I took a day off of work today, and I can't say I have a single thing to show for it. I can never decide if that is the sign of a successful day off or not. I tend to feel guilty with days like these, though, which I truly hate about myself. I did watch a movie this afternoon, which I had put off all weekend as it is a French film, and that means having to read subtitles. I found Sequins (Brodeuses in French) via my friend and fellow needleworker Lelia. The movie is about a young woman, Claire, who is pregnant and planning to give up the baby for adoption. It is set in Angouleme, which is gorgeous by the way. She is a cashier in a supermarket, and the only thing that seems to keep her going is working on her embroideries, which are her passion. As her pregnancy progresses, which she is trying to hide, she must quit her job. She begins working for a woman, Mrs. Melikian, who is an embroiderer for haute couture designers. As with books, if it is a good film, I easily get wrapped up in the story and the reality around me disappears. Sometimes it is scary how much I allow myself to get drawn into these stories, as coming up for air, so to speak, can be hard when the story is finished. As I love needlework, I had to see this movie and I wasn't disappointed. Although I do needlework of a different kind, I loved the embroideries that were shown in the movie--utterly exquisite!
I also watched Marie Antoinette, which I actually enjoyed. I know it received lukewarm (maybe even bad?) reviews, but it was so lush visually I couldn't help liking it for that reason alone. Okay the music was sort of different, but I didn't find it too terribly distracting for the most part. Talk about disgustingly decadent, the royalty must not have had a clue how the French people even lived. No wonder they started a revolution. It makes me want to pull out all my books on Marie Antoinette and this period of French history and start reading them, but I need to try to stay on track with the books I have already started, so they will have to just sit close to the top of the TBR piles.
As for reading I have been dipping into a few different books this weekend. If Peter Ho Davies writes as well in all his books as he does in The Welsh Girl I am going to have to buy his short story collections as well. I tell myself just one chapter and then back to work on something else, except I want to keep reading! I am halfway through Robert Alexander's The Kitchen Boy: A Novel of the Last Tsar. It is a sort of mystery about the last days of the Romanovs as told by the young kitchen boy who witnessed it all and was the only one to survive and tell the tale. Yet more decadent royals who were out of touch with their subjects. I have finally started reading Dickens's David Copperfield. I plan on reading a chapter a day to start, and we'll see what happens when I pick up Tolstoy again. I'm still enjoying Brother of the More Famous Jack by Barbara Trapido. Like the Alexander book, it is quite short and if I wasn't reading chapters here and there of other books could finish it pretty quickly. That's okay, though, it is kind of nice to prolong these sorts of pleasures. And I am actually happily anticipating restarting War and Peace...maybe I will start dragging it around with me tomorrow! I guess it is time to drag myself back into reality.
Edited: I did a bit of editing on this post 3/9--sorry, a bit of sloppy writing!