"knit two, purl two, knit two, purl..aw fuck"

Been spending the last couple of days working on The Sweater, valiantly warding off every impending disaster somehow. It's a bit, well, unique, but still going strong, and I don't think I'll have to rip it apart and start over.

(Is this going to turn into a knitting blog? Not much point without a digital camera...)

Also been working on my visa, which is a pain in the ass. I like the French but personally I sometimes suspect they were the inspiration for Douglas Adams' beaureaucratic Vogons (better poetry though). Finished The Watsons. All this half-written Austen is breaking my heart; but at least we get the outline of the plot. Started Lady Susan, which is rapidly giving Northanger Abbey and Persuasion a run for their money as Favorite Austen Novel. What a nasty piece of work she is; I love her. Also working on the second part of Juliet Marillier's Sevenwaters Trilogy, Son of the Shadows. Went to a Ren Faire last week with L., it's given me a craving for fantasy. And bought a brand-spanking-new hardback copy of An Instance of the Fingerpost for 50 cents. I guess it's just as well I'm unemployed, I don't have time for a job. Too much to read.

Number of Books I Own: At least a hundred, easy. Haven't counted them up in a while. I wish I had a proper set of bookshelves, I've been itching to rearrange them all lately.
(Shut up. It's fun. Yes, it is.)
Last Book I Bought: Child of the Prophecy, Juliet Marillier. Thus breaking my Book Buying rule for the umpteenth millionth time (Thou Shalt Not Buy Books Until Thou Hast Read the Books Thou Already Ownest, Unless It Be From the Second Hand Table at the Library). But I think I'm justified; I mean, I gotta find out how it all ends. And I can stop whenever I want to!
Last Book I Read: Mm. I think the last book I finished was James Baldwin's Another Country, for class. I kind of half-assed my way through the rest. I'd never read Baldwin before, but Another Country was astounding. Simply knocked me off my feet. So prescient, I can't believe he wrote it in 1962. He anticipates so many aspects of the civil rights and the gay rights movements. It's a beautiful novel; it's like a gift. Just go read it.
5 Books That Mean A Lot To Me (in no particular order):
Rubyfruit Jungle. First dyke book I ever read, at precisely the right time that I needed to read it, because it's got a spunky heroine who's unapologetically out and proud.
Mrs. Dalloway. The only Woolf novel I've read, I fell in love with her with this book, a passion that will last me the rest of my life I'm sure. It's like a prose poem more than a novel. You can open it up anywhere and find gorgeous writing.
A Wrinkle in Time. Meg Murray was my alter ego growing up. I thoroughly identified with her in almost every way. It got me through some lonely times and pretty much opened up all of literature to me.
Pride and Prejudice. Like everybody else, this was my intro to Austen. It actually wasn't until the second time I read it that I got the Janeite bug, but I've been in love with Lizzie ever since. I even tried my hand at some fanfic, which I titled The Courtship of Mary Bennet, of which I thankfully only finished one and a half chapters.
The Golden Treasury of Poetry. This got me hooked on poetry when I was too young to know that you aren't supposed to read poetry for pleasure. I opened it up to look at the illustrations and found "The Outlandish Knight", "Robin Hood and Allan a Dale", "If No One Ever Marries Me" (baby dyke moment), Blake's "The Tiger", Chaucer's "The Knight's Tale", Shakespeare's "Queen Mab", Keats "La Belle Dame Sans Merci", Tennyson's "Lady Clare", Longfellow's "The Secret of the Sea", "Wynken, Blynken, and Nod", "I Hear America Singing", everything that a grade-schooler is supposed to be unable to comprehend. So, yeah, thanks, Mr. Untermeyer.