Below are the top 106 books tagged “unread” in Librarything.

The rules:
Bold what you have read, italicize books you’ve started but couldn’t finish, and strike through books you hated. Add an asterisk* to those you’ve read more than once. Underline those on your tbr list.

Jonathan Strange & M. Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One hundred years of solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi: a novel
The Name of the Rose*
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice*
Jane Eyre *
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveller’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
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales*
The Historian*
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
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
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
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The Aeneid
Watership Down*
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood
White teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

I really can’t stand Dickens…..

My sewing machine has been languishing since I took up knitting. Until today, I didn’t have a blog category for sewing.  Which is a shame because I’ve been sewing since I was about 6, and I learned how to use my grandmother’s knee-pedal Singer when I was about 9. I made patchwork pillows, doll dresses, and hemmed my own pants. In college I started doing costuming for theatre, and learned how to fix draperies. College is also when I got my current machine, a 30+ year old steel Kenmore beast.  It’s a fabulous  machine, and it works like a charm. A few years ago I got a new Pfaff, but that was a POS compared to my 70s era Kenmore and quickly unloaded the Pfaff on Craigslist. Anyway, the Kenmore has seen me through so many projects: a black and red ankle length chongsam, a number of tops, skirts, and upholstery projects in grad school, costumes for  productions of Hamlet and Rosencrantz & Guildernstern are Dead.  I made a number of Halloween costumes and hemmed so many pairs of Regular and Tall pants, added so many darts to make things fit without butt-gap.  I started and stopped a quilt top, too. Then I learned knitting.

Knitting is portable, where as sewing requires the use of the kitchen table, an ironing board, and tons and tons  of room. Space that I can leave set up for more than a few hours at a time.  Space where my roommates, their SOs, various houseguests, etc won’t mind. Yeah, right.

My roommates are away this week–all 4 of them. Once my vacation started, I took out the sewing machine and started working.  When I went to Webs with Ariel, Alexis, and Monkee, I dragged them to Valley Fabric. I knew that I wanted to sew again. I founds so many great things in that store, including some hand-marbled fat quarters, and a book on pattern drafting skirts (Sew What! Skirts: 16 Simple Styles You Can Make with Fabulous Fabrics) written by the store’s owner. I bought it right away, and it’s a great book. I was able to follow the directions and draft my own pattern and make the skirt I had in mind.

I wanted some more skirts for dancing. I wanted them to be simple, A-line, and cotton, so that I could wash them easily. I had found a pattern at Sew-Fisticated Discount Fabrics (New Look 6494) for an elastic waist A-line skirt and PJ bottoms. I modified the pattern, made it a draw-string, cut it on the bias, and used fabric I found on clearance at Fabric Place, and made this:

I like the madras plaid,  and it will make a great dance skirt. Someone said that there should be more tartans at class. I know it’s not a tartan, unless it’s of Clan MacPreppy, but it’s at least plaid.  I’d definitely been bitten by the sewing bug.

Anyway, at Sew Fisticated, I found this amazing quilting cotton:

I wanted an ankle-length A-line skirt, so I used my new favorite book (Sew What! Skirts) and drafted my own pattern. I made a few mods to the pattern after I drafted this one, namely I went from a waistband to a facing, and added 4 darts, but here’s the basic pattern I made up, taking up my entire kitchen table:

It only took a few hours to sew, and that includes sewing in the zipper. I’m really happy with the skirt. I can’t wait to wear it.

Yeah, I know, long time no post. It’s because my job is great, and I don’t have time to blog.  But I do have time to knit.

I’ve been working on this shawl for a while. It’s part of a knit-along the Fiber Cult girls are doing, except I’m the only one doing the Koigu Lace Shawl. Everyone else is doing Charlotte’s Web.

Yarn used: STR lightweight in Rhode Island Red and CTH Supersock Potluck in Earth. One skein of each.

I love how the two colors of yarn blended so well together. I used about 95% of the STR and about 90% of the CTH.

Blocked, this shawl is huge! It’s not nearly as heavy and thick as I wanted it to be. I was hoping for something thick and comforting, that I could wear while lounging on the couch, or reading in bed. A knitted version of the shawl/blanket/wrap things my aunt bought in Mexico. Instead, I got a substantial piece of lace.

Amanda made this for me in our Secret Spook exchange. I’ve worn it to work twice this week: once as a scarf, once as a headband. Both times I received lots of compliments. Thanks, Amanda

Random wool I got with my new wheel this summer.

I haven’t knit on Emerald since last Sunday, but in between cleaning and laundry today I worked on the body until the start of the raglan shaping and  started the first sleeve. No photos today, though. That would be just too much.

I’ve also been wasting a lot of time on this.

I feel like I’ve had a bad hangover these past few months.  I’ve done too much kntting in such a short amount of time that just the thought of knitting recently has been off-putting, like the thought of drinking the next day with a bad hangover. Add to that the plantar fasciitis in both my feet has just made spinning painful. Looking at my stash….well…I didn’t do too much of that.

I’ve been knitting on things for other people, like my Knittyboard Sock Swap Socks, and these socks for my friend’s fiancee. In addition to my fiber hangover, I think I have sock overload.  My lace projects were too intricate to be portable, and I wasn’t excited by them.

And I’ve been busy with my new job, which is just awesome.

I really needed something to make me want to knit. It had to be portable, not too difficult, and not socks.  Yesterday,when my roommates had taken over the living room to watch 15 straight hours of college football, I cast on for Emerald from the Winter 06 Knitty. I’m using the Jamieson’s Chunky that I got for $1/ball at the Woolcott summer sale in 2006. A sweater’s worth of yarn for $21– how could I pass it up? It’s sat in my stash for a while, but once I saw Emerald I knew I wanted to use that yarn for that sweater. It just took me a while to cast on. Anyway, within the past 24 hours I’ve knit 13 inches on the sweater.

I’m using 6mm/US10 needles, and it’s such a change from my usual 2mm circs. The needles are as big as my fingers.  The yarn is 100% Shetland wool, and aside from two knots in two different skeins, I haven’t run in to any problems. The sweater will be wonderfully thick and warm once it’s done.

I think the novelty of the sweater, and the size of the needles and the yarn is keeping me interested. It’s also not socks.

I got my invite on Thursday- I’m bryghtrose over there.

I promise a knitting content post this weekend.

Look over there– I’m not here. Really.

I just started a new job, after leaving the sucky job.

The sucky job sucked all my energy and creativity. The new job is super-cool, it’s so perfect for me, and it’s totally absorbing me, in a good way. I have had so little time to myself, though. I just want to sleep.  New job gave me a laptop, though, so I can post while vegging out watching CSI re-runs.

Combining two months and hazy memories leads to short reviews. Mostly just impressions.

The Wood Wife by Terri Windling
Art, poetry and mythology meet in this Southwestern mythic fiction.

The Hidden Queen & Changer of Days by Alma Alexander
Decent, unmemorable fantasy.

Kushiel’s Justice by Jacqueline Carey
It was more contrived than any of her other books, and it felt like the middle book in a trilogy–something that needed to be said and done before moving on to anything interesting.

Krakatoa by Simon Winchester
My coworker N. recommended this to me. I love Winchester’s work in general. In  Krakatoa he explores not only the day of the eruption, but the geology and ecology of Indonesia, vulcanology, and Islam. Fascinating read.

Austenland by Shannon Hale
Much better than I thought it would be. It’s chick lit, and the ending is predictable, but there are enough twists and surprises to keep it from falling flat.

Three Bags Full: A Sheep Detective Story by Leonie Swann
When their shepherd is murdered, the cleverest flock of sheep in Ireland attempt to solve the mystery. Such a fun read. In the American hardback edition, there is a flip illustration of a sheep jumping on the lower right corner of  the odd numbered pages.

Borderland: Where Magic Meets Rock & Roll by Terri Windling, Mark Alan Arnold
I’ve been wanting to read this anthology forever, and thanks to Paperbackswap.com I finally have a copy. Four excellent short stories set in a shared fantasy world that is on the border between our world and Elfland.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling
The first 300 pages were tough to slog through. There was a lot less angst and whining than in books 5 & 6. All in all, it was a good book. I just have two complaints: the epilogue and the need to introduce some new magical something every 25 pages.

Movies
Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End
I was less-than-impressed. It was over the top, overdone, overcostumed. The scene with 5,000 + Jack Sparrows reminded me of Being John Malkovich.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
This movie was well-done. They edited out all the whining and focused on the salient plot points, and produced a very enjoyable, watchable film. Excellent casting, as usual.