the plan for today

This past week has not been a good one for any kind of sewing.  Except a little secret sewing.  Which of course, I cannot prove here.

(It wasn't much anyways.)

This week has seen the near completion of Christmas shopping, which is good.

I still have to bind the littlest quilt and put labels on them both.  That is on the agenda for today.

Unless the hubby takes a nap, then I might read.  At least while he is sleeping.

I did finish two books in the last week, though!

I need to learn to expect less from books with stickers on them proclaiming them to have won awards.  It seems more often than not, they are wordy and pretentious and not all that fun to read.  (I have no idea what the criteria for any of these awards are, but I want to be entertained.)

So this book centers a lot around a brain malfunction called Capgras Syndrome, where a person cannot recognize loved ones.  Or maybe just one or two of them.  Here it's induced by a horrific car crash and the sister and dog are the ones not recognized.

Slow paced, to the point where I wondered if I could just skip whole pages, it takes a long time to develop characters (some of which I wonder why they were there at the end of the book), watch them stumble around for a LONG time and eventually resolve the malady, or at least truly treat it.  (yep, a little spoiler there)

The "echo makers" are sandhill cranes and I believe it was a Native American story that gave them that name, though I can't remember and I'm not going back to look for it.  Their presence and the environmental changes impacting their lives was part of the book, but it was like a whole different story going on.

Can you tell I didn't care much for the book?

I kept reading because I'm stubborn and because I thought maybe the story might redeem itself.  I learned a little, so I guess there's that.

They can't all be winners in my book, even if they have gold stickers on their covers proclaiming them to be just such.

Second up was a quick read, though a lot of pages!

Though I didn't realize it until I pulled it out to read, this one is geared towards "middle grade" kids.  (Just like A Wrinkle in Time.)  But I'll give it a chance - the blurb on the back sounds good...

It was good!

As with the other book geared towards kids, though, I sometimes felt like the author was talking down to me.  It wasn't often and maybe that's just how kids books are written? (I don't remember this as a kid, but my perception was different then!)

It's a story of four children who are selected through a questionable set of exams to save the world from an evil genius.  The kids are all exceptionally smart and have skills that come in handy throughout the novel in their quest.  

I enjoyed the book and it was a quick read, though I was bothered at the end by the fact that all the "good" people were smart and patient and kind and all the "bad" people were mean and dumb (except the evil genius, of course, but he also had some blind spots).  While that made for a good narrative, it's not at all how the real world works.  I guess if you're trying to escape the real world by reading (yep, that's me!), that's okay but I also feel like if you're writing for kids, you might have a little obligation to teach that not all nice people are good and not all mean people are bad.  (But if that's my biggest complaint, we're okay!)

I've started the next book already and it's another that I'm not sure how it ended up in my stash.  But so far it's interesting and a whole other world from what I know, so a good one to expand my knowledge.  I expect to have it read by the time I'm back here next week - hopefully with finished quilts to talk about, though maybe not quite yet share?

Happy quilting!

Katie

(an old photo, but seasonably appropriate!)