MadelineValentine

I have a fluffy Maine Coon-cross cat, Percy (he's a cross-breed, not angry). I love books. A lot of them. And knitting. And day-dreaming about moving back to Japan. I'm also @onigirisuki.

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I FINISHED IT! A-whoop!

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I've been on hiatus from blogging and pretty much everything over the last few weeks since loosing Mum. This is hands down my favourite photo of her - she looks so radiant and happy. Starting to get back to normality, but missing her loads.

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Knitting from a Goliath ball of wool. Percy doesn't even know where to begin with this one...

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I finished this at the weekend. I first read it when I was 14 (14 years ago!!) and loved it. Rereading it was interesting - I wasn't as taken by it as I remember being, though I did realise that there had been layers of the story that I had been too naive to pick up on as a teenager. 

The novel follows the two week holiday of a group of friends, staying in a farmhouse in rural Dordogne. Sabine is a Frenchwoman married to James, a highly strung and pedantic advertising executive; they are accompanied on this sojourn by their two young daughters. Beth, the youngest, is a harmless aside, but Jessie, the elder daughter is plagued by psychological episodes that begin with a zoned-out stare and end in public nudity and self-harm. Holidaying with them are Matt and Chrissie - old friends of James - and Rachel,a young bohemian colleague and erstwhile mistress of James. 

The narrative alternates between three formats: real-time events in the holiday cottage, factual burst of meteorological information concerning storms, and flashbacks to the past of a mysterious, unnamed character who we know to be amongst the 7 people holidaying in the Dordogne. This latter character's story is infused with dark, gothic paradigms, creating a sense that her presence (that's not a spoiler - the narrative tells you it's a female!) is a bad omen, and that her influence on the disturbed young Jessie is inherently malign.

This is a brooding, claustrophobic tale whose progress reflects the changes in pressure and atmosphere as a storm builds, and the unbearable, stifling wait for it to break. An intriguing mystery, it wins a gazillion points for being set in both France and around storms (two things I love), but there was something just a little too slick about this particular writer's style - it just didn't sit well with me.

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An earlier attempt at the owl jumper, this one for my niece. The jumper was a success; the silver hologram nail wraps not so much...

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A hoot of a new jumper for a brand new small - my cousin's baby. I used the Owlet pattern available for purchase on Ravelry. Lovely.

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Turns out Monsieur le Perce is a bookworm too. He happens to have chosen the shelf with the most rare /expensive editions too - Monsieur has taste.

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Finished this read last night - at last! I've started it 3 times now, and despite being an absolute page turner I've always been bamboozled by a whopping great distraction and abandoned it. A dark, gossipy adventure story set in Virginia (and a bit of New York) during the mid 1800s, I felt a bit like I was reading a tabloid in book form. Odd moments of feminist rhetoric pop up, as do laugh out loud moments of the cartoonish, loveable bluster of Ira Warfield. I've been trying to remember which module we were supposed to have studied this for at uni and I think it was Gothic Sensations, or 19th Century Sensations or something of that ilk. Entertaining and sentimental, but also littered with uncomfortable, casual racism very much of it's era - a complete compliment of stereotypes nonetheless! 

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I bought it! I've been after this dreamy cat tee for ages, and have been pretty much living in it lately.

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Ticklish Perce.

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Stealthy Monsieur Le Perce.

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I like to call this one "cat on rugs".

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I'm making a jumper from milk! Well, 70%cotton, 30%milk protein. Here's my attempt at the jumper pattern I posted earlier-the back is taking an age. This photo makes it look more blue than lilac. Yarn is Rowan Milk Cotton Dk in shade 88.

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Current knitting project. I have to do this on a different room from the cat though, as he just can't resist getting tangled in the wool. Scamp.

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Lacy kitten silhouette. #knitting #devonrex #cat #juleprex (Taken with instagram)

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Cat AND knitting?! All this shot needs is Benedict Cumberbatch.

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Dear whoever invented purling:

x Bear

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This is one of the (hundreds) of books gathering dust on my shelves, having been accumulated without consideration or particular interest, just cuz I have Book Compulsion. I took it with me for the journey to my parents' house, thinking that with nothing else to read I might as well have a stab at it. 24 hours later and I'd devoured the whole thing - I put it down to sleep and shower, that's about it. I'd always assumed that Grisham wrote murder mysteries - I'm not sure why - and despite reading the blurb on the back, it was only once I reached the 200th-ish page I realised there weren't going to be any bloody mysteries. Fine.

So, it's a story about a fledging lawyer, who spends the first half of the book wading through personal disaster upon disaster, and the second half of the book flipping the bird at the whole mess and scoring a marvellous victory or two. It was the right combination of technical (in terms of explaining legal terms/practices) to give credibility and substance to the story, mixed with various human-interest stories that kept the pages turning and emotions running high. I won't run out and buy another Grisham, but this certainly made a refreshing change.