Monday morning things

* Slept badly last night; it stormed most of the night. (It started just as I was putting my book down and getting ready to sleep. SOMETIMES I can sleep through storms - if they're not too loud - if they start after I'm asleep, but not if they start while I'm awake). At one point it sounded almost like someone pounding on my front door and I had a brief moment of worry: are they evacuating the neighborhood for some reason? (Then I decided: the city has reverse-911, they'd call too). Or could it be police were dispatched and they got the wrong place, and my door's about to be broken in? (Once, years and years ago, one Sunday afternoon, a young cop showed up at my door. I was puzzled but he said there'd been a report. I *think* it must have been a DV report because he kept asking me if I was okay and if I was alone or if there was someone else there and did I want to leave? And I finally assured him that I lived alone, and I was perfectly fine and safe. And then he looked at the address again and apologized. There's a SOUTH version and a NORTHEAST version of my numbered street in town, so it's entirely possible the dispatcher got it wrong. He was perfectly polite though, didn't try to come in the house, just stood there on the porch - and I stepped out, too - and talked to me.)

* One dream I do remember - I was back living with my family (well, actually, I was much younger than I am now, like late teens/early 20s). We had a mastiff dog named Zeus. Zeus was nice, he was protective of me. He would come and lean against me (I think that was my pushing up against Pfred in my sleep and feeling that pressure, and my brain translated it to that). He'd get between me and the front door if someone were at the door.

It would be nice to have a protector some times, I think.

* I went back to reading "The Three Musketeers" last night. I had detoured to read some short stories, and I am also reading on "Weekend at Thrackley" (another one of those 30s-era British mysteries; this one is the classic country-house-party mystery, and thus far it's pretty good)

One thing that strikes me hard about "The Three Musketeers" - the casual violence. "Opponents" are dispatched and left dead (or left-for-dead) on the side of the road without much thought. In fact, as the Musketeers travel to England (long story but it's fundamentally to cover up the Queen of France's infidelity by retrieving some baubles), three of the four are waylaid, and the fourth is himself injured. (I presume the other three are fine, seeing as there is another Musketeers book called "Twenty Years After" or some such).

It's just....it's a very different style to that which I am used to. The books I read tend to fall into a couple categories:

1. "Classic" novels that are largely comedies-of-manners or drawing-room novels (Trollope, for example, and I think Austen would fit in here). Essentially no violence; if a character dies, it's usually either of old age or illness. If there is mention of war or similar it's very offstage. The main conflicts are interpersonal sorts of conflicts or things like "how am I going to marry off my three daughters when I have no money" and the like.

2. "Classic" mystery novels (or sometimes modern "cozies" or classic police-procedurals like the Maigret novels). Yes, there is violence here, but either it is very offstage (and many of the "classic" British mysteries don't do much describing of the body, as if to avoid offending the sensibilities of the readers). Very occasionally there is a bit more violence (some of the Campion novels that are more novels-of-intrigue) but even that is largely offstaged....and the Campion novels are comic enough that it does somehow distance you a little bit.

3. Young-adult-originating fantasy (e.g., Susan Cooper) or historical-fantasy (Rosemary Sutcliff) novels. Again here, much of the violence is downplayed, or at least the gore is downplayed. I suspect part of that is the intended audience of these books. (Though maybe different times? Maybe post World Wars I and II people lost a lot of desire to read about violence and fighting? I think Sutcliff mostly wrote in the 50s and Cooper was the 60s and 70s....and the Narnia books were written in the 50s (And Lewis was himself a veteran, IIRC, though there is perhaps a bit more violence in the Narnia novels than in the Dark is Rising books)

And even the "historical fiction" I have read in the past tends to be tamer* and so I'm a bit discombobulated by the casualness of the violence in "The Three Musketeers" but at this point I'm hanging in there. (I give myself permission to bail on a book, though, if it gets too hard going. Several years ago, in the middle of some tough life-stuff, I tried to read "Gulliver's Travels," and had to give up because Swift's cynicism was making me even more depressed)


(*I have mentioned before my test for a new author: take a book off the shelf, turn it at random to three different points. If one of those points contains an explicit sex scene, I put the novel back on the shelf and don't buy it. I suspect I'd do the same with gore, though I mostly remember rejecting novels because of "proud members" or "heaving bosoms")

It's funny. I once remember someone simplifying the left-right political axis down to "one side hates violence in entertainment and wants to ban it, the other side hates sex in entertainment and wants to ban it" but really it's more complicated than that. And to be honest? I'd rather avoid graphic forms of *either.* A little consensual snogging or the implication that a married couple does what married couples do is fine....but I don't want to read deep detail. And same with violence: I know people get killed in war, I know war is brutal, I know that in the past and in current times people get tortured - but reading details of it is unpleasant, and part of the reason I read books is to avoid some of the unpleasantness of reality.

I dunno. I keep thinking I should compile a list - or find a list - of nice, light, fluffy, pleasant things to read for when I'm particularly jangled. Miss Read is one author that works - basically, she writes about the small towns in Britain where she lived between the wars (and up into, I think, the 1960s). Jane Austen works but you have to be alert enough for the slightly-more-challenging vocabulary and syntax. Anthony Trollope works, too, though I confess that even as much as I love Trollope, he can get boring at times (and like a lot of older British books, you have to "blip over" some stuff - I mean, anti-Semitism was a thing in the Victorian era. It was as wrong then as it is now. And yes, I still will read novels with those references; I don't 'cancel' them wholesale even as I recognize that that viewpoint is wrong. And I'm not even sure Trollope felt that or if he was putting words in the mouths of characters we are meant to see as unpleasant and snobby)

Or maybe I do go back to some childhood books. I bought an inexpensive set of the Chronicles of Prydain (which I never read as a kid but recently read an enthusiastic online review of). And there's the All-of-a-Kind family books still out there, which I remember as having some similarities to Miss Read, in the sense of being a slice-of-life of a time I never experienced and a place I've never been.

* But yeah. Right now I'm going through a "jangled" point. Part of it is just some unsettling news around me, part of it was the bad surprise yesterday of learning of Sharon's death. (In a way, it was not unexpected - she was in hospice - but I didn't think it would be so soon).

Edited to add: and apparently my departmental secretary lost her dad over the weekend. She had told me "He's taken a turn for the worse; if I'm not here at some point in the coming week or two it's that he's passed" and she wasn't here today...

I didn't knit a lot over the weekend - I worked in the yard some Saturday and then went to the "Amish store" for some things and drove around a bit. But as much as I did knit? I pulled out the big fluffy blanket I'm knitting of Red Heart's "Hygge" yarn. Why? I don't know. I don't know why 90+ degree temperatures saw me knitting on a blanket, but there you are. (I had a pair of sufficiently-simple socks on the needles, and I *just* started a new sweater - though some of the beginning steps of that once you knit the neckband are complex enough, and sometimes when I'm tired and a little sad, complex knitting doesn't appeal to me).I'm almost half-done with the blanket - blankets are big, but Hygge is a fat yarn (either CYC 5 or 6, I forget) and so it moves faster). Also it's nice and fluffy and soft and it's a pretty color (a very pale purple).

I also found myself looking at some Lion Brand "multicolor cakes" (I forget which yarn line of theirs it is - Cupcake, maybe - in one of the pastelly colorways. Maybe Tutu Much?). I bought several cakes of it when it was on a good sale at JoAnn's with the idea of doing one of those crochet blankets that people *usually* do with scrap yarn (like the ripple stitch ones) but in this case, instead of having joins all over the place, I will get slower color changes but fewer places I have to weave in ends.

(Correction: I looked at it when I came home for lunch. It's Cherry Blossom. I have almost 2400 yards of it which is hopefully enough for a smallish crocheted blanket....)

And I admit, I was tempted to grab one of the patterns I had bookmarked and start it. (But was disciplined and said I needed to finish the Hygge blanket first, and also probably pull out the Color-Bar blanket and finish IT). And I have some yellow yarn for a honeycomb-pattern crocheted blanket. I don't know why earlier this year I had this run of wanting to make blankets (and I still kinda do) but there you are.