It's Monday! What Are You Reading? is hosted by Kathryn at the Book Date and is "a place to meet up and share what you have been, are and about to be reading over the week."
Visit the Book Date to see what various other book bloggers have been up to in the last week.
--
The weather in Reykjavik has been annoying lately. There have been such temperature swings that I never know how to dress for my walk to work in the mornings. At the beginning of last week it was balmy and sweet for a couple of days, with mildly frosty nights and calm, clear days and warm for the time of year. I could swear I smelled spring in the air on Monday.
Then it snowed.
And then it rained.
Last night it snowed again, but the rain is already washing the snow away and we are expecting three storms to hit during the week, one after the other.
I'm getting ready to curl up on the sofa with a good book.
I finished three books last week, two new reads and one partial reread. My luck in picking good reads still holds, and I enjoyed all three books very much and will be putting all three on the keeper shelves.
Without Reservations: The Travels of an Independent Woman by Alice Steinbach. The author took a year off from work to get to know herself better in unfamiliar environments and away from friends and family, and spent it in Europe, divided between Paris, London, Oxford and Milan.A lovely travelogue that doesn't try to stuff its message of self-discovery forcefully down your throat (unlike some previous books of this sub-genre of the travelogue I have read).
The Dover Publications edition of The Diaries of Adam and Eve by Mark Twain.
I had read parts of it this before and enjoyed both the humour and the philosophy. When I saw this edition, I had to have it. This is a beautifully illustrated, lovely book that I enjoyed looking at as much as I did reading it.
This was an appropriate read, as the book I finished before that was Marco Polo's Travels. The hero of this lovely book is a contemporary of Polo's who travels along the same route to China as Polo did. Polo is even mentioned in the book.
This is a charming fictional imagining of how the colour ultramarine was brought to Europe and used to paint the sky in this painting:
 |
| Maestà by Simone Martini |
My yarn stash is diminishing bit by bit. Just before Christmas I looked at my overflowing baskets and boxes of yarn and something went 'ping!' in my mind. I have been crocheting every chance I have had since and trying desperately not to look at yarn when I go grocery shopping, which is difficult because in the supermarket where I buy most of my groceries I pass the yarn aisle on my way to get bread.
I am 1/3 of the way through an adult-sized Midwife blanket, which should rid me of 12 skeins of yarn, and I have also made a number of plushies and dolls and several scarves. The goal is to finish up some odd balls of yarn left over from previous projects, to use speciality yarns I bought with no particular project in mind, e.g. ribbon, eyelash, furry, glittery, spangled, variegated, and to use yarn from projects I have planned - and even started - but then abandoned.
I think it's all really a pretext to delay deciding whether or not to continue with the Sophie's Universe mandala blanked I started last year. One the one hand I'm unhappy with the colours I chose, but on the other I have already made so much of it that I might as well continue...
Comments