Patterns

Things I have done since last week:
1. Seen patterns everywhere that I'd like to make patchworks from;
2. Revelled in how easy it is to take pictures on my new phone, and how well they turn out;
3. Read numbers 47 (Frankstein) and 48 (Her fearful symmetry) and made a brave start on 49 (War and Peace) so that I can join in with dovegreyreader's Team Tolstoy.

Things I woefully have not done:
1. Got hold of the Booker shortlist, even though it was announced on Tuesday. I haven't even ordered any of them. With each further day that passes, my chances of getting them all read before the announcement diminish some more:
2. Finished my economics project. It's fine, it's fine, I still have a month. It's just less *interesting* than most of my other projects...

You'd think I did nothing but read

Seems that quite often I end up putting off writing an update because I'm behind, or because there's a book I really want to write about but I haven't yet mentioned the one before.
So, to catch up with a list:
42 Work 2: twenty personal accounts (Fraser)
43 Little Women (Louisa May Alcott)
44 What the Dog Saw (Malcolm Gladwell)
45 Testimony (Anita Shreve)
46 The Rings of Saturn (WG Sebald)

I don't want to say much about Testimony mainly because I didn't really enjoy it that much, and that disappointed me because when Shreve is good, she's great. This one, though, while it was very readable, just didn't ring even slightly true. Plenty of bad stuff happened, but there was no sense that these truly were characters who would have behaved that way. Writing by numbers, but slightly misprinted ones.
There's also not much to say about what the dog saw which is probably why I've not said much about it before now - it was probably a month ago that I took this and Testimony out of the library (technically, not a breach of the summer reading project, because I didn't *buy* them). If you liked Blink, you'll like this - it's a collection of previously published journalism about, not sure what to call it, 'interesting stuff'. I read it, thought "ooo" a few times, noted to myself the range of things that I could well be interested in if I only gave time to exploring them, and then took it back to the library. It's not changed my life.

Perhaps you can see I'm building up to something here. I LOVED LOVED LOVED The Rings of Saturn but it's a Sunday morning, I'm not feeling very alert yet, and so I can't quite do it justice. Another post will follow.

(I can tell you in the mean time, though, that Little Women is just as good as it always was, only that every time I read it more of it makes me cry, not just the obviously sad bits but all the bits where they try hard at something and it goes wrong and they learn from it and resolve to be better, nicer people. Sometimes I resolve this as little as three or four times a day.)

test from gmail

just wanted to see if it really is this easy

New starts

More than almost anything, I love the autumn term feeling. Yesterday and today have been just as this time should be: sunny as you like but with a bite in the air in the mornings. It makes me want to rush out and buy a new pencil case, and check my shoes still fit.
Unfortunately, having a grown up job, the new term's only in my head, but you know what? It doesn't matter. I can have a pile of new resolutions, and a clean start, and if I make turkey lasagne once and it's horrible, then I never have to make it again.
(The backlog of un-written-about books is building, and I'll do some catch-up posts soon, but mainly I wanted right now to share my wonderful autumn feeling).

The only cloud is that cat has vanished, only since last night so far too soon to worry about her, but still, I'd like to have her gathered in by dark. Time to go and stand at the back door rattling the biscuits and making kissy noises, I think....

ETA: the cat came back :)

Life and craft

It's been a basically horrible week, with lots of difficult things to process and more adjusting to do than I have easy resource for. So this weekend's been one for recuperation, recharging, and nurturing my sense of perspective, and to help I picked up 41 Beth Gutcheon's Perfect Patchwork Primer. It's apparently a classic in the world of quilting, and tells you all you need to get started (this according to dovegreyreader, who I think used to run a quilting shop, so should probably know). Of course, since it was printed in the early 70s, it's all black and white and a bit light on pictures, not like the sort of how-to manual that you find now, but absolutely compelling in making you want to try it. I have to quote from the introduction:
"People are seeking activities that offer a direct, sinple relaionship between what they put in and what they get out, and are hunting for projects with a definite beginning and a definite ending, since so much of modern life seems merely a holding action - a set of routines which never began and never will end and at bottom don't seem to matter to anybody. In a world screaming from incurable pains and insoluble problems people are seeking problems they can solve, problems which will truly challenge but not defeat them. On every hand one sees evidence of an enormous need to master something...And for any of us, when we want something pure and simple in our lives, the answer is to make things with our hands".
It seems to me that there's a parallel to be drawn between certain kinds of endeavours and certain kinds of crafts. Knitting a pair of socks, quite a lot of it is about grind and persistence, with just a bit in the middle that needs super-concentration - but it's mainly about sustained effort.

Lace knitting, ah, lace knitting, concentration, high likelihood of making mistakes, requirement for resilience and resignation to ripping back again and again because there's no point doing it unless it's perfect, and that will almost certainly mean restarting a number of times (I would love to have illustrated this with a picture of my doily only last weekend, at round 30, something went horribly awry and, not having put any lifelines in, I had to tear it down to nothing).
Perhaps patchwork/quilts are appealing to me just now because what I feel like I need to do is acknowledge that there's so much I'm trying to do, so many different endeavours and interests and types of striving, and that they somehow need to be made to fit together, because they'll be brilliant if they do. I suppose the other side of this is the "scrap" part, though - I'd probably "do better" at any of my interests if I dropped some of them, but I quite like the patchwork effect.

(And do I want to work in an environment where having outside interests is interpreted as not taking your job seriously enough? I do not.)

Finished! Free!

Things I enjoyed about the Brothers Karamazov
1. I liked the bit with the dog
2. At points it reminded me of Crime and Punishment (albeit a sort of low rent version)
3. Lise sort of interested me as a character, and her mother.


Things I didn't enjoy about the Brothers Karamazov
1. At least three times as long as it needed to be
2. Put me in mind of Crime and Punishment often enough to have me continuing to feel frustrated that it was nowhere near as good
3. All the pages and pages going on about god.

Perhaps it's my own fault for having enjoyed C&P too much, so BK was always going to be a disappointment, and I did try, I promise, and I soldiered absolutely all the way through, but now that I know I can do a Russian one so it's not the names that are the problem any more, for me with this one it was just the book that was the problem.
In C&P I believed in the hero, I believed in the way he changed over it and his internal agonisings and his unravelling and so on, and I believed in the tart with a heart, and I believed in the possibility of redemption. With BK I didn't really mind whether he did it or not, I didn't get why anyone would be so bothered about Grushenka, and I wasn't even slightly troubled about whether anyone was redeemed (apart from Kolya).
I think I'm going to refresh myself with a bit of Austen revision before diving into anything Russian again - probably Pride & Prejudice unless I get a better recommendation. But before even that, I think only finishing Little Women is going to work for me.

Books about infants

I don't know, pictures of sunflowers do bring to mind small children - that seems a good enough reason.
(As an aside, my sunflowers have been hugely disappointing, or more accurately dwarfishly disappointing. Only two made it to adult size, and this one was about 18 inches high, with the other not much better. Pretty, but tiny - do you think it's catching?)
So, I've now read all four of John and Elizabeth Newson's books following the progress of children in late seventies Nottingham. To recap, they began with Patterns of infant care in an urban community, went through Four years old in an urban community, and then did parallel studies Seven years old in the home environment and Perspectives on school at seven years old (number 40). The books followed (as far as possible) the same group of children across these stages (the intention was to follow them to adulthood but I can't find any evidence that they got past 7), documenting their parents' approach to child-rearing and trying to describe trends and patterns.
It's perhaps not the type of book that would appeal to everyone - certainly you'd need to be interested in child development, for a start, and in the 7-year-old ones in particular it helps if you're interested in numerical as well as narrative analysis. But I say this to be deliberately balanced: in fact, I can't imagine how anyone could fail to be mesmerised by pages and pages of quotes on attitudes to (say) smacking, bedtimes, freedom, imaginative play - and then how these affect the child's attitudes and behaviour as he becomes older. While there is a certain amount of, not snobbery, but gentle explanation of ways in which one might find the middle classes better, it's definitely not written with an agenda of rich=good or anything close. In fact, after four volumes in which they are scrupulously inconclusive, it's really surprising when at the end of the fourth they become quite definitive. It appears that taking generally accepted measures of "success" for a seven year old (based on things like school tests at the time, which I don't think have much in common with current day SATs) and also teacher descriptions of children's apparent well being and happiness, the piece of parental behaviour that most strongly correlates with the child's "success" is simply, when the child asks a question that the parent doesn't know the answer to, the parent's working with the child to find out the answer, either by looking it up together, or asking a neighbour, or reasoning it out. The authors contrast this with other approaches like "bamboozlement", or changing the subject, or making something up, and look at a pile of other aspects of upbringing, but it's this one that it seems everything's tied to.
I would pay good money to see a comparable set of studies done today (and I wish they'd been able to follow up these particular children for longer). If I ever have children of my own, I will be going back to all of these.