The orange cowl is still in progress, but I just couldn’t post a picture of it the sixth week in a row. Last Friday I bought yarn to make a sweater vest for my dad. He requested light blue, and he showed me a sweater and asked for a blue that was lighter than that sweater, and the blue on the sweater is pretty darn light. It took me a while to find a lighter blue. As it stands, this yarn looks blue only in direct sunlight. Otherwise it looks gray. Technically I think it’s the color that the Crayola 64-pack used to call ‘periwinkle’ (and perhaps still does). Anyway, my dad approves of the color and so far the vest is moving along well.

I am back to my old ways of reading lots of books at once. I thought of trying to gather up all the books I am technically ‘reading,’ piling them up, and balancing my knitting on top. Maybe I’ll try that next week. The book in this photo is Margaret Drabble’s The Witch of Exmoor, which so far is kind of mysterious and intriguing. It’s about three adult siblings and their spouses, all trying to deal with the fact that their mother, a famous feminist writer, appears to be going insane. Drabble’s novels always seem to be about fussy, fastidious characters that get all snippy when one little thing is off kilter in their lives. I find this quality annoying, although I still keep on reading Drabble’s novels. In this novel, this kind of behavior seems to be mostly packed into the crazy mother, so the fussiness isn’t coming from the narrative voice, which helps. The narrative voice in this novel is funky – omniscient, but also kind of opinionated. It seems to be coming from a specific semi-involved consciousness – it actually reminds me of the “first-person omniscient” POV in & Sons – but as far as I can tell it’s not attached to a particular character. Still, I’m enjoying this novel (and am also enjoying all the other novels I’m reading. Sigh).

Yarn Along is hosted by Ginny on her blog, Small Things.