Do you ever get into jags with your hobbies? Periods where you just spend hours and hours doing the same thing?

I’ve been on a reading kick recently and have been finishing books left and right. I get home from work and head to the bedroom to curl up with my latest novel. It’s not a bad thing (although Rudi might disagree), but it’s just odd.

Sometimes, I feel that way about knitting, too. I can feel a knitting jag off in the wings, waiting its turn. Right now, it’s just manifesting itself in a strong desire to wind yarn for upcoming projects, but I know that one day soon it’s going to elbow its way to the front and demand I pick up the needles and start casting things on.

How about you? Do you have obsessive relationships with your hobbies, too?

Bedknobs and Broomsticks (©, Walt Disney Productions)

From the fly leaf: “From Screen to Book

“Two modern classics for children are The Magic Bedknob and Bonfires and Broomsticks by Mary Norton. Recently Walt Disney Productions purchased these two books and set about making them into a single motion picture.

“Bill Walsh and Don DaGradi wrote the screenplay for Bedknobs and Broomsticks, and Robert B. Sherman and Richard M. Sherman composed the music and wrote the lyrics. (These are the same four men who wrote the screenplay and songs for Mary Poppins.) The screen story is built around that fabulous apprentice witch Eglantine Price (played in the film by Angela Lansbury), but all the adventures are new. This book is based entirely on the screenplay.”

My take: When I last visited Karen, she took me to a local used bookstore that was going out of business and selling off their wares for $5 a bag. Clearly when you have that kind of incentive, you pick up some odd choices. (I once, for instance, picked up during Middletown’s buck a bag sale a book based on The Partridge Family.) This wasn’t particularly odd, but I didn’t peruse it as carefully as I might have otherwise and merely added it to the pile.

So I didn’t notice the above caveat, which now means I will have to seek out Norton’s source material and to see how certain details were Disnified. I have some things that I’ll be keeping my eyes open for, but it could be that Norton (who also wrote The Borrowers series) included them in the original novels.

That said, this was a cute enough story about three orphans evacuated to the countryside from London during World War II. Carrie, Charlie, and Paul are foisted upon a local single woman living alone in a large house when she comes into town to collect her mail.

Unable to refuse what she is informed is her patriotic duty, Eglantine Price takes the children home and feeds them all sorts of healthy and natural foods that would probably make a modern vegetarian proud. (I assume cabbage buds are Brussels sprouts. She also feeds them rose hips, glyssop seed, elm bark, whortle yeast, stewed nettles, squill tea, and mangel-wurzel jam (a type of beet which the children assure this modern American reader is generally considered cattle food).

Unexcited to discover they’ve been placed with someone so ill-fitting as a surrogate parent, the children plan to escape back to London. That is until they witness Eglantine crash landing her broom in the back yard. Realizing she might not want this episode broadcast to the neighbors, Charlie decides they are going to stick around to blackmail her instead.

Hoping to get cash, the children instead end up with a magic bedknob that will take them anywhere they like. Accompanied by Eglantine, their journey takes them to London to find her witchcraft correspondence course teacher. When he turns out to be a second-rate con man, where will she turn to find the elusive spell that will finally enable her to contribute substantively to the war effort? Will the children stay in London or will the lure of magical travel lure them back to the countryside? And will Eglantine turn Hitler into a white rabbit or something worse?

The story isn’t particularly well written and, as I noted above, there were some aspects that felt a little too Disney-like to ignore. But it was a quick read, provided you with a definite feel for a specific time in history, and fueled my curiosity to seek out the original Norton novels. I can think of a worse way to spend an evening.

Pages: 212

My dentist lives and works on the other side of town in the Capitol Hill neighborhood. After my appointments, I like to stop in the shops I don’t visit terribly often. Sometimes it’s Eastern Market, but other times, like this week, it’s Riverby Books.

Riverby might be the nicest bookstore in town these days. I mean, sure, Capitol Hill Books is a book lover’s dream with its piles of books everywhere, including the tiny bathroom, and Second Story and Idle Times are both perfectly lovely shops. But when you walk into Riverby, you feel like people are glad you’ve come in and are excited you want to buy these books, some of which they’ve loved, too.

First, they lure you to their gate with the colorful balloons.

Then they invite you to walk into the yard with their tables of $1 charity books.

And, then, once you’re inside, snap! You’re theirs. You are going to give them your money because they have books you want, books you need. Even if you’ve never heard of the titles, you’ll find yourself with an armful of books after just a few minutes waving around a pile of money, pleading with someone to take it so you can stop finding more.

Ahem….

Not that that happened to me this week. No, not at all…

Karen and Grey Kitten have suggested that I ought to just start writing up my book reviews. I figure if I start with the most recent and work my way backwards, I at least have a shot at offering insights into what I’ve just read, rather than not remembering details of any of this year’s books…

Sabriel, by Garth Nix

From the jacket: “Sent to a boarding school in Ancelstierre as a young child, Sabriel has had little experience with the random power of Free Magic or the Dead who refuse to stay dead in the Old Kingdom. But during her final semester, her father, the Abhorsen, goes missing, and Sabriel knows she must enter the Old Kingdom to find him. She soon finds companions in Mogget, a cat whose aloof manner barely conceals its malevolent spirit, and Touchstone, a young Charter Mage long imprisoned by magic, now free in body but still trapped by painful memories. As the three travel deep into the Old Kingdom, threats mount on all sides. And every step brings them closer to a battle that will pit them against the true forces of life and death — and bring Sabriel face-to-face with her own destiny.”

My take: Dark fantasy is generally not a realm of fiction I choose to pursue. But I was in need of something to read at work one lunch hour, and Sabriel was sitting on the discard cart at the office. It looked promising, but I wasn’t wowed by the prologue. Later, though, I saw it mentioned as a young adult fantasy novel with a particularly strong female character and decided to give it another shot. I’m glad I did.

Sabriel is the teenage daughter of the Abhorsen, the necromancer in charge of protecting the Old Kingdom from the Dead (who sometimes refuse to stay dead). Sent to school in Ancelstierre (a land much like an early 20th-century England) on the other side of the border from the Old Kingdom), she doesn’t see much of her father. When he does visit her, though, he shares with her his knowledge of Charter Magic, the strong force which keeps the dead at bay, and of walking in Death. As she ages, her father increases his visits but appears to her mostly in a less corporeal way.

Until one night, when he fails to appear when expected. Instead, a golem materializes in the school, bearing her father’s sword and the bells of Death to her. Realizing that the Abhorsen would never part willingly with those items, she sets out to the Old Kingdom to rescue her father from whatever has trapped him somewhere between Life and Death.

Pursued by the Dead, their zombie-like minions, and their slaves, she arrives at the family homestead only to find that the supernatural servants there, including Mogget, a cat who isn’t really a cat, believe her father dead and greet her as the new Abhorsen. Mogget reminds her that her sworn familial duty is to protect the kingdom and to vanquish the Dead, not to mount rescue missions. With these two obligations vying for her loyalty and with the Dead dismantling the kingdom, Sabriel must figure out how to save the world — and her father — before it’s too late.

Carl is once again hosting his annual Halloween-themed read-along, the R.eaders I.mbibing P.eril Challenge IV. Sabriel qualifies under the dark fantasy category and puts me halfway toward my Peril the Second quest.

Pages: 311

I am here and am hoping that regular blogging will return sometime this week. The trip to Salt Lake just took a lot out of me and I’ve been in a funk since our return.

It even got so bad last week that I took my brother’s advice and went out for drinks with friends. I ordered an alcoholic beverage — my first ever. But it was nasty, so my consumption was limited to three sips. (In defense of the drink, no one else seemed to be under the impression that it reeked of liquor. In fact, they kept telling me how sweet it was!)

But I’ve been occupying my time productively when not trying to acquire a new bad habit. I’ve done a bit of housecleaning and some laundry. I am running low on handknit socks, though, so a load of sink washing must move up on my priority list…

I’ve done a bit of cooking recently. We made a batch of Jenn’s tomato sauce last month and I followed it up with Mum’s recipe for baking tomatoes. Well, not so much baking, as preserving. Sort of… Tonight I baked an apple crisp as a follow-up to the delicious turnip soup Rudi made for supper. (Of course, I started it too late for it to be done before Rudi toddled off to bed, but I promised him he could eat it for breakfast if he wanted…) While in Salt Lake, we had a delicious pear coffee cake one morning at a cafe, and Rudi’s mom sent us home with a handful of pears (and plums and quinces and apples and herbs), so I may give that a shot sometime soon unless Rudi decides he’s going to start eating them.

The garden continues to give us petite tomatoes and the pepper plants all have flowers covering them. I planted a rather late crop of squash, so although the plants have come up, I’m not convinced they’ll make it to vegetable stage. Although our frosts come pretty late in the year, so who knows. A volunteer lettuce popped up from the spring’s harvest going to seed, and our chard remains ever faithful.

I’ve been knitting quite a bit, but not finishing an awful lot. I have one mitt and one sock done, so either half of me will be nice and toasty or I’ll have to switch it up and go the right sock/left mitt route and hope that keeps either side from too much shivering.

Reading has been more successful, although I think I failed to finish any of the three challenges I took on over the summer. Plus, I have gotten so behind on book reviews that I need to figure out a new way to handle them. Or just suck it up and crank them out and inundate you with reviews. Any thoughts on that? And I missed the National Book Festival while I was in Salt Lake, which just makes me crabby to think about…

I try to get out on the bike each weekend, but my progress is slow when I go on my own (and Julia and I have not been coordinating our schedules well lately…) Bike D.C. is coming up in two weeks, so maybe I’ll see if any of our friends are interested in signing up with me. I also should sign up for that yoga class I keep telling Elspeth and Julia I’m going to take. Maybe when I get back from our long Connecticut weekend. I have done more commuting on the bike this year than ever before, helped by the delays caused by the Red Line crash earlier this year. (They were completely necessary and understandable, but I had a way around them, so why not take advantage of my two wheels?)

Anyway, that’s my version of a catch-all catch-up. Maybe tomorrow I’ll offer you my reflections on the baseball season…

Last month, Rudi and I made it up to Cleveland Park to catch a rather unusual solo art exhibition for D.C.

Who, you ask? Monet? Judy Chicago? Thomas Kinkade?

Nope!

Eric Carle, of The Very Hungry Caterpillar fame.

This summer the Stanford in Washington Art Gallery brought the work of one of America’s most recognized children’s picture book artists to the District for all to enjoy.

It’s a small gallery — roughly the size of a two-floor townhouse, so it can only house two dozen pieces or so. Part of the downstairs was set up with Carle’s books in kindergarten-style cubbies set at ground level to encourage young readers to enjoy them.

There was a looped video running upstairs with an interview with the artist, who showed how he takes a piece from start to finish. He paints and colors on tissue paper to start and then cuts them into small pieces before rearranging and pasting them onto his canvas. He accents the work with crayons.

The great thing about seeing Carle’s work up close is that you really get a chance to see the detail. I’d urge you to click on some of the smaller images (particularly the cricket up above) to get a better look.

This is what you see in a book:

But when you see the originals, you really notice certain details, like the rhinoceros’ toenails:

I was glad we were able to make it up to see the exhibit. If you live in New England, Carle and his wife run a picture book museum in Amherst that looks like it could be a really fun day trip.

I was wholly inspired after seeing this exhibit. I hope you enjoyed it too!