yesterday so you'll have forgotten what's going on. There's no point trying to pick it up again tonight. It wasn't that good anyway. Pick a different one, it might be better." I've lost count of the number of books I've picked up, read a chapter of, then put down again. I stopped going to my monthly book club because I "wasn't enjoying" any of the choices. Now, some of them were probably not for me. But since I've sorted out some of my mental health issues, I've finished at least one of the ones I previously rejected and really enjoyed it, so I think the fault lies more with my brain than the books.

And the worst thing about all of this is that all along I thought it was me. I've been a reader all my life. It's pretty central to who I am. One of the ways I know that is because even throughout this whole period, I haven't stopped WANTING to read books. I haven't stopped donating a significant portion of my salary to Waterstones. I haven't stopped listening to book podcasts and playing with different ideas for tracking the books I wasn't reading. I haven't stopped evangelising about the power of books. So this weird reading slump was deeply confusing. Am I not a reader any more? Have I... grown out of it? Who am I if I don't read? So when I started to be able to read again, when I finished that first precious book, and then the second, I was just deeply grateful that the reading slump was over. I thought it had something to do with having some time off. And then my therapy group were given a case study about a man who was so anxious that he couldn't concentrate on reading, which was something he had previously enjoyed, and suddenly the whole thing made sense. I hadn't lost my identity at all. It was a symptom I hadn't even noticed. I feel like I've found myself again. And that is such a profound relief. My mental health is good for my reading, but it also turns out that reading is pretty good for my mental health. That link just got a bit broken for a while.

So, what have I been reading since I found my sanity again? More on that, and the wonder that was #cosyreadingnight, next time.

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!

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?