A Work in Progress

Newest Book Acquisitions

I almost always work on posts the evening before I actually post them, but last night I spent more time trying to deal with internet connectivity problems than I would have liked, so that left me with little time to try and write any sort of thoughtful post.  It's nights like that when I am happy to have a new pile of books to share.  Something mindless and fast but bookish at the same time.  I've been meaning to show these anyway, but I do wish that I had fewer internet problems these days.  After the holidays I switched to a wireless modem and a faster internet speed and almost daily lose connection with the internet.  Progress?  I am trying to sort it all out with my internet service provider, but so far there has been no definite solution forthcoming.  Keep your fingers crossed for me.

Now on to the good stuff.  I've had these for a couple of weeks.  Don't you just want to pull one from the pile, crack it open and start reading?  I do, and more than one actually, but I've had to resist since I have too many other books already started.  From top to bottom:

Double Sin by Agatha Christie is another collection of short stories featuring both Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple.  I'm very much in the mood for an Agatha Christie mystery, but I am trying hard to finish the mystery I already have on the go, first.

I was browsing and came across Michelle Paver's The Serpent's Tooth, which I understand is part of a trilogy of books.  It's the last, but I don't think it matters whether I have read the other two.  They are set in Jamaica, but it was the WWI setting in this third one that drew me to it.  I don't usually like reading books out of order, but I may skip the other two entirely depending on how I like this.  As it is a multigenerational story, I expect the books are related but perhaps not dependent on having read the others.

I've been lusting after Daisy Goodwin's My Last Duchess for months!  I bought it via ABEbooks from a UK seller.  The Book Depository was out of stock for ages, so I looked for an alternative source!  I believe it is reminiscent of Downton Abbey with its setting--a wealthy American heiress marries into an aristocratic British family. 

I'm sure I mentioned The Penguin Book of Victorian Women in Crime, which is edited by Michael Sims.  The earliest story (or excerpt from a novel) is from 1864 and the latest 1915.  "It is the late Victorian era and society is both entranced by and fearful of that suspicious character known as the New Woman.  She rides new-fangled bicycles and doesn't like to be told what to do.  And, in crime fiction, female detectives such as Loveday Brooke and Dorcas Dene are out there shadowing suspects, crawling through secret passages, fingerprinting corpses, and sometimes committing a lesser crime in order to solve murder."  Doesn't this sound like fun?

Sheila Kohler's Bluebird, or the Invention of Happiness is a historical novel based on the life of 18th century French aristocrat Lucy Dillon.  I seem to be collecting Kohler's books, so I must read one soon.

I loved Johan Theorin's The Darkest Room, which also won the CWA International Dagger last year.  Echoes from the Dead is actually his first book, so I will be backtracking.  Both are set on Sweden's remote Oland Island.

Flowering Wilderness and Over the River are the last two books in John Galsworthy's Forsyte Saga (books eight and nine!).  I've only read book one, but I am the eternal optimist when it comes to books I want to read.  I will get to these...eventually. 

Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls is set during the Spanish Civil War.  I knew that.  But somehow it slipped my mind.  I mixed it up with A Farewell to Arms, which is set during WWI--and happens to be the book I really wanted.  Oh well, I can certainly read more than one book by Hemingway. 

So now I have something to read next time the internet goes down (knock on wood that it won't).

Teaser Tuesday: Mad Puppetstown

Well, no better time than the present to start a new Molly Keane novel--particularly so since I failed to read a single one in 2010.  I feel like I have some catching up to do this year.   Although the setting  of Mad Puppetstown seems very familiar--sprawling country house in Ireland, orphaned or semi-orphaned siblings and the usual sporting life, this story seems quite different than Taking Chances.  This is a good thing, if only to avoid any samey-ness of stories since I am reading her books back to back.

Puppetstown is the name of a country house in the fictional county of Westcommon, where the Sorrier family lives, and by the way where Peter and Prudence (who make appearances in Taking Chances) of Young Entry also live.  This time around it's the early 1900s and the story begins with eight-year-old Easter Chevington and her slightly older cousins, twins Basil and Evelyn, growing up in this very large house.  Easter's mother is no longer alive, so she is raised by her father and two aunts and there are the servants and Patsy (the boot boy) to keep her company.  It seems a charmed environment filled with carefree days, but Ireland's troubles are not far away. 

I'm not far into the story yet, but according to the blurb the family all flee to England, but Aunt Dicksie and Patsy decide to remain in the house.  I suspect Easter is going to return when she's grown and that's where the story will really take off.  My teaser, or teasers as I am going to share a couple, are going to give you a glimpse of Easter and her cousins.

"Easter was a small, mousey-looking child.  Her nurse scraped all her hair straight back off her forehead and away from her ears, plaiting just a very little of it on top of her head, and tying this unattractive morsel with an infinitesimal piece of brown ribbon.  The rest was allowed to lie in straight uninteresting strands down her back.  This unbecoming method of hair-dressing laid bare every inch of Easter's forehead which was high and intellectual and bulged hard and round like a cricket ball.  Her eyes were grey and very shortsighted so that they always appeared to be screwed up into slits."

Not very complimentary is the description, is it?  I do hope she improves with age.  Her cousins are old enough to have been sent away to school, but their mother keeps holding them back for yet another and another term. 

"Last time it was because they had caught ringworm in their heads through kissing calves, and you cannot let people embark on the most cruel adventure of their short lives while their heads are shaved as bare as marbles.  Not that Basil and Evelyn seemed to take their leprous condition in a properly sensitive spirit.  Each had painted a face of alarming ugliness on the back of his brother's shaven head, artistic achievements lacking merit only to the eye of authority.  Thus for one sweet summer more they kept wild holiday at Puppetstown."

I like Keane's sense of humor very much and already I am happily losing myself in the story.

From Start to Finish!

I've finished my first needlework project of the year--actually 'finished' finished it.  I thought it might be fun to share a 'time lapse'  of the project, which actually began last year.  Chart at the ready, linen cut to size and floss all lined up.

And the first stitches.

A few more stitches.

And some more.  This however, is where I got stuck.  I hate stitching light colors on light color linen as it is hard to see.  The letters at the top weren't fun to stitch so I set it aside.

Then a burst of energy to finish the wording, add the cloud and raindrops and contemplate how I would complete it.

After many, many backstitches it is almost ready for assembly as a 'mattress' pincushion.

And this weekend I finally was ready to sew all the pieces together and stuff it.

And here it is--Finished.  Here's a straight on view...

...and a side view...

...and a close up.  The finishing went pretty smoothly.  I used a polyfill fiber for the stuffing, which I see I didn't quite clean off from my pincushion, so please excuse any errant strands of white filling.  I might try using an interfacing to iron on the back of my design next time to give it a flatter shape, but all in all I'm pleased with how it turned out.  This is my first time attempting to 'finish' a design like this, but it certainly won't be the last.  Now I get to think about another small design to start or (*cough*) continue...a look through my bins will help me decide!

Taking Chances by Molly Keane

In the back of my mind I've had such mixed feelings about Molly Keane, that I'm a little surprised at myself for picking her as an author whose work I feel so compelled to read.  The more I read the more I like her, however, and with Taking Chances she seems to finally be breaking away from a more formulaic type of story to something slightly darker and deeper and more interesting and nuanced than her earlier novels.  Her books give a glimpse into a long vanished world, which is where my fascination lies.  I might be able to do without so many descriptions of hunting--foxes, rabbits, birds or otherwise--yet this was such an integral part of Keane's life, and likely the lives of the other Anglo-Irish aristocratic families of the period, that now I can't imagine a book without sporting scenes in them.  I am curious to see how her work will develop with later novels as she becomes more sophisticated in her storytelling abilities, but I was very impressed with Taking Chances, which was published in 1929.

Irish author Clare Boylan (I read her Room for a Single Lady some years ago) wrote an excellent introduction to this  novel.  What I like about these Virago introductions aside from their shedding a little light on the text is the extra biographical detail they offer on Molly Keane, as I don't believe a book has been written about her life yet, and I'd like to know more about the woman behind the stories. 

"Molly Keane was, herself, something of an outsider.  Although her social credentials were impeccable, her mother, a published poet and 'literary recluse', refused to indulge Molly and her sister with the clothes, lunches and parties necessary to 'launch' a girl.  Molly believes that her sister Susan's romantic prospects were permanently damaged by the gown she was compelled to wear to her first dance--'a sort of tennis dress'."

Molly depended on friends and invitations to house parties for her own launching into society.  As a matter of fact she all but lived with one friend, much to her parent's disapproval.  It was there where she met her husband, Bobby Keane.  She initially wrote under the pen name, M.J. Farrell, as being a lady author wasn't something to brag about to her sporting friends and was more of an embarrassment.  By the time her third novel, Taking Chances, was published her literary life was no longer secret.  It was apparently met with some disapproval from the "stricter brigade of local mothers".  Writing books was already bad enough, but to write about the more intimate aspects of relationships and with a sense of humor was frowned upon.  To top things off she lived with Bobby Keane for five years before they married, something that just wasn't done (though according to Keane, "of course it was done").

One of the things I like about Molly Keane is her authenticity.  She knew and understood the society about which she wrote--she lived it.  She may have gently skewered the lifestyle, but you can't chide her since she was such a careful and affectionate observer.  Her descriptions of the people, the houses and even the natural world are so well done you have the feeling of being there as you read.

"Molly Keane is adamant about the fact that their world was not based on wealth (her own family, she says, was only moderately funded and the need to augment her dress allowance was her literary spur), but on a knowledge of horses and easy access to cheap land and domestic labor.  Whatever reason, times change and people too, but when a new and very young novelist--Irish and female to boot--pokes her pen so provocatively through the social fabric of her own world, one realizes that people do not change  with the times; it is people who change the times."

The "their" in the quote refers to the Sorrier family of the fictional county Westcommon of Sorrier House--Sir Ralph (Roguey), Maeve and Jer.  Orphaned, though now grown, the three siblings are quite close but will soon be split as Maeve prepares for her wedding to neighboring squire, Major Rowland Fountain.  They have been a companionable trio and were used to doing things with much pleasure in each other's society.

"Jer felt it most--that was because he loved Maeve; while Maeve loved Roguey; and of the three of them Roguey loved Roguey best of all."

Handsome Roguey is very much what you would expect a lord of the manor to be--confident, somewhat self-absorbed and oozing a sense of entitlement, which includes an indiscretion with the daughter of one of his tenants.  He and Maeve are consummate horse riders.  Jer, the youngest, prefers shooting as he has a fear of horses as well as an incurable stammer, so he is therefore somewhat outside of things.  Of the three he is the most sensitive as well as the most perceptive and sees and understands what the other two don't.  He doesn't miss a look or a tone of voice.  Into their lives comes outsider Mary Fuller, Maeve's English friend who is to be her bridesmaid.  Maeve's not even all that fond of Mary and will have wished she had chosen someone else by story's end as she catches the eyes and hearts of not only Roguey and Jer but Rowley as well. 

Mary steals the show really, and much is made of this femme fatale by Boylan in the book's introduction.  She’s not beautiful exactly, but there is something about her.  Boylan calls her one of Molly Keane's most dazzling creations—"vulnerable and ruthless and with an unsettling appeal".  She messes up everyone's lives, including her own.  I wish I could say I was fonder of her than I am, and maybe with another reading, I could be, as she is certainly an interesting concoction.  I found myself more sympathetic towards Maeve, however--good but unimaginative Maeve.  I don’t think I could ever be a Mary Fuller, but I probably could be a Maeve Sorrier.

"'It's a bad thing,' Jer thought, 'to care about people so much that you learn something about their natures.  The more that you know about them the more afraid you are of them.  Maeve is getting like that with Rowley.  If only she'd crash along and beher herself, and not study him.  I wouldn't like to bet on her being happy now.  She's got a terrific handicap to play off'."

Supposedly Molly Keane modeled her characters on people she knew, and with such scandalous goings on in the Sorrier household, her friends must have been wary of her. 

Next up is Mad Puppetstown, which was published in 1932.  It has yet another country house setting.  It's found its place on my nightstand and I hope not much time passes before I start reading.  Perhaps this is my year to make serious progress on my stack of Molly Keane's novels.  Even with characters like Mary Fuller (or maybe because of them?), I think it will be a pleasure.

Lost in the Stacks: Above Suspicion

For a while I've felt a little guilty about borrowing books and then returning them unread, but I think I'm not going to feel guilty about this anymore.  In thinking about my little project to keep my library's fiction books circulating, it seems a good thing to borrow them and hope to read them rather than assume I won't get to them and leave them on the shelf untouched and ignored.  So this week's book rescue is one that I already had on my list to read, and how handy that my library has a number of her works!  I think Helen MacInnes's works are now out of print, so it's fortunate that I have access to so many of them. 

MacInnes wrote quite a few books in the spy/thriller genre.  Her career spanned some forty years.  She was born in Scotland, worked as a librarian where she met her husband and eventually moved to New York.  Her first novel, Above Suspicion, was published in 1941 and made into a movie a few years later.  It concerns a newlywed couple who get mixed up spying on the Nazis while on their honeymoon.  It seems to have been quite popular at the time it was published if the New York Times is anything to go by. 

"Mark down on your pending reading reading list Helen MacInnes's thriller called Above Suspicion.  Put ** after it, for that matter, if you can abide thrillers at all.  I can't, as a rule, but this one seems to be A-1 and fairly wonderful, even unto some terrific business about a big, black, stolen, swastika-hung Mercedes, a series of forged passports and a fierce and ultimately spitted dog.  Perhaps I am prejudiced: I read it the other afternoon while taking a four-hour train ride in an open-windowed, plush-upholstered day coach, with the temperature up around 85 or 90 and the New York Central's best quality of soot and cinders in my hair.  Under the circumstances, any novelist should have been a nuisance or a menace, but Miss MacInnes was a comfort and an angel in disguise."

Well, there won't be any 85 or 90 degree temperatures here anytime soon (wishful thinking), but maybe it will do just as well on a cooler day?  I'm still reading Daniel Silva, but I now have this one on my pile to get to sometime soon.  By the way I haven't a clue what the writer means by an "ultimately spitted dog", but I am transcribing my quote faithfully.

"Miss MacInnes's highly educated spy story should do for almost any Summer reading list.  The directors of the N. Y. C. could do worse than install a copy in every open-windowed car running north of Harmon between now and Labor Day."

*Quotes taken from the New York Times, Jul 9, 1941.

A Little Supplementary Reading

A little serendipity.  I told you about how I came across Mary Borden?  At the same time I also came across Irene Rathbone.  Unfortunately my library does not own any of her books, so I went to our trusty interlibrary loan department and found a library that does own her We That Were Young.   So, I've got a little more WWI reading lined up, and although this was not published until 1932, it's a nice first hand account, at least as told from the female perspective.  The serendipity is that E.M. Delafield wrote the introduction when it was published.  Another case of one book leading to another.

Rathbone based the book on her own experiences during the war.  She worked in two YMCA camps in France and was a VAD nurse in London.  I've yet to get my hands on the Borden book, so I will start here.  Both served as nurses, which I suppose was the only war work open to women at the time?

E.M. Delafield was only two years older than Rathbone, so they would have been contemporaries.  Delafield also worked as a VAD nurse, though I don't know if any of her books deal directly with her experiences.  I'm very tempted now to start looking for Delafield's other books.  I really like her work and am finding there is more to her than meets the eye.  There's something that runs below that calm, happy surface of her stories I'm discovering.

At the time Rathbone wrote her book the war had been over for thirteen years.  I've been told some novels and memoirs weren't published directly after the war as the experience was still too raw and it was not a popular subject.  Delafield writes that with each passing year Englishwomen have had to set aside their memories of the war, but that means recollections grow dim.  She calls Rathbone's novel a "faithful and unromanticised story about women's war work".  Although characterization of the novel may not be strong, it's strong point is in the rendering of the atmosphere of the era. 

"To a very great number of middle- and upper-middle-class young women--myself amongst them--the War brought release.  We had been brought up in the tradition that a girl did not work: she was worked for, by a male relation, usually her father.  Her aim in life was to find another man who would take it upon himself this obligation by marrying her.  In return, she became his housekeeper and the mother of his children."

"To some young women this ideal was satisfying: to others it was not.  Only the bravest and most honest-minded failed to conform to it, for the usual alternative was to be the 'daughter at home'."

I'm really looking forward to this book--written from several young women's perspectives ca. 1914.  I find this period endlessly fascinating, but I promise to try and not let it monopolize all my blogging time. 

A Few Recent Library Finds

This is the first year in the last four or five that I have not participated in my public library's winter reading program for adults.  I've amassed a number of book bags from these programs, but I knew this year I had too many other books I wanted to read in January.  Now I find out there will be a drawing for a color Nook for those who participate!  Somehow I don't think I can squeeze in five library books before the end of the month, but it would be fun to win one (or at least have the chance to win one). 

I've also not been borrowing many books as it's been so cold, snowy and icy that I've preferred to just stay warm at home rather than face the elements walking to the library.  Normally I am happy to walk and very much enjoy it, but the longer I live in the midwest, the less I seem to tolerate extremes in the weather.  So of course I had to pick the coldest day of the  year yet to bring these home last night!

So, I think this is my first stack of library books of the new year.  I'll mention the top book in a moment, but let me tell you about the other four first.

I've not read Sara Hylton before, but she seems to write about a period I like quite often.  Flirting with Destiny begins in 1914 and is about four friends from privileged families whose plans after school are drastically altered with the outbreak of war.

I plan on reading more of Andrew Taylor's Lydmouth mysteries, but this standalone caught my eye.  The Anatomy of Ghosts is set in Jerusalem College, Cambridge in 1786 and seems as much a ghost story as a murder mystery.  He won the CWA Cartier Diamond Dagger for it.

Peter Helton's Falling More Slowly, on the other hand, seems a straightforward police procedural set in Brighton, which introduces Detective Inspector Liam McClusky. 

Kate Taylor's A Man in Uniform seems to be a combination historical fiction, mystery and tale of espionage.  This story, which centers on France's Dreyfus Affair, takes on quite a lot, but I've been in the mood for some good historical fiction.  Maybe this is just what I'm looking for?

I had to share a photo or two of the book on the top of the pile, 13, rue Thérèse, by Elena Mauli Shapiro.  I knew vaguely what it was about when I requested it, but I had no idea it would come with illustrations.  This is a story within a story.  Louise Brunet, a Parisienne, has lived through two world wars.  She lost her lover in the first war, marries a man who works with her father, and has a passionate attraction for her neighbor.  Her story is told through the mementos found in a box many years later.  The keepsakes in the photos are actually Shapiro's, who was born and raised in Paris.  The real-life Louise Brunet owned the box and its contents, but after her death no one claimed them.  They ended up in Shapiro's possession.   

I thought this was very clever, so I hope it lives up to my expectations.  It reminds me a little of the Griffin and Sabine stories, but here the story is the focus with the illustrations as embellishments, yet the artifacts are what inspired the story in the first place.  I was just contemplating which new book to pick up and start reading, and apparently I've found it.

Teaser Tuesday: Stone in a Landslide

I'm afraid I've given the heave ho to my first read of the year that just wasn't quite clicking with me.  I've become much better at doing this than previously.  Actually I shouldn't be so flippant about it as it really isn't the book's fault.  I just lost the thread and don't feel like reading it anymore (and I hadn't really gotten very far into the story anyway).  The book in question is What Happened to Anna K. by Irina Reyn, which is a loose retelling of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina set in contemporary New York City.  I like the premise and the writing is good, but I'm just not in the mood and rather than let the book sit on my nightstand as I keep moving it to the bottom of the pile, I think I'd rather pick something else.  Sometimes I'm willing to persevere, but other times the reading just feels like a slog, and with so many other books waiting to be read...  Instead I think I will pick one of the books from this list or maybe one of these new books. 

And now any guilt I was feeling over picking up Maria Barbal's Stone in a Landslide is wiped away.  I told myself I was going to keep my reading pile under control this year, but I am obviously very good at not only fibbing to myself but believing what I say (all the while knowing I'm actually going to turn around and do the opposite).  Whereas the Reyn just wasn't working at the moment, the Barbal is.  It's quite a slender novel--just over 100 pages, but I am not rushing it.  It could easily be read in an evening, but the chapters are so short I like to just read a little at a time.

Barbal's style is very pared down.  She tells the life story of Conxa, from her simple beginnings in a small village in the Pyrenees, through her adulthood and moves along at a brisk pace.  And she does it all with an economy of words.  I like first person narratives and being inside a character's head.  In my teaser, Conxa is reflecting on whether the baby she is carrying will be a boy or girl. 

"A boy will be a man.  And a man has the strength to deal with the land, the animals, to build.  But I didn't see it clearly.  When I thought about the families I knew well, I saw the woman as the foundation stone.  If I thought about  my home, it was my mother who did all the work or organized others to do it.  Not to mention Tia.  The woman had the children, raised them, harvested, took care of the pigsty, the chicken coop, the rabbits.  She did the housework and so many other things: the vegetable garden, the jams, the sausages...  What did the man do?  Spent the day doing things outside.  When a cow had to be sold.  When someone had to be hired for harvest.  It wasn't obvious that the man did more or was more, but everyone said, What is a farm without a man?  And I thought, What is a house without a woman?  But what everyone had always said weighed on me.  I only knew that I wanted a boy."

This is descriptive of how events in the story shape and carry Conxa along.  She seems so accepting of life and willing to bend and conform.  But war is soon going to break out in Spain, and war changes everyone's life, and I wonder how it will change Conxa's.

Reading Notes: February 7

The only thing that is going to get me through this week's arctic subzero temperatures is the promise of warmer than normal temps next weekend.  Could it possibly be close to 50F on Sunday?  It's something to look forward to in any case.  Until then I will continue to stay nestled indoors under warm blankets reading my books and working on my needlework projects.  I really hate wishing my life away (as in I wish it was the weekend), but I can't but help look forward to sunny, if not warm then moderate, days.  And it is even staying lighter a little longer every day.  Bliss.

There are new book choices up at The Slaves of Golconda.  Do go take a look, and if you think you'd like to read along place your vote.  Things got off to a very good start this year with Tove Jansson's The Summer Book.   There's a nice mix of books to choose from, and we won't be discussing the book until the end of March.

I wish I could read South Riding by Winifred Holtby in time for Cornflower's discussion in a few weeks, but I am sure I won't manage it.  I think, however, I'll have much better luck next month as she's chosen Peter Ellis's A Morbid Taste for Bones, the first Brother Cadfael mystery set in Medieval times.  Although I've read Edith Pargeter before, I've yet to read any of her Cadfael mysteries she wrote under the Ellis pen name.  I even have this one sitting on my reading pile.

I've started a few new books.  I've been following Teresa's progress on the Morland Dynasty series of books.  She has only a few more to go until she's read all that the author has published.  I'm sure I've mentioned them here, but I'm sorry to say my own pile of books has been untouched for the last couple of years.  I had to go all the way back to the beginning of 2009 before I could find something I'd written about the last book I read by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles.  Teresa has been reading one a month for the last couple of years, hence her steady progress.  I wonder if I should try and do something similar--at least try and read a few this year.  So I pulled out book #6, The Long Shadow, and started it this weekend.  I very much like her style of storytelling, but the problem is, I think, that I am stuck in the Restoration years, which I am not particularly a fan of.   I believe this and the next book center around a spirited young character called Annunciata who has strong ties to the court of Charles II.  More to follow on this one.

I also raided my library book pile and started the slender novel, Stone in a Landslide, by Maria Barbal.  This is one of the Peirene Press books that so many people were writing about last year.  I had the set of them checked out last fall and didn't read a single one.  I decided I would tackle them one at a time instead.   Barbal is a Catalan author and I like her spare prose style in which she tells the story of a young girl from the country who goes to live with her aunt and uncle and falls in love with a builder.  As this is set during the years leading up to and during the Spanish Civil War, I expect Conxa's life to be turned inside out.

Watching Downton Abbey put me in the mood to read something from the Edwardian period, or if not from the actual period, then about it.  I've picked Katharine McMahon's Footsteps.  I've read and enjoyed several of her novels, in particular her recent The Crimson Rooms was one of my favorites last year.  I'm not sure any of her other books can top that one for me, but I am enjoying Footsteps.  The novel has parallel storylines with one reaching back into the past of the other.  This may be a case of I wish she had just told the story set in the Edwardian period, but it's too early still to tell how things will work out.  Or it may also be a case of I loved Downton Abbey and how could you possibly top a story like that?

Otherwise my reading is filled with the usual suspects.  I'm still working away at Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time.  I've not been writing about it, but I am reading it almost daily.  I was planning on reading one novel a month, but I am still in the first book.  I am hoping to finish it and book two by the end of the month, however.  I'm determined to finish Molly Keane's (M.J. Farrell's) Taking Chances by the end of this week.  Maybe I'll be writing about it next weekend?  And I am very slowly reading Elizabeth George's doorstop of a mystery, This Body of Death.  Despite George's shortcomings, I do love her novels.  I can easily spend an afternoon whiling away my time in her stories, but they are so long that it takes me a while to read them.  I admit, though, the length makes me start to think about the next mystery I'll pick up well before I get to the end of it.  I'm thinking Agatha Christie, but that may well change before I finish the next 350 pages...      

What I've Been Working On . . .

No bookish news today as I've spent my afternoon working on my Prairie Schooler "Rain, Rain" project.  This is how far I've managed to get while watching the first three episodes of season eight of MI-5.  It's probably not a good thing to watch those episodes back to back as they are so intense (let's see--one agent returned from the dead, one retired, and one shot in the line of duty!), but I couldn't stop after just one.  I get the DVDs from Netflix, so in any case they are rationed out and just as well that I'll get a little break now.  Watching the show you would think that London is perpetually on the edge of plummeting into some awful disaster, but I seem to be addicted.  I think to balance things out I need a little costume drama--too bad Downton Abbey has finished (loved it!), but I hear filming is due to begin on a second season.  I bought the DVD so I can watch the uncut UK version, so perhaps I'll pop that in now as I try and finish my work.

When I finish the design will look something like this.  It's amazing how long backstitching takes and then there is the endless counting of tiny stitches to make sure front and back will match as well as the strip of linen that will become the top, bottom and sides.  I may use a ribbon on mine as well as the pins.  We'll see.  I've got the second strip of edging to finish and then will come the slightly tedious job of stitching the pieces all together.  I'll share my mattress pincushion next weekend as I don't expect to get it all done tonight.

And work still progresses on my Prairie Schooler "February" design.  The log cabin is coming along slowly.  The strange black shape to the right of it will be a tree.  I actually had it all stitched, discovered that I counted incorrectly, had to pick the entire thing out and start over.  I think I'm back on track again, though I seem to be taking forever on this particular section of the design!  Isn't it good news that the real groundhog didn't see his shadow?  I'm keeping my fingers tightly crossed that we do indeed get an early spring this year!  I'm enjoying this project, but I think the next design I choose is going to have a nice green garden in it!