Since I have joined Kat with a K’s Summer Reading Program, I feel I ought to give updates a bit more often than once a month. So I figured I’d aim for a post on the books of the week (or, in this case, fortnight).

So far this month, I have read:

Pericles, by William Shakespeare
From the Shakespeare Theatre (because the book jacket is lame): “Pericles begins in Antioch, where Prince Pericles of Tyre must unravel a riddle to win the hand of a princess. But when Pericles discovers King Antiochus and his daughter’s terrible secret, he must flee for his life. Pericles sets sail—traveling from kingdom to kingdom—falling in love with a princess (Thaisa) and conceiving a child (Marina). After a terrible storm strikes their ship at sea, father, mother and daughter are separated. ”

Why this book? The Shakespeare Theatre was performing Pericles as its Free for All performance and I’d never read it. A few years ago, Karen, Rudi, Michael, and I went to see a performance of a Shakespeare history play that I hadn’t read and it was very confusing. I recognized Falstaff and the king of England and eventually figured out that another character must have been the French king, but it was a less than ideal play-watching experience. I didn’t want to be caught out again, so I read the first four acts before we saw the play. (I finished the final act today, since it’s always nice to be surprised by the ending of a play when you’re seeing it for the first time.)

My take: Pericles is a lesser-known Shakespearean play for a reason. The first half is believed to have been written by another playwright and it’s all based on an epic poem by the 14th century poet Gower (who appears as the narrator in the play (although not in the staged version we saw)). Apparently the story was well-known at the time, but it was definitely full of unrealistic melodrama by today’s standards. I mean with two assassination attempts, incest, a shipwreck, a birth and death at sea, a pirate attack, a brothel, and slavery in its slim 163 pages, it packs almost as much action in as a soap opera episode. The story at the heart of the play is a sweet one, nonetheless, and the ending is happy. The whole story is far-fetched, but it’s fiction and allowed. Worth reading if you haven’t already.

Pages: 163

Hoot, by Carl Hiassen
From the book jacket: “Roy Eberhardt is used to the new-kid drill. His family has lived all over, and Florida bullies are pretty much like bullies everywhere. But Roy finds himself oddly indebted to the hulking Dana Matherson. If Dana hadn’t been mashing his face against the school bus window, Roy might never have spotted the running boy. And the running boy is the first interesting thing Roy’s seen in Florida. . . . Sensing a mystery, Roy sets himself on the boy’s trail. The chase will introduce him to some other intriguing Floridian creatures: potty-trained alligators, a sinister pancake PR man, some burrowing owls, a fake-fart champion, a renegade eco-avenger, and several poisonous snakes with unnaturally sparkling tails.”

Why this book? I was in the kids’ room at the library and this popped out at me. I knew it had recently been made into a movie and that the book had good pre-movie hype, so I thought it might be time to check it out.

My take: Somehow Hiassen’s name makes me think of gross-out books and I don’t know why. Maybe his adult books are less appetizing? But this story was sweet and reminded me a bit of Louis Sacher’s Holes, but without the prison element or the magical realism. Essentially it focuses on how you develop a personal code of ethics and how far you take it. I really liked the main character who seemed to be an average sort of teen boy with a bit too much curiosity for his own good. Worth a read as well as a good gift for a young person in your life.

Pages: 292

The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader”, by C.S. Lewis
From the book jacket: “How King Caspian sailed through magic waters to the End of the World”

Why this book? As you might have seen in the earlier issues, I’ve been re-reading the Chronicles of Narnia since the movie came out last winter.

My take: The Narnian characters go sailing! Yes, there are a few other things going on the book — slavery, a child being turned into a dragon, invisible people — but it’s pretty much just Narnia on water. Not as good as the original.

Pages: 216

Gatsby’s Girl, by Caroline Preston
From the book jacket: “Just as Jay Gatsby was haunted by Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald was haunted by his own great first love — a Chicago socialite named Ginevra. Alluring, capricious, and ultimately unavailable, she would become his first muse, the inspiration for such timeless characters as Gatsby’s Daisy and Isabelle Borgé in This Side of Paradise. . . . Now, in this richly imagined and ambitious novel, Preston deftly evokes the entire sweep of Ginevra’s life — from her first meeting with Scott to the second act of her sometimes charmed, sometimes troubled life.”

Why this book? I read an excerpt on NPR’s website and thought it seemed like it had potential.

My take: I liked it. Ginevra starts off as your stereotypical debutante — spoiled, rich, and willful. But as time goes on she becomes more than that. She grows — through her reading of Fitzgerald’s books, through seeing herself as a Peter Pan-type of spoiled heroine, and through hearing of Fitzgerald’s frustrated life. By the very end of the book, you feel that she’s grown in ways that Fitzgerald was never capable of — and perhaps in ways that he never realized one could grow.

Pages: 310

Total: 4 books, 981 pages

Three beautiful things from the last week:

1. Our friends Sam and Alexis are coming to visit this weekend. Rudi was under the impression that they arrived tonight, but they aren’t in fact coming until tomorrow. This gives us an extra day to clean. (Not getting to spend Thursday evening with them is not, however, a beautiful thing.)

2. While on my Sunday bike ride along the C&O Canal, I saw a Baltimore Oriole fly by. He had the brightest plumage and just looked so jolly.

3. I won passes to see The Heart of the Game, which is a documentary about a Seattle high school basketball team, at a local movie theater last week and invited Amani to go with me. She and I are the only two people I know in town who played high school basketball, so I figured we both might see something in it that those who hadn’t played the sport would. (I think that was true, but anyone who loves women’s basketball, sports in general, seeing kids triumph over their personal situations, or an underdog story would enjoy it as well.) Amani gave me a ride home and we chattered most of the way about playing basketball, high school vs. college teams, Division I vs. Division III teams, and boys’ vs. girls’ games, as well as societal implications brought up by the film. I had forgotten how much fun seeing a movie just with a girl friend could be and I fear Rudi may get ditched a bit more often in favor of such outings.

We’re ten days away from the wedding in California.

Two problems:

a) I don’t have a present yet. Yes, I know. I can buy off the registry if need be. It’s just so … unoriginal. And from one Wesleyan grad to another, it does seem that the gift almost begs to be original. Any ideas?

b) I have to pick a dress. I have four choices:

1. Red satin with plunging neckline, worn to Caroline’s and Sam’s weddings.
2. Pink silk sheath, worn to Jason’s and Wendy’s weddings.
3. Pink flowered linen party dress.
4. White linen full-skirted party dress.

I just modeled them for Rudi, who votes for one of the two linen dresses. It’s an outdoor Saturday night wedding in Southern California. Is linen too informal? I know we’ve abandoned the taboo on wearing black to weddings; how do we feel about guests wearing white?

I’ve got a week and would love some feedback.

This story in today’s Hartford Courant reminds me why it’s important to buy locally produced food.

The article talks about family dairy farmers in Connecticut whose 2006 crop of cattle feed is drowning in the spring’s season-long rain. Add to this short-term natural catastrophe a long-term man-made one of cost. Energy prices have raised the costs of running a farm, but the market has held the price of milk below what it actually costs to produce it. Subtract the costs of the middle men — the store owner and the bottler — and the average farmer loses $10 for every 100 pounds of milk they produce. One farmer took out $50,000 in loans last month to pay his bills. Six have been forced to leave farming altogether just in the last year. Two have closed just since January.

Connecticut boasts 169 dairy farms that spread across a quarter of a million acres of land statewide. Twenty years ago (four years after the farm across from my elementary school had been turned into a housing development) 481 farms dotted the state’s landscape. Ten years ago, 289 still existed. Try to remember that this was happening while other businesses were flourishing in a time of economic prosperity. Think what happens when the interest rates on loans start going up.

Picture the cows you drove past last week on your way to work. Imagine now their pastureland plowed under and a McMansion in the cows’ place.

Call or write your state legislator and ask him or her to support economic bills that encourage long-term vitality for farms as well as more immediate low-interest, fixed-rate loans. It’s imperative that legislators understand that this affects more than just 169 families; it affects all of us.

Invest in the future of local agriculture. Tour a family farm — the biggest dairy farm in Connecticut has a herd of fewer than 1,000 cattle. Visit an agricultural fair. Support kids who want to go into farming.

In the meantime, buy locally produced food (such as The Farmer’s Cow milk) whenever you can. You can immediately put money into the hands of farmers by buying into community-supported agriculture — by buying actual shares in a farmer’s crops, buying from farm stands that eliminates some of the middle man costs, or demanding that your local grocer start carrying local produce.

Food tastes better when you buy it close to where it was grown. In the same way that food out of your own garden tastes best because you can see when it is just ripe and perfect for tasting, so, too, can a farmer best judge when it’s time to harvest his or her crop. If, on the other hand, a crop has to be picked so that it isn’t rotten when it arrives on the other side of the country and sits out at the grocery store, it sure isn’t going to be ideal.

Remember those strawberries you bought last season from the grocery store when you thought to yourself, “These looked beautiful but, God, they hardly tasted like anything!” Try a locally grown strawberry from a farm stand this summer. I bet you’ll be pleased with the results. Even when the fruit doesn’t look as pretty (and sometimes it doesn’t because these crops are grown in real-world situations where some days it rains too much and cracks the tomatoes and on other days a worm bites into the apple), it still tastes … real.

Yes, it may cost more than what you’ll pay at Stop & Shop or Big Y or WalMart. And if you are on a tightly fixed income, this may not be how you choose to make the dollars stretch. I can respect that. But if you can afford it, consider investing in a way of life that is rapidly dying out.

Food does not originate in a grocery store. Eggs come from chickens, not cardboard containers — and chickens require feed. Meat comes from living, breathing animals that do (and taste) best when they are allowed to roam in pastures. Fruit comes from trees and bushes that require protection from birds. Fences need mending. Tractors require fuel. All this costs a farmer money, and food you buy in the grocery store is priced so that the farmer providing it is losing money hand over fist. They are losing money so you can save pocket change. Family farmers are not rich. They are not squirrelling their money away for a sunnier day or to save for a vacation home in Florida. They are living hand-to-mouth and another bad season could be the last for them.

A Connecticut farmer is still earning the same amount as in 1979. What were you earning 27 years ago?

You pay less than $4 for a gallon of milk. Farmers earn $1. It costs them $1.60 to make it. A farmer literally pays 60 cents to provide you with a gallon of milk. Think about that for a minute. Can you afford to pay more for milk? On the other hand, can you afford not to?

This is a very real problem, but one that’s not too late to address. You can still see cows as you drive around this weekend. There may come a point where that’s not the case. But right now right here, you can choose to be part of the solution.

(Information for this blog entry also came from June Sandra Neal’s “Not Cowing Down to the System” article which appeared in the May 28, 2006, issue of The Hartford Courant’s NE Magazine.)

“In one of the stars I shall be living. In one of them I shall be laughing. And so it will be as if all the stars were laughing, when you look at the sky at night . . . You — only you — will have stars that can laugh! . . .

“And when your sorrow is comforted (time soothes all sorrows) you will be content that you have known me. You will always be my friend. You will want to laugh with me. And you will sometimes open your window, so, for that pleasure . . . And your friends will be properly astonished to see you laughing as you look up at the sky! Then you will say to them, ‘Yes, the stars always make me laugh!’ . . .

“It will be as if, in place of the stars, I had given you a great number of little bells that knew how to laugh . . .”

          The Little Prince
              ~ Antoine de Saint Exupéry

Jen Robinson had an idea to start a list of cool girls from children’s literature. She solicited her readers’ opinions for suggestions and she has now posted 200 Cool Girls from Children’s Literature at her site.

Of the top ten, I know 8 of the girls. (I may have read one of The Borrowers books, but I have no memory of any of the characters and I’ve never even heard of The Westing Game.) Of the next ten, I know only half. And of the full list, I’ve only read 63! I’d better get reading. (Can I count these as some of my summer reading books, Kat?)

(Via A Chair, A Fireplace and a Tea Cozy)

When I was in high school, I liked joining things — French Club, Key Club, Environmental Club, volleyball, softball, basketball, drama performances, creative writing magazine, yearbook…. You get the idea.

I thought that had worn off as I’d gotten older, but in the last week, the joining gene seems to have resurfaced since I have signed up to take part in two new projects:

The Kat with a K Summer Reading Program
Kat thought back to her childhood summers and remembered how much fun those summer reading programs the public library used to offer were. So she decided to create her own summer reading program and invited folks to join her. How could I resist?

For this challenge, I aimed low: only 10 books over the course of the summer. I thought about 15 or even 20, but given I only managed two last month (and since I can’t read and knit at the same time (see below)), I decided to play it safe.

But Kat also offered the chance to have a bonus goal and here I aimed high. As I mentioned here, I want to read Alexis de Tocqueville. So my goal is to read the complete text of Democracy in America — all 769 pages of it.

The Knitting World Cup 2006
Since I did eventually finish my Knitting Olympics projects, I thought I would try my hand at the Yarn Monkey’s World Cup knit-along. Who knows? Maybe I’m more of a summer sport girl. (I also thought I would hand the mousie booties from the Olympics over to their new owner, and Heidi seemed pleased by them.)

So what am I turning my needles to? A summer tank top from the most recent issue of Interweave Knits. I’m adapting it to work with Rowan’s Summer Tweed in Exotic (a turquoise tweed in cotton-silk).

The project has stumbled a bit in the early days as my guage swatch seems to have no bearing on either the pattern or the yarn’s specifications. I gave up on the math and decided to just cast on. Except that the pattern calls for a provisional cast on, which I didn’t know. Rudi went to sleep last night to the sounds of my bemoaning the yarn, the needles, the pattern, and my own inability. To give you some clue of how miserable I was, it took me about three hours to cast on and to knit three rows. Three hours. Today’s work is still moving slowly, but there does seem to be actual progress. Let’s just hope it’s not for naught and that the silly thing fits.

And let’s keep our fingers crossed that this is all I sign myself up to do for the next few months….

Guess what I won’t be watching? Tuesday Night Book Club, which starts next week on CBS.

I like light fluff combined with books as much as the next person (was Pam Anderson’s Stacked really that bad?). And I realize this is going to make me sound very shallow. But I just don’t think I would have so much in common with these women.

Sure, I may peek at the book list. But I think that’s where my interest in the show stops.

A long time ago (in knitting time it was a hat, two mismatched socks, two washcloths, four mouse booties, and several unfinished objects ago) in a galaxy far, far away (Louisiana), Amanda of Clothesknit had an idea. A good idea. A very good idea. Her idea, you ask? Why to start an exchange of sock yarn all around the world. And, thus, Yarn Aboard! was born.

I had never joined an exchange before. But I wanted to. And even though I originally thought I would have to knit socks for my secret pal, I still wanted in. Amanda patiently explained that I would not be required to knit for my pal but just to buy for her. Huzzah! thought I, that’s even better!

So Amanda drew up two lists. She sent out a Drill box that Alison had mailed her from Massachusetts and Alison of the blue blog sent out a Radio box that Carola of sheep and no city had shipped her from Iceland.

I promptly went out and bought yarn and needles for my pal. And then I sat down and waited for the box.

(more…)

Three beautiful things from the last week:

1. One of the houses that adjoins the back of ours has a cat they let out into the backyard periodically. The cat enjoys coming over and peering in our bedroom window. Jeremiah and Della took affront at this when it first started happening, but Della has grown bored with the whole thing. Jeremiah still likes to defend our honor, but in a non-bushy kind of way. He stands on the inside window sill, Neighbor Cat stands on the outside window sill, and they box back and forth as if they could actually reach one another. Jer looks just like he does when he’s rassling with Posey in real time. I think he won this morning’s bout because he looked very proud of himself when he eventually abandoned his post by the window.

2. Pericles was an enjoyable romp in the woods Saturday night. It was obvious that the National Shakespeare Theatre enjoyed putting it on, particularly when you saw a pirate character emerge dressed like Captain Hook from Peter Pan.

3. When I was out on the C&O Canal path this weekend, I kept my eyes open for ducklings because I hadn’t seen any yet this season. I did eventually see some on the way home — two little yellow fellows swimming by themselves as well as a wood duck family with three tiny babies (about the size of a Peep, but not as easily melted). I also saw some Canada Geese families, or maybe daycare centers. One pair had 14 young’uns; the other had 17! They were all swimming in lines, just like you see little kids in on field trips. They were utterly adorable.

Bonus beautiful thing: Our favorite Ben’s Chili Bowl counter man, David, was back at work when we stopped in last night. We hadn’t seen him in months and were afraid that he’d left Ben’s without saying good-bye. But instead he’d just gone home for 2 1/2 months for a visit, so it was good news all around.