World Wide Knit in Public Day 2010

Knitting outside today was a wash.  Literally.  We had rain all morning meaning the event at the Farmer's Market (even though sheltering in the parking ramp) was not in my future.

So I started my KIP day at Bruegger's with a bagel sandwich and a cast-on.  I decided to set aside my blue sweater (which sheds everywhere) for a more summer-y project.  Hence, Icarus (Miriam Felton's "Icarus Shawl" from The Best of Interweave Knits).  I have some super-pretty blue "Silky Alpaca Lace" from Classic Elite Yarns.  Yay!

Then I went to The Knitting Shoppe (of course, since knitting in public was kind of a bust) intending to get some stitch markers then leave...but I was captured by sock yarn.  Again. 

Schaeffer Yarns' "Anne" in colorways "Gloria Steinem"

and "Elizabeth Zimmerman".  Then I stayed to knit and chat with some of the other ladies (and spoil Milo, a therapy-pug-in-training who was visiting the shop with his human).

Then I went to work where I KIP'd in the breakroom.  And now I'm home.  Don't forget to KIP all week! 

Bookspotting: June 10, 2010

Beyond Reach by Karin Slaughter
Mennonite in a Little Black Dress by Rhoda Janzen
A zillion newspapers (the University of Nebraska-Lincoln just voted to join the Big10, big news in Hawkeye-land dontchaknow)
Someone knitting a green sock (yay! another knitter)

And what was I reading? No reading, I was knitting my fuzzy blue sweater - the sleeves are almost done!

Don't forget - KIP!

Tomorrow, June 12, is the kick-off for World Wide Knit In Public Day!

The fun lasts all week so don't forget to take your knitting out into the wide, wide world!  Visit the WWKIP site to find a KIP event near you or to promote your own.

I don't have a particular event in mind for me - I will be out and about in the Iowa City/Coralville area.  Since my handbag doubles as my knitting bag you'll find me with my knitting just about everywhere (whether I'll have the sheddy blue sweater or something new I don't know yet).

Teaser Tuesday: The Corrections

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along!

Just do the following:
- Grab your current read
- Open to a random page
- Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
- BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
- Share the title and author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers

He compared himself to the Minutemen at Lexington and Concord.  When Robin, much later, showed Denise the trial transcript, Denise imagined bringing Billy and her brother Chip together over dinner and listening while they compared notes about "the bureaucracy," but this dinner would have to wait until Billy had served seventy percent of his twelve-to-eighteen-year sentence at Graterford.
~ p 301, The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

BBAW 2010 Registration: Count me in!

Book Blogger Appreciation Week (BBAW) will be here before we know it and now is the time to register (June 7 through July 7).  Registration gets you all the info, lists your blog, lets you compete for giveaways and prizes, and, most important, makes available to you a voting ballot.  Yay, voting!  Muy importante - Amy is the brains behind this, and she's got a team of peeps to help her, but BBAW isn't any fun unless we, the book bloggers, get our little bloggy corners of the web registered to compete and vote (and I'm sure she'd like us to do this sooner than later).

I am registering Scuffed Slippers and Wormy Books for the category Best Written Book Blog and the niche Best Eclectic Book Blog!  Yay!

Five Posts for Best Written Book Blog:
27 October 2009: Penny for your thoughts?
20 December 2009: The Help
13 January 2010: "Which translation?": There is a reason why...
17 January 2010: Speak (times two)
12 April 2010: Sales of Wuthering Heights are up!

Five Posts for Best Eclectic Book Blog:
14 October 2009: The Children's Book
20 November 2009: New Moon: if you're Beth and Katharine you shouldn't read this until Tuesday!
3 January 2010: Shades of Grey
28 January 2010: Illness
24 February 2010: Showgirls, Teen Wolves, and Astro Zombies

Speedbumps

 Hmmmm....that's an odd lump....

Oh, it's just Chaucer - looks like he wants some privacy.

Anywhoo, just a little note to say that my precious laptop is going for a spa visit to the Geek Squad - hopefully they'll have an answer to the "blue screen of death" problem I've been getting lately.  Having no laptop available ASAP when I snap my fingers is seriously going to cramp my style.

Lazy Saturdays are necessary!

I had a lazy (but busy!) Saturday morning.  The weather is all sorts of Iowa crazy - humid with pop-up thunderstorms, tornado watches, and flood watches - so that means it must be time for the Iowa Arts Fest!  There seemed to be more booths this year than previous and any sort of art or handcraft you can think of was represented.  Painting, drawing, ceramics, photography, metalsmithing, jewelery, basket-weaveing, furniture-making, stained-glass, someone who "paints" with thread, and the guy who makes wind-chimes out of found objects (I can't decide if it was kitchy or just junk).  I've never been able to afford anything I like at the Arts Fest in previous years but I found something I wanted this year:

Aren't they cool?  A guy in Kalona, IA, makes trays, lazy Susans, salt-and-pepper shakers, trivets, etc., with this inlaid wood technique.  These were noted to be trivets but they're a little small, in my opinion, so I want to use them as oversize coasters.  I really liked the irregular chevron pattern and the little bits of reddish wood that pop.  Additionally, they were affordable.  Yay!

On the way back to the car I stopped at Dick Blick (to indulge my love of colored pens and pencils) then swung by the yarn store to pick up the Addi turbo needle I ordered (I needed a 32-inch #7US circular).

Then I hit the library.  I checked out books:

All kids' books this time around.  Dear Mr. Henshaw is one of the few Beverly Cleary books I never read - it also won the Newbery so it's for my Newbery Project as well as A Gathering of Days.  I've been thinking about reading the "Series of Unfortunate Events" so I picked up The Bad Beginning.

And then in the library basement they were having the Friends of the Library sale.  Now, Day 1 of the library sale is ALWAYS on a Friday so if there was anything super good I certainly missed it since I, and a good portion of the adult population, was working.  Day 2 is not without its merits, however, because all adult books are half off.  Check it:

The Life of Pi, Empire Falls, House of Sand and Fog, and Sula all for TWO DOLLARS.  Yup, adult paperbacks are fifty cents each on the second day of the sale.  So it's worth missing out on the first choice stuff on Friday.  The Life of Pi is a deaccessioned library book (from the library itself) and the library stickers are under the plastic covering the book; I don't think I'll be able to get them off.

It's also extra-discount week at the bookstore so I made a small, preliminary purchase (technically last night) to get me started:

The Siege of Krishnapur and The Singapore Grip are the next two JG Farrell books I need to read (I'm reading Troubles right now); Siege will also count toward my Booker Project and Challenge.  I also got the very pretty two-volume Rabbit novels (one and two) set.  I've only ever read Rabbit, Run - and it wasn't so pleasant since it was for high school English - so the four-books-in-two looked appealing.

I was also conned into buying by the merch manager seduced by this ridiculously cute, and very true to life, Cat Companion Journal by Jeffrey Brown.  The front and back illustrations are reproduced in color and there are more cartoons throughout.  For the record, my cats have done probably everything depicted in the cartoons.

Hooray for new books!

PS: The Iowa Arts Fest thoughts remind me that I will miss the Iowa Sheep and Wool Festival in Adel, IA, next weekend because it's my niece's baptism.  I'd love to be able to visit a fiber festival just once although it does sound like a hay fever festival for the sinuses but I'd be willing to deal for some good wool.

PPS edit: I just had an exhausting shift at the bookstore.  So much for my lazy Saturday.

Descartes' Bones

Russell Shorto's book Descartes' Bones straddles several different genres - philosophy, history, religion, and science - and it inhabits this intersection very well. 

As does its subject.  Rene Descartes helped usher in the scientific revolution in addition to creating his namesake mathematical and philosophical theories.  He suffered ostracism from the Church and the academic elite when his mind-body theories whipped-up debate over the nature of God and man (even though Descartes professed to being a devout Catholic until his death; he was also the only Catholic in regular contact with Queen Christina of Sweden who later converted from Lutheranism).  He died after contracting what was probably pneumonia in the dead of a Stockholm winter; his remains did not remain buried, however, and the body was moved from Stockholm to numerous places in France.

The peregrinations of Descartes' skeleton (particularly that of his skull) form the central core of Shorto's book.  Shorto gives the reader a basic overview of Descartes' philosophical views, one that is reasonable and easy-to-understand, and some insight as to how Cartesian theory played into Descartes' journey to Sweden.  Shorto was also meticulous in following the historical record to trace the movements of Descartes' body, particularly his skull, through history; it's a very interesting story  and Shorto doesn't bog down in the details.  Shorto also spends some time on the comparison of the veneration of religious relics (like saints' bones and things) to the veneration of the remains of a "scientific" man like Descartes; the history of Descartes bones in this period (Enlightenment to post-Revolution France) was particularly interesting.  Descartes' Bones runs to about 250 pages so it's a quick and enjoyable read.

Bookspotting: June 3, 2010

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
Howl's Moving Castle (I kid you not, given the unhappy news about Diana Wynne Jones today)
Gentleman who usually reads well-thumbed SF/Fantasy mass-market paperback is reading new(er) trade paperback titled something like "Believe in the Hope" (or similar)

And what was I reading? I was knitting on the sleeves of my fuzzy blue sweater (only a few more inches left before I can get back to the body)

You must visit "Ward Six"

One of the things I love about the combination of book bloggers and Twitter is the never-ending supply of new things to think about and read.

Like the blog Ward Six.  For whatever reason, I'd never run across this book reviews/bookish thoughts/writing bits and bobs/general book knowledge blog and then, bam, everyone on Twitter is tweeting about this 10-over-80 list of great authors on Ward Six.  So I had a look-see.

It's a great idea - there are always "25 under 25" or "10 new writers under 30" or whatever type lists so I think it's wonderful that someone took the time to honor authors for their longevity.  Beverly Cleary is 94 - 94! - and she still writes books.  Rhian created a great list honoring authors she loves and I'm not going to copy it all here because I want everyone to visit Ward Six for themselves.

So, go visit.  Then stay a while and read more of their posts.

Teaser Tuesday: Children of the New World

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along!

Just do the following:
- Grab your current read
- Open to a random page
- Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
- BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
- Share the title and author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers

There are so many memories that attach Lila to Suzanne, from childhood and high school on.  It just so happened that for six years they didn't see and hardly spoke to each other.
~ p 72, Children of the New World, Assia Djebar

We're reading Children of the New World as our June selection in Literature by Women - come join us!

Runaway

I always find it hard to write about story collections, particularly those containing exceptional stories - do you write about the whole thing or about the individual pieces?

I read Alice Munro's Runaway as the May 2010 selection for my "Literature by Women" group.  Munro has been on my "you ought to read that" longlist for quite some time but I never got around to picking out one of her books to read (an earlier collection containing "The Bear Came Over the Mountain" caught my attention after watching Sarah Polley's adaptation Away From Her - a beautiful adaptation of a heart-wrenching story).  Runaway was awarded the 2004 Giller Prize, not to mention Munro's richly-deserved 2009 International Man Booker awarded for her body of work.

The stories in Runaway all deal with women retreating from some idea or situation.  The title story follows a young woman who impusively tries to leave her abusive marriage.  "Trespasses" follows a young teen befriended by a woman who turns out to have ulterior motives.  In "Passion" an orphaned young woman, Grace, shakes off her emotionally-dry-but-proper-and-capable steady boyfriend in an unexpected joyride with his drunken elder brother.  Two sections of Runaway are made up of linked stories to create two novellas.  "Chance", "Soon", and "Silence" follow Juliet as she runs away from her established path, her parents' disapproval, and Juliet's daughter runs away from her.  "Powers" consists of five stories following Tessa, a psychic, who ends up in a spot of trouble due to her visions.

The most remarkable thing about Munro is her writing style, something I had not noticed until I went back and re-read the first few chapters of Francine Prose's Reading Like a Writer (specifically Chapter 2 - "Words").  Munro does not ascribe to the creed of "show, don't tell" - the example story Prose uses is "Dulse" from Selected Stories where she points out that Munro doesn't waste time having the reader "see" Lydia working as an editor or writing poetry.  Munro tells us that's what Lydia does then gets down to business.  The same style is present here; Juliet muses on her life of teaching while she reads her Greek history book on the train - we don't see Juliet teaching because it's not necessary to Munro's story and she doesn't bother with it.  Her words slice into your brain effectively because there isn't any fluff to slow them down.