Wednesday, April 29, 2009

What I've been...

Reading: The Forest of Hands and Teeth, which is fantastic. It's gotten a lot of hype online, so I was curious to see whether it lived up to it and am happy to say that it SO does. It happens to hit a lot of my personal literary high notes — dystopian fantasy, female protagonist who's fighting the constraints of the society she lives in, genuine darkness, secret societies, a quest —and also happens to be very well-written in addition to being a compelling page-turner. It's set seven generations after the zombie apocalypse and humans have been reduced to living in a single fortified village that's ruled by a religious order, the Sisterhood, and there are zombies clawing at their fences all day, every day, to the point where their moaning is just white noise. But there's this girl, Mary, who thinks that maybe, just maybe, there are other people out there, but she's being forced to marry the brother of the guy she really loves and then she finds a secret book but before she can read much of it the zombies get into the village and kill everyone except four or five other people and they manage to escape together but even some of them die along the way and they discover that they have all been LIED to about many, many things and it all just makes for a mighty fine read. Thumbs up for this one.

I have this waiting to read next, which I'm really looking forward to too.

Watching: I finished up the fourth season of The Wire a couple of weeks ago and will probably dive right into the fifth next. I haven't been home much to watch anything though.

Knitting: Not much, really. Plugging away on Yank, just half a sleeve and the front bands to do, then blocking and assembly. While I was out of town, I started a striped pullover in fingering-weight alpaca that I've had sitting around, but am not sure about yarn amounts and should probably re-spec the whole thing to work top down.

Doing to support indie craft businesses: After the reveal of what Michelle rightly called the "egregious and foul" copyright infringement against Jenny Hart (her response here), I placed an order with Sublime Stitching for four patterns and a couple of tea towels. I got the Daniel Johnston set, the tattoo alphabet, vintage lamps and forest friends. I had been toying with the idea of taking up embroidery in some small-ish capacity, but this was really more of a voting-with-my-wallet kind of scenario than a yes!-now-is-the-time-for-another-hobby! moment.

Looking forward to: dreaming up things to do with the eggs that Martha dropped off at my office for me today (from her backyard chickens!), watching friends perform at Arena Rawk Karaoke tomorrow night, spending this weekend in the country with friends, stopping in at the Rob Ryan show that's apparently in a shop in the Meatpacking District(?), checking out the Jenny Holzer show at the Whitney, especially since my friend Seth (not that Seth, THIS Seth) called me "the Jenny Holzer of Twitter" a few months ago. What can I say? I have a thing for text-based art...

2 comments:

Cabbage said...

I just finished The Forest of Hands and Teeth and liked it a lot! Especially considering it is a zombie book... I was skeptical at first, hehe

Carolyn said...

i LOVED that book! LOVED!! OK back to read the rest of the post...