Nibbling Along

A Surprising Prize

I am very flattered that the lovely and talented Suzanne (of Yarnhog) bequeathed me with an award! If you haven't read her blog before, be sure to check it out -- she is a master when it comes to seeing the potential in beautiful yarns in unfortunate colors. Check out this. And this. Mad overdyeing skills, I tell you.

Now, I get to pass the award on to bloggers I love!

The rules of the award are as follows: 1. The winner can put the logo on their website/blog. 2. Add a link to the person who gave you the award. 3. Nominate at least five other websites/blogs. 4. Provide links to the nominated websites/blogs. 5. Leave a message at each blog/website telling them they've been given the award.

I love way more than five blogs -- my bloglines list is pretty long -- so I decided to highlight a few which I think do a great job of balancing the crafty-blog stuff with the mommy-blog stuff.

So, in no particular order, I would like to spread the bloggy love around to:

• Fickleknitter, who also incidentally has designed some very cute patterns (check out these reversible baby Mary Janes -- adorable!)
• Oiyi, whose recent success with Kool-Aid dyeing inspired me to try my hand at it again after a long hiatus. (She also makes kickass baked goods, including a totally gorgeous wedding cake. How cool is that?)
• Knitting Betty, who has not blogged in a few weeks. (I am selfishly hoping that this award will bribe her into posting again. Is that wrong?)
• The Two Black Sheep, "Ava" and "Lola," who routinely crack me up and have done me the priceless service of introducing me to both the fresh-ground Whole Foods honey-roasted peanut butter, and Blue Moon ale. (Good stuff.)
• Ruth, whose quilting and crafting are awesome, even though her former quilting guild members were decidedly non-awesome. (The new group sounds much better -- go Ruth!)

And now, since I'm always trying to strive for crafty-blog and mommy-blog balance, here is a completely gratuitous picture of Measure playing with one of the Halloween pumpkins we carved. He loves to take their "hats" on and off.

He's kind of obsessed with the pumpkins. He even noticed the little tiny pumpkin icon above the Ravelry logo, and spent a full minute excitedly staring and pointing at the "dundin," making sure that I realized that yes, there was a pumpkin on the computer, and yes, that was the most awesome thing ever. Good times.

I Also Have Books Which Aren't Cookbooks

Jason and I have a lot of cookbooks. He's a difficult person to buy gifts for, so I often end up getting him cookbooks as gifts, since I at least know which authors he's likely to like. We also have a lot of books in general, though I've been trying to cut down on my book acquisitions lately by visiting the library instead. It was either that or buy more bookshelves, which we really need to do anyway since ours are all bursting at the seams, and that's with a good chunk of our collection still boxed up in the garage. In theory, we could cull the books we own but actively dislike, but both of us have an almost pathological aversion to getting rid of books. It's just something we don't do.

Anyhow, I picked up this meme on And She Knits Too!; you are free to pick it up and play along as you like. These are the top 106 books marked as "unread" by LibraryThing's users, meaning they are books which people own but haven't read. To play along, copy the list and bold the ones you have read, underline the ones you read for school, and italicize the ones you started but didn't finish.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Simarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities (I hatehatehate Dickens)
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales (half in bold because I've probably read about half, all together)
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood BIble
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise)
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
In Cold Blood
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

I seem to have read about half the list. Not bad. It's not surprising that some of these books are owned-but-not-read by a lot of people (Ulysses, for example -- I don't think I could enjoy that book unless I took a really good literature class on it or something) but others are pretty light reads, which makes their "unread" status a little more surprising to me (The Hobbit, Neverwhere, anything by Jane Austen...). Funny to see Watership Down on the list, I was just thinking of rereading that. It was my favorite book from when I first read it, when I was 8 years old, until I read Crime and Punishment sometime when I was in high school. I don't think I have a definite "favorite" book anymore, but there are some I definitely love to revisit every few years.

So: what are you reading?