Unfelted Unpainted and Unread

It was bigger than a hockey jersey, I swear. And it kinda looked like one, too.

My French Market Bag, unfelted:

Measuring in at 12” wide, 12” deep, and 15” tall for just the bag body, not including the height of the handles, it was a sizable wad of wool. And then I felted it.

Now it’s just a little bigger than a plastic grocery bag. I’m all set for those French Markets. Which means I’m probably over-prepared for my local Kansan Markets. I could probably haul two or three cantaloupes in this hefty tote, no prob, if I was a big cantaloupe fan. But I’m not that wild about them.

By the way, to give the picture a little perspective (and because I don’t have any local produce yet), I filled the bag with yarn—three skeins across and four layers deep of Lion Brand Wool Ease I found at Michael’s for $2/skein. I couldn’t believe I’d run across a Clearance bin that hadn’t been cleared out yet. So I volunteered. This red “sprinkle” yarn is slated for a Susie Hoodie someday in the near future, I hope.

In the meantime, I’m knitting with Cotlin in my first lace project, a Lightning Lace Jacket to wear over tank tops. Yes! Summer knitting.

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Painting update: Only the kitchen, a spare bedroom, and the window in the bathroom remain unpainted in my dad’s house. Glory be. And we still have to sort through the rest of the junk/neat stuff. Oh, but we’re ever so much closer.

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I am a LibraryThing member. The basic membership is free and I have cataloged in my free account all the books I have read that I still own. I have many, many, many…many more books that I haven’t cataloged and won’t until I have read them and have decided to keep them.

Other LT members catalog all the books in their possession, whether or not they have read them. And in LibraryThing’s vast database is a list of the most unread books cataloged by members. Based on this list, a blog meme is going around that asks each blogger to own up to which of these tomes, out of the top 106, he or she has read, begun to read, had to read for school, and read again just for fun.

I took the most updated list of unread books, as of yesterday night, and pasted it below. I’ve highlighted in bold the books I’ve read, underlined the books I read for school, italicized the titles of stories I’ve started but not finished, placed an asterisk (*) beside the ones I would read again, and placed an arrow (>) next to the ones I haven’t read but do own and want to read.

This meme isn’t viral in the sense that I’m going to name five other bloggers whom I want to embarrass into elitist illiteracy. If you want to boast about the books you have or haven’t read, I’ll leave that up to you. If you’d like to crow about which lofty works you’ve chosen to stop a door, prop open windows, or kill spiders, well, by all means…

Here, then, is my confession.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

One hundred years of solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Crime and punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

Catch-22 a novel by Joseph Heller

The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien

Don Quixote by Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra

The Odyssey by Homer

The brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Ulysses by James Joyce

War and peace by Leo Tolstoy

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

A tale of two cities by Charles Dickens

* Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

The name of the rose by Umberto Eco (saw the movie)

Moby Dick by Herman Melville

Emma by Jane Austen (saw the movie)

The Iliad by Homer

Vanity fair by William Makepeace Thackeray

Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood

Pride and prejudice by Jane Austen (saw movie versions, too)

> The historian : a novel by Elizabeth Kostova

The Canterbury tales by Geoffrey Chaucer

The kite runner by Khaled Hosseini

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

Life of Pi : a novel by Yann Martel

> The time traveler's wife by Audrey Niffenegger

Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies by Jared Diamond

Atlas shrugged by Ayn Rand

Foucault's pendulum by Umberto Eco

Dracula by Bram Stoker

The grapes of wrath by John Steinbeck

Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

A heartbreaking work of staggering genius by Dave Eggers

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

Sense and sensibility by Jane Austen

Middlemarch by George Eliot

Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books by Azar Nafisi

The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas (ooo, loved the most recent movie)

The sound and the fury by William Faulkner

Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

Quicksilver (The Baroque Cycle I) by Neal Stephenson

American gods : a novel by Neil Gaiman

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

The poisonwood Bible : a novel by Barbara Kingsolver

> Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West… by Gregory Maguire

The picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (nothing but the Cliffe's Notes)

Dune by Frank Herbert

A portrait of the artist as a young man by James Joyce

The satanic verses by Salman Rushdie

Mansfield Park by Jane Austen

Gulliver's travels by Jonathan Swift

The three musketeers by Alexandre Dumas (saw a handful of movies)

The inferno by Dante Alighieri

The corrections by Jonathan Franzen

The amazing adventures of Kavalier and Clay : a novel by Michael Chabon

The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand

Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy (saw the public TV movie)

Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens

To the lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

A clockwork orange by Anthony Burgess

Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe

Persuasion by Jane Austen

The scarlet letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

One flew over the cuckoo's nest by Ken Kesey

The once and future king by T. H. White

Anansi boys : a novel by Neil Gaiman

Atonement: A Novel by Ian McEwan

The god of small things by Arundhati Roy

A short history of nearly everything by Bill Bryson

Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson

Dubliners by James Joyce

Oryx and Crake : a novel by Margaret Atwood Angela's ashes : a memoir by Frank McCourt

Beloved : a novel by Toni Morrison

Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed by Jared Diamond

The hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo

In cold blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its… by Truman Capote

Lady Chatterley's lover by D.H. Lawrence

A confederacy of dunces by John Kennedy Toole

Les misérables by Victor Hugo

The amber spyglass by Philip Pullman

The prince by Niccolo Machiavelli

Watership Down by Richard Adams

Beowulf : a new verse translation by Anonymous (three or four times, but not cuz I love it!)

The Aeneid by Virgil

A farewell to arms by Ernest Hemingway

Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance : an inquiry into… by Robert M. Pirsig

Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson

The personal history of David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

Sons and lovers by D.H. Lawrence

Possession : a romance by A.S. Byatt

The book thief by Markus Zusak

The history of Tom Jones, a foundling by Henry Fielding

The road by Cormac McCarthy

Tender is the night by F. Scott Fitzgerald

The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells

Gravity's rainbow by Thomas Pynchon

Never let me go by Kazuo Ishiguro

The plague by Albert Camus

Candide, or, Optimism by Voltaire

Jude the obscure by Thomas Hardy

The English patient by Michael Ondaatje