I'm approaching the point on the sweater-front where I begin doing the zig-zag motif in the center.

I tried knitting on it while I read, but wound up switching over to the Southwestern socks.

Reading
I read a lot. Not just for work (which includes textbook stuff, journal articles, online articles, and student papers as well as books in my field of interest) but also for entertainment. One of the great joys, I've found, is beginning a new novel - getting to know the characters, trying to figure out if the narrator is reliable or not, becoming accustomed to the author's voice or voices.

Monday night I finished the book my book club is reading for this month: "The Dress Lodger" by Sheri Holman. It's a different sort of book from what I normally read - it's very definitely a modern novel in its sensibilities but harks back to the Victorian novels (like Dickens or Eliot or Trollope) in its narration and in some stylistic touches. If I had to sum it up in a phrase, I'd say it was "fascinating but gruesome". It follows a couple groups of characters - a young prostitute (the "dress lodger" of the title; she wears borrowed finery to attract her johns), a doctor and his fiancee, a little girl obsessed by a ferret. The book is set in Sunderland (a part of northern England) at the beginning of its 1831 cholera plague. (hence the gruesome part - there are some pretty intense descriptions of the symptoms, of the horrific treatments, of what happens before and after death). If it makes sense at all for me to say this, I liked it but didn't like it.

And now, I've started "Great Expectations" (by Dickens, of course). I find that my earlier education (particularly junior high) was somewhat spotty in terms of literature - this is, I think, a book typically read in 7th grade. I've also never read "Silas Marner", another staple of the educational process. Dickens is considerably more sentimental in his portrayals than Holman was, but I have to admit I like his world and descriptions better. Yes, I am that kind of reader - I like my stories with a gloss of unreality applied over them, I like my poor noble but downtrodden, my villians really and truly bad, my heroes someone I can trust. What can I say: I'm an idealist, and too rarely does the real world satisfy my vision of what the world should be like. (well, not really "should", because if the world was as it "should" be there would be no poor and downtrodden...) But you know what I mean.