Last weekend involved endings, so hopefully the upcoming week will center around beginnings.
Here’s what I’m hoping that looks like:
The yarns (and pom pom) are for a colorwork hat that I’ve been planning to knit for a couple years now.
And the book, an Austenite British novel, rather than one set in a New Jersey bookshop, as I originally thought when I grabbed the title at a recent library book sale, seems fitting for a week set around love (particularly since on Sanditon, the two main characters finally realize they each like the other).
Head over to As Kat Knits to see what everyone else is working on.
This week’s Top Ten Tuesday post from That Artsy Reader Girl invites us to share any topic we’d like related to “love” in honor of Valentine’s Day. I thought I’d share the 11 books I have rated with four or five stars in Goodreads with some form of the word in the title:
The History of Love by Nicole Krauss
Love Is a Mix Tape by Rob Sheffield
Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton
Love, Rosie by Cecelia Ahern
Beloved by Toni Morrison
Love That Dog by Sharon Creech
My True Love Gave To Me, edited by Stephanie Perkins
Book Love by Debbie Tung
The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine who Outwitted America’s Enemies by Jason Fagone
Modern Lovers by Emma Straub
The Game of Love and Death by Martha Brockenbrough
That’s out of 46 books with “love” in the title.
Interestingly, it’s a pretty balanced list: three books by guys, two nonfiction titles, one book of poetry, one collection of comics, one collection of short stories, two classics, and three books aimed at kids or young adults.
I have absolutely nothing new to report on the knitting front. I still have to bind off my shawl. I would like to do that this week, so I can take it home with me to Connecticut and block it there in a place where there are doors to close against cats who like to lie on wool and pick up small things (like T pins) in their mouths. (To be fair, Corey has never actually picked up a T pin, but I imagine it’s only because I’ve never given him the opportunity.)
I’m also still carrying around the sock project in my bag that I started back before Christmas, thinking that it would certainly be done by the end of January. I did unravel a knot in the yarn last week, but that really seems like a low standard of success, unless you judge it based on the Senate, in which case I’ve won the week.
I was hoping to knit up my Valentine’s Day hat before next Friday, but at this point, that seems unlikely. But who knows…
I’ve had a better reading week. I didn’t take The Paper Magician with me to California because it was a library book, instead grabbing Cath Crowley’s Words in Deep Blue, part of my #tbtbSanta gift this year. It was a fantastic choice, demanding to keep being read long after I should have put it down and threatening to force me to buy a new book for the trip home. (It did not and I did not, which is good, because that was not in my budget and I don’t think I could have convinced work it was a mandatory travel expense, although…) But I did finish it on Saturday after I got back to D.C., and it was excellent, and actually worked together nicely with The Paper Magician, since it, too, highlights the magical power of words. (It’s a new year, so book reviews should resume shortly. They don’t usually fall off altogether until spring.)
I also started listening to A Fatal Grace over the weekend. I don’t love books that change points of view every chapter, and I clearly forgot about that from the first book, but Louise Penny has such affection for her characters that I think it will be fine. And who wouldn’t want to spend Christmas in Three Pines, particularly if you could guarantee you weren’t going to be the one being murdered? (It’s probably too much to ask that you aren’t amongst the suspects; I’m hoping your own conscience will keep you from being the murderer.)
I hope you’ve also had books you loved this week and that your craft projects are moving forward faster than mine… (Check As Kat Knits for people who are more productive than I — and who also don’t let their phone batteries die just as they need a blog photo.)
Today’s Top Ten Tuesday topic from That Artsy Reader Girl asks us to consider books that we just know we’re going to absolutely love. For the purposes of simplicity, I’m not going to consider books that are parts of series.
Books I predict will be 5-star reads:
Nic Stone’s Shuri (my favorite Black Panther princess-scientist)
The Telephone Box Library by Rachael Lucas (someone wrote a book about Little Free Libraries, essentially)
Today was February 2nd, the sort of still but maybe no longer annual Bloggers’ (Silent) Poetry Reading in honor of St. Brigid, patron saint of poetry.
I missed last year, in part because the tradition has mostly gone by the wayside. But I liked it when we all shared poetry on our blogs, so I’m resuming it, at least for 2020.
This one is for the English majors and poetry geeks amongst us:
A Tale of Two Metres
~Tom Disch
I heard a little couplet cry:
‘Will God or Someone tell me why
We couplets are condemned to squeeze
Our wisdom into shapes like these?
To speak with gravity and treat
Of higher truths one needs more feet:
Four will not do! Four are too few. Five feet for me or I am through!’
Not only I but Poesy had heard:
She raised her sceptre, uttered not a word,
But struck the couplet dead. And what do you think?
Its ashes stirred — and formed, in living ink,
A couplet calm as Zeno and as stoic —
The couplet known to fame as The Heroic.
