Reading List

My reading list for 2014 - mostly birthday and Christmas presents from 2013. No match for Jim's 2014 reading challenge - which is to beat the 57 books he read last year. But some challenges here nonetheless - notably, my challenge to read more Dickens. This challenge, recklessly agreed to after a glass of fizz on Christmas Day, was to read a chapter of Dickens a day. That quickly became 5 chapters a week and I'm ashamed to say that I haven't read a single chapter at all this week. The challenge now is just to finish Little Dorrit. Reading Muriel Spark's Symposium at the same time probably isn't helping. Spark's sharp, economical prose is such sweet relief from Dickens that it's difficult to resist.

Others on my list for this year are a mix of pure pleasure (cats and Anne Tyler), semi-serious literariness (biographies of Charlotte Bronte, Patrick Hamilton and Jane Austen), and just great writing (Patrick Hamilton).

Apparently, it's naff to post picture of one's reading matter (as naff as posting pictures of one's breakfast no doubt). Well, naff I am.



Summer in February

I've found myself thinking a lot about yellow cardigans recently. I've got two sunshiney cardigans, which I love and wear year-round. But I've never managed to knit myself a yellow cardigan. I once spent a lot of money on some golden-yellow, very fine alpaca yarn in a cute shop in Edinburgh but half-way through the intended project I realised that that kind of yellow just doesn't suit me. The cardigans that I love are a sharper, lemony yellow and I've realised that this is the shade that I need to knit with.

Having pondered the perfect yellow cardigan for weeks now, I finally took the plunge and spent a fortune today (Rowan - your prices are getting insane!) on this cotton-linen yarn to make my first Spring/Summer project of 2014.

The pattern is going to be this one from Knitting By Design by Emma Robertson. When I first flicked through this book in November, I thought it was a bit boring. But I found that I kept being drawn to it whenever I visited a bookshop. I ended up buying it as a pre-Christmas treat for myself and I've already made a few things from it. It's really grown on me.