This weekend I was in a blissful book cocoon, curled up with The Corrections and the Frost Flowers & Leaves edging. The border edging has been a grind, but I’m in the home stretch now for sure. The best part was when I decided to take the lifelines out of the interior of the piece, and suddenly it stopped being an oddly-shaped tube and started to resemble the finished object. Glamorous visited over the weekend (she loves to come over and “use the pool,” which means spraying herself with oil and laying out in the sun reading, napping and listening to her iPod) and although she flatly refused to have anything at all to do with the ball-winder, she was gratifyingly excited to see my progress on the shawl. I have to admit, I loved the shawl design at first but it’s starting to seem stale and old, the yarn has a beautiful hand and is still a pleasure to work with but the color looks drab to me. The final lengths of this piece have been grueling.
So it was a pleasure to wrap myself up in something completely indulgent and fresh as I worked the endless twelve-stitch rows: Jonathan Franzen’s novel The Corrections. When I was a little girl I used to stay up late-nights reading until the early morning, hiding my light under the covers. I burned holes in several pillowcases and sheets on hot lightbulbs at three or four in the morning. Friday night I got home from work exhausted – the guy I share a cubicle and a massive job with went on vacation to Canada and I’d been doing the heavy lifting by myself all week – and I thought I’d spend an hour knitting before passing out. I put in The Corrections and ended up knitting for almost five hours, until it was dark and the late-night humidity fell still and heavy over the house. I’m only half-way through, but this is the best book I’ve read (ok, heard) in a long, long time. The reading, by George Guidall, is fantastic – the words read aloud seem to find a resonant frequency that glides along above the rich cadence. And it’s funny too – my favorite passage thus far involves a man shoplifting fancy salmon from a designer grocery store by hiding it under his sweater and then agonizing as it slides down into the crotch of his pants.
I want to completely immerse myself in the novel but at the same time ration it out to myself in small doses to make sure it lasts. I reassured myself today by updating my Audiobooks Page with a list of books, in no particular order, that I want to listen to. Please, please, please, if you have a book you love, let me know! I’m going to be heartbroken when The Corrections finally comes to a close, so I want to have good stuff waiting in the wings. The best news: there’s plenty of knitting to be done, which means lots of listening time ahead.
And finally, from a town in Ontario, Canada that my co-worker passed through on his way home from vacation:
Type-K 