Showing posts with label reading project. Show all posts
Showing posts with label reading project. Show all posts

Tuesday

The pillow plan



What do you do when your pillowcases get a little dingy? If you're me you decided to drown them in embroidery. This is one of the apparently 12,000 motifs I will have to finish in order to cover one side of a king sized pillow case. I am using water soluble stabilizer to transfer my patterns. I just trace the pattern onto my stabilizer, put it in the hoop with the fabric directly behind and start stitching.


This week's book is If the Buddha got Stuck. This is the second of the If the Buddha... books I've read. I also loved If the Buddha Dated. Dr. Kasl has an easy way of writing that asks you to look a little closer at what you hold true and why. She tweaks your thinking (if you let her).


I've also finished A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf. Though it was written 90 years ago, many of the points Woolf makes are still valid. Though at this point (at least in the West) a lot of the ideas that hold women back are self imposed rather than dictated by pipe smoking men reclining in calf-skin chairs. What I enjoyed most about this book was her humor. She compares the juice the seeps from prunes as what flows through the veins of misers. Who knew, Virginia. I may actually have to give To the Lighthouse another try.

Saturday

Reading is Fundamental




Last week I discovered I am woefully under read. I've only read 10 of the Modern Library's List of the 100 Best Novels (the Board's List) and only 1 of the Modern Library's Best Nonficition Books (the Board's List). I fared much better on the Guardian's 100 Greatest Novels of all Time (thank you multiple centuries), but still ended up with 200 unread great books. Using the time honored scientific process of going through the list and picking titles I like, I compiled a list of 31 books I will read in 2011. They span from the voluminous (1536 pages) Clarissa by Samuel Richardson to The Periodic Table by Primo Levi. The complete list is on the sidebar.

Reading changes me. It expands my thinking, broadens my world and spurs my curiousity. I hope that by reading this span of books I will discover new things about myself and the world I help create.