The only thing such doubters really need, that believers have, is a sense that people like themselves have always been around, that they are part of a grand history.

In Doubt: A History, Jennifer Michael Hecht sets out to provide just such a historical context for religious doubters of all stripes. She seeks to trace an unbroken line of free thought from its earliest stirrings to today, to illuminate patterns in disbelief. There is a tendency to think of doubters as a monolithic block: that there are a million ways to believe, but only one way to disbelieve. Hecht, however, teases out a wide variety of doubt from 2600 years of human thought. She’s ecumenical in her collection of doubters: mingled with the obvious agnostics and atheists, she highlights many interesting moments of questioning and doubt from believers. And she questions the utility of labels like these I’ve just used:

I think politics drives a lot of clinging to the three terms, but I also think it is easier to force yourself to be clear if you avoid using ‘believer’, ‘agnostic’, and ‘atheist’ and just try to say what you think about what we are and what’s out there.

A nice picture, isn’t it? Everyone going about, granting and granted plenty of time to delineate their nuanced thoughts about the universe and our role in it; for that matter, a society that encourages people to have such complex thoughts? If I could find out where that happens, I’d live there. Or at least join their forums.

It was heartening to learn the depth of the history of non-believing thought; atheism is in no way a modern development. The only golden ages of universal faith believers can look back on are periods of brutal suppression of dissent. There have always been doubters; they haven’t always been allowed to express their thoughts, or even been left alive to think them. It was also demoralizing to realize the same arguments pro and con have been going on for millennia; though there is some progress over time, (e.g., the burning of heretics being substantially less common today than it has been in prior centuries), there’s very little evolution of ideas after a certain point. It seems the various strands of thought have been refined to their most essential points, and now we cycle through them in an ongoing tug-of-war to win the most adherents. Thesis, antithesis, and synthesis are lost to shouting matches and robotic iteration of well-worn points. Can there be nothing new under the sun? Are there any new thoughts to think? Is there a way to break the cycle of library building and burning?

Although it’s a relatively breezy and high-level survey of the topic, Doubt is a good deal more dense than my customary reading. It was dismaying how much work it took to keep my attention on it; I’ve let my reading muscles go slack, I’m afraid. I did pick up speed (and interest) as we entered the 19th and 20th centuries and covered less dry philosophy and more fruitful literary and scientific inquiry. And, significantly, women finally joined the story in a major way (not to discount martyred Hypatia, whose murder in 415 C.E. signals the fall of Alexandria as a cultural center and the onset of the Dark Ages, and her few ancient sisters in free-thinking.)

In my copy of Doubt, the latter chapters are thick with flags to remind me of quotes I wanted to capture, topics I want to delve into further, and people whose biographies I want to seek out. So many interesting and witty characters, from the Salons of Paris, through the suffragette and abolitionist movements, and on to the arts and sciences of today. This is the best thing I got from reading the book: myriad leads for further illuminating reading.

Springy greetings from the Pacific Northwest! I used to hate this short little month so much, until I moved to a place where February is when the first flowers bloom. Now, I’m quite fond of it. The daffodils in the neighbors’ yard look ready to pop any day now, and our irises are racing them. If the promised sun and 55 degrees develop this afternoon, we’ll probably go out and start prepping our little garden for the coming season.

We happened to be shopping on the southeast side of town on Saturday, mostly for a craft supplies run to Jo-Ann’s, because I’ve decided to learn cross-stitch and ‘needed’ a ‘few’ things–like PILES more embroidery floss. I don’t know why I thought I would hate cross-stitch: it’s very soothing to the OCD part of my brain, as all the little x’s line up, row after row. I don’t have enough done on my first project to make it worth showing, but I’ll post pictures after I’ve made more progress. Anyway, being on that side of town, we stopped at a grocery store that carries a lot of imported items, and look what I found in the tea aisle:

I didn’t think you could find Ahmad No.1 anymore–they changed the name a while ago, and I never remember what it’s called now (English Afternoon, maybe?) Or perhaps they didn’t change the name in Russia–because when I turned the box over, it was all in Cyrillic (and I tried, but couldn’t get a decent shot of that for you.) (Because now that Missing Sync puts my cell phone photos straight into iPhoto, I’m too lazy to get out the real camera and go through all that rigmarole.) Too bad it’s in bags, instead of loose leaf, but it’s Ahmad No.1: I’m not going to complain.

On to reading matters: we knew I couldn’t sustain that heady book-a-week pace forever, but it was fun while it lasted. I’m now mired in Doubt, and reading at more of a book-a-month pace. But I am reading–and taking notes! See?

To ensure I finish by the end of the month, I’ve also had to do this:

That’s the rest of the book divided into convenient 20-page-per-day portions. Just to be sure I’m staying on pace, you understand, and not because I’m having any trouble making myself read the book. It’s not as juicy as the books I read just before it, but it’s nowhere near as dry as you’d expect of a historical survey of religious and philosophical dissenters. It’s very much the reading equivalent of eating your vegetables, but I like vegetables, so that’s okay. I just have to think of it as broccoli, not spinach.

Mmm, broccoli…maybe we’ll have better luck with it in the garden this year.

Zenia is a ravishingly beautiful woman with a gift for telling just the right lie to get her victims to open their doors, hearts, and lives to her. She mimics and mirrors her prey, flattering them while playing off their deepest fears and pain, ingratiating herself so thoroughly that they never see the knife coming. Zenia is well away with her prize (money and menfolk, generally) before the victim notices the protruding stiletto. Some, indeed, never recognize it for what it is, but go on believing Zenia’s lies, to their doom.

The title is a play on the Brothers Grimm tale ‘The Robber Bridegroom’, and the book is constructed like a fairy tale: three ’sisters’ undergo the trial of the Ogress, which increases in pain and difficulty with each iteration. Tony, the first to confront Zenia (and therefore the youngest), suffers a broken husband, but one that remains with her. Charis, who might have learned from Tony’s experience, had they been closer at the time, suffers a disappeared mate, fate unknown. Roz, who by the time she tangles with Zenia should have plenty of reason to know better, enters the challenge willingly, and suffers commensurately for her hubris.

The book reads like a gossipy, juicy piece of chick lit about women banding together in the face of perfidious men and traitorous frenemies, but it is still an Atwood: these characters and their interactions are more than they appear on the surface. Is Zenia the unstoppable man-eater of our heroines’ imaginations, or is she something much more complex, perhaps a fairy godmother in malevolent disguise? Her actions, for all the hurt and disruption they cause, rid the three friends of faithless, feckless men and encourage their bonds of sister-friendship. The end of the book leaves the interpretation up to the reader, but makes it pretty clear that something more (or possibly less?) was going on than the three friends perceived.

The structure of the book itself is mirrored, giving the reader the sense of descending into the underworld with the heroine and re-ascending with whatever trophies and scars she might bear. We enter through Tony’s perspective in Onset, proceed with the trio through The Toxique, into the three central tales of each woman’s encounter with Zenia, out through The Toxique once more, and end with our guide Tony, in Outcome. Have we progressed directly through the tale in an orderly manner? Have we gotten turned around somewhere in the middle and come out the way we came in? Are we back where we started, or does this exit just look like that entrance?

You can read the book at face value and enjoy a quick, engaging story about women you feel you could actually know. (The detailed, convincing characterization of the central trio is one of the book’s great strengths.) But I recommend reading it with an eye to the underlying mythology–I think you’ll find it rewarding.

A strange sequence of events one summer day in 1950 shocks Flavia out of her potion-concocting and sister-tormenting, and sets her on a new path: detecting. First, the family cook discovers a dead bird on the kitchen doorstep; one look at the postage stamp curiously impaled on its beak sends Flavia’s normally imperturbable father reeling. That night, Flavia overhears her father in heated conversation with a stranger, who attempts to extort money in exchange for his silence about a murder that her father, shockingly, admits to. Then, at dawn the next day, Flavia discovers this same stranger breathing his last in Buckshaw’s back garden.

That final breath (” ‘Vale,’ it said.”) will be a critical clue to solving a whole patchwork of mysteries, ancient and modern. Along the way, Flavia (and we) will learn much about philately, Victorian assassination plots, village politics, and the dangers of life at elite British boys’ schools–and we, at least, will love every minute of it. Poor Flavia has rather a rougher time of it: the run-ins with police, the skulking about and trespassing, the imprison–ah, but no, I can say no more! You must pick it up and explore its delights for yourself.

When I was about two-thirds of the way through the book, I started hoping that this was the first in a series of novels. Flavia is such an interesting character, in a rich background, with so many tantalizing threads lying about with their ends just dangling: I had to hope Bradley harbored long-range plans for our brilliant little miss. Imagine my delight, then, to read this bit in the About the Author section: “In 2007, Bradley won the Debut Dagger Award of the Crimewriter’s Association for The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, the first book in a new series featuring the brilliant young British sleuth Flavia de Luce.” Cheers, Alan Bradley; I shall enjoy following Flavia’s every investigation, whether into the poisonous potential of an English country garden, or the murderous impulses of English country folk. And thanks very much to Carl V. for the recommendation of this delightful novel!

I have much to be grateful to Rachel for; she’s brought many wonderful things into my life, and “swimmies” is way up high on the list. I have always loved to swim, so when she asked me last August if I might be interested in checking out the aqua aerobics classes at our local community center, I accepted immediately. The thing is, it’s just not something I ever would have gone to check out by myself; the buddy system is very important when you’re going back into a locker room for the first time since…huh…since whenever it was you last went to a gym….sometime in the 90s, maybe?

Anyway, we went, and we loved it. I bought two new, high-quality swimsuits that same week, confident that the expense would be justified by the amount of time I would be spending in the pool. Plus, my ratty old Wal-Mart tank was a serious passive barrier to participation: it was ugly, unflattering, and uncomfortable. Not wanting to wear it could (would!) discourage me from going to class. Conversely, having a suit that fit well AND made me feel pretty would encourage me all the more.

Flash forward six months and what do we find? Kari and Rachel, hitting the pool twice a week, most weeks. This, despite the fact our local pool closed for two weeks of refurbishment just when we started classes: no problem, we went to another community center a little further away until ours re-opened. Just after that, I came down with H1N1, which kept me out of the pool for about a month–two weeks to prevent spreading contagion, and two more getting over the cough. Still, the minute I felt well enough, I was back in the pool, exercising my way back to normal lung capacity. And never mind the constant wet towels and suits hanging in the bathroom, the lingering chlorine smell, the need for stronger moisturizers, the newly brittle hair, which is also showing off all its gray strands to sparkling effect, thanks to the chlorine. All worth it, for the pleasure of swimmies.

The thing about swimming, unlike any other exercise program I’ve ever tried, is that I will work to overcome my own excuses not to do it. Its emotional and social rewards are sufficient motivation to keep me at it; the physical rewards are a nice bonus, but not the goal. And THAT, as people tried to tell me innumerable times over the years, is the secret to staying active: find something you love to do, and it will be easy to stick to.

So many thanks to Rachel, for the initial impulse, and for being my partner on the trek. I owe you big, whirly girl!

I’ve added a new page to track all my reading in 2010–see the “2010 Reading List” at the top. The last thing on the list will generally be what I’m currently reading. There’s also a page to track my progress in the various reading challenges I’m working on.

I’ve finished the first book of the year! Xenogenesis was a very interesting book, with some challenging ideas about interpersonal (and interspecies) relationships; it will deserve a post or two of its own, but they’re not going to come easily, and therefore, not soon. But trust that the ideas are bubbling away, deep down.

In a perfect bit of timing, the day after I finished that book, the library notified me they finally had a copy of Alan Bradley’s The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie on hold for me. I waited on the reserve list for about five months for this book, so I’m really hoping it lives up to Carl V.’s high opinion of it. (With an 11-year-old mad genius for a sleuth, how could it not?)

Happy reading!

The blogger in front of her To Be Read pile.

If my life has a lodestar, it’s books. They have been my constant companion for as long as I can remember, and the only topic of sufficient interest and variety I could devote a blog to. Other hobbies flourish and fade, and even they are a vehicle for more books in my life: captivated by volcanoes? Read a book (or six!) Learning to knit? There’s all kinds of interesting books for that! Contemplating skepticism, Buddhism, Wicca? Books, books, and more books! Sad, lonely, bored or bereft? Books to comfort, sustain, and entertain! Confused and ignorant? Boy, do you need some books!

Reading a book is about half the fun; discussing the book with others, exploring its meanings and themes, debating over differing interpretations, and letting the experiences of others enrich your understanding is the other, oh, 80%. The bookish life was once quite a solitary pursuit, but no longer–at least, not if you don’t want it to be. I’ve belonged to various real-life book clubs over the years, but they invariably fizzled out due to splintering interests, physical distances, and/or personality clashes. Lately, though, I’ve been drawn into a wider web of book blogs, and found them expanding my reading horizons and reigniting my passion for blogging what I read. It’s not as sociable as gathering the club to discuss this month’s selection over hors d’oeuvres, but it’s also not as problematic. There’s no scheduling problem–you join in the conversation whenever you can. You can participate only when the book is interesting to you and disregard uninteresting titles. If personality conflicts emerge, you can simply move on to another blog without a big “I’m quitting bookclub!” drama.

One of the ideas I have found really valuable is the Reading Challenge: organizing your reading around a theme for a defined period of time. There’s so much I want to read out there, that it gets a little daunting–call it the tyranny of choice. Putting a bit of structure around my reading is an idea that works for me rather like picking out an outfit for work the night before does: it eliminates the 5 or 10 (or 20!) minutes spent staring blankly at the closet without the first idea of what to wear. As Ken will tell you, I do a lot of sitting and staring at my bookshelves, wondering what to read next. Not this year! This year, I have taken on specific challenges that I hope will automate the selection process and motivate me to get some books read!

First challenge: the 2010 Chunkster Challenge. It looks like I’m going for the Mor-book-ly Obese level, with six 450+ page books picked out:
Xenogenesis, Octavia Butler (already underway)
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, Susanna Clarke
Clementine Churchill: the Biography of a Marriage, Mary Soames
Doubt: A History, Jennifer Michael Hecht
The Ozark Trilogy, Suzette Haden Elgin
The Eagle and the Raven, Pauline Gedge

As these are all part of my existing collection, they will do double duty and get me well on my way in challenge 2: Attacking the TBR Tome. I went through my shelves yesterday and pulled out 20 books that I’ve been “meaning to read” for ages, and put them all together on one shelf. I won’t list them all here, but it’s a nice mix of genres and lengths, so that whatever mood I find myself in, I should be able to pull something from that shelf to satisfy it. An additional level of challenge I’m setting for myself: once I’ve read them, I will put them into circulation via Bookmooch, unless they’re truly exceptional, and I know I’ll want to re-read them.

Challenge the Third: Science Book Challenge 2010. This is really a gimme, as I have piles of science books I’ve been meaning to read, and have salted the TBR shelf with them. Hey, no-one said we couldn’t make our challenge books do double duty–or even triple, like Doubt: A History, which rings all three challenge chimes. (Moving that one right up the priority list, I am.)

And of course, I need to get the bulk of this reading done by September, because I am definitely participating in Readers Imbibing Peril again, assuming Carl runs it this year.

One final challenge to myself for 2010: to talk about every book I read here on Bookish Dark. Even if it’s off track; even if it’s just for fun (and a little embarrassing); even if it doesn’t deserve a full review. If it’s part of my reading life, it deserves at least a mention. I’m working on making my bookshelves a more accurate representation of my reading habits, and I would like this blog to be, too. Let’s not call it a resolution, as we all know those tend to fail by February; and let’s not say I have good intentions, as we know where those lead. Let’s just jump right in and make 2010 the most Bookish year yet!

An excellent premise, carried out reasonably well by TV-adaptation standards, although I always felt that the source novels were probably much deeper, perhaps darker, and almost certainly more textured. Imagine my disappointment, then, when I finally read the first novel, and found the TV series had done it quite a bit of justice. It’s a serviceable genre novel, but it felt like reading a script for the TV show. Forum discussions among fans who read the novel first led me to think there was a lot left out–primarily Tony, one of Henry’s regular donors. The level of outrage at Tony’s absence from the TV show made me think the Tony/Henry scenes must be pretty hot. Instead, they were kinda not: as, in mostly occurring offstage and leaving it to the readers’ imagination. Maybe if I’d gone into it expecting a Young Adult novel, rather than the Canadian Anne Rice, it wouldn’t have been such a letdown. As it was, I found I was mostly continuing to read it to compare the book to my memories of the TV show.

Oh, the plot? Well, there’s a dork who’s learned how to call up a demon, whom he uses to get ‘gear’ to make him ‘cooler’–and then later, to take revenge on all who have ever ‘wronged’ him (by laughing at him, or by refusing to go out with him, or by simply failing to recognize his inherent superiority). What the dork doesn’t realize is, the demon has plans of its own, related to loosing the greater demon it really serves upon the human world.

Blood Trail–Tanya Huff
Why, after my experience with Blood Price, would I launch into a second Tanya Huff book? Well, it was conveniently at hand, I wanted to be sure to get at least four RIP novels done, and I still really wanted to like this series–I like both Vicki Nelson and Henry Fitzroy quite a lot as characters. (In the books, Henry writes romances, not graphic novels, and does it under the name ‘Elizabeth Fitzroy’–a jab at his half-sister, whom he considers as much a bastard as he.) Plus, I figured I could always put it down, if it was really dull. I used to feel obligated to finish the books I started; I felt like a bad reader if I didn’t. As I’ve aged, though, I’ve gotten over that: time is too precious, and there are too many excellent books to be read, to waste even an hour on a book I don’t like. About 100 pages in, Blood Trail was looking like the latest in a pile of books deemed not worth the time. A funny thing happened, though, on the way to abandoning it: I found I couldn’t put it down.

One of things I like about these books is that Tanya Huff introduces us to her villains early on and lets us spend some time getting to know them. Vicki and Henry may be running around in the dark, but we know who the miscreants are, and what they’re up to. It helps to ratchet up tension in some places–when we see the investigators miss the significance of a clue they don’t know they’ve found, for instance–and in this case, it kept me reading all the way to the end, because the evildoers were such self-righteous pricks, I couldn’t wait to see exactly how they’d get their comeuppance.

A family of peaceable, sheep-ranching werewolves (“¦yes”¦) are being picked off by someone who has discovered their secret and, apparently, takes exception to having werewolves in the neighborhood. They can’t go to the police, because the murderer has been careful to only shoot them in their “dog” form. Anyway, they don’t want the killer arrested and jailed–they want to deal with the problem the pack way. So they ask their old friend Henry Fitzroy to help them figure out who’s committing the murders, and Henry brings Vicki Nelson along–both for her investigative skills, and because he knows she can be trusted with the weres’ secret. The explorations of pack life and the difficulties of being a werewolf clan trying to get along in the modern world were interesting, but as I said, I was in it for blood. Of which: not nearly enough, at the end. People really could have been rent limb from limb much more than they were, to please me.

Sharp Teeth–Toby Barlow
Now this was a satisfying, disturbing, creepy, funny, and above all, bloody werewolf novel. My goodness, what a fantastic reading experience! Do not let the next thing I say put you off the book: it’s written in verse. No, come back here! Listen, after a couple of pages, you’re so deep into the story that you stop noticing the poetry. It’s blank verse, so it’s not all rhymey and precious and annoying, like the file full of junior high poetry I–er, some people–have stuffed in the back of their drawers. No, this is vital stuff, pulsing with life and lust and anger. The book practically throbs with primal urges.

There are (at least) two werewolf packs in Los Angeles, struggling for territorial dominance. One pack is headed by Lark, a very smart werewolf/businessman with big plans for his pack, but he is betrayed and overthrown by a lieutenant before he can put the plan into motion. He escapes, and finds a clever hiding place while he considers his options. His thuggish, but not stupid, successor is left to contemplate the pieces of the plan and make of it what he will.

Against these machinations, we have lone-wolf Anthony, just trying to get by in life, and working as a dog-catcher–a job that suddenly has a shockingly high mortality rate. Anthony is in the wrong place at the right time, and is unwittingly drawn into local pack politics. He also falls for a mysterious woman who we know as the female of Lark’s destroyed pack. (Two things: in this book, packs only ever have one female in them–they expand the pack by means of a ‘blood brother’ ceremony, not reproduction. Two: this was my biggest problem with the story: on the one hand, we’ve got weres with a sense of smell so acute, they know when a cop is staking them out from blocks away. On the other hand, you’ve got two weres living together, and neither ever realizes the other IS a werewolf. Uh…huh?)

How the dog shelters figure into the plan, and what it all has to do with an Odd Couple-ish pair of tournament bridge players and a Mexican drug gang, are mysteries best solved by reading the book yourself. There’s some artful misdirection that keeps a major piece of the puzzle hidden in plain sight right up to the moment the author chooses to reveal it–very nice!–and a few glosses over plot holes and contrivances that I was happy to forgive . This was a thrilling read: very much the high point of my first RIP Challenge.

White is for Witching–Helen Oyeyemi
Miranda Silver, the protagonist of this strange, chilly novel, is a 17-year-old girl stricken with the family curse of pica, which is a compulsion to eat non-food items like dirt, plastic, and (Miranda’s favorite) chalk. Miranda has just returned home from a lengthy institutionalization for a break-down brought on by her mother’s death a year earlier. But pica isn’t the only curse haunting the Silver women, and returning to the family home means returning to the influences that precipitated Miranda’s crisis. Miri has little will to resist the ghosts of Silver House, and is soon back to her unhealthy habits. Her father and twin brother are frightened for her, but make only ineffectual efforts at halting her decline.

The story is told from multiple viewpoints, including that of the house itself, and the reliability of all of them is cast into doubt. Our most reliable narrator is Ore, a girl Miri meets at school and starts a complicated affair with. Ore has ghosts of her own, and they have well prepared for her entanglement with Miri. Ore knows perfectly well how to deal with a devouring female spirit; the question is, will she be able to save Miri, along with herself?

The book is indirect and ambiguous; much is hinted at, gestured toward, and elided; little is explained. The reader feels herself, like Miri, surrounded by swooping shadows and half-seen horrors, with the picture never quite coming clear enough to make out the truth of the situation. There are brief flashes of light, but what they reveal is even stranger than what we were imagining was out there. Perfectly sane-seeming witnesses proffer impossible, unimaginable testimony, and we are left to wonder what, if anything, is real.

The ending left me a bit flat; I thought we were leading up to a rather different conclusion. (Although, it’s less a conclusion than a turning of the wheel to begin a new cycle of obsession and compulsion.) But there was so much wonder and terror, such beauty and repulsion, on the way there that I didn’t mind making the journey.

Let the Right One In–John Ajvide Lindqvist
Twelve-year-old Oskar is a deeply troubled child: he’s bullied at school, he has a pants-wetting problem, he shoplifts, and he keeps a scrapbook of news stories about murders–the better to fantasize about revenge on his tormentors. Eli is a girl who moves in next door, and they quickly become friends. Although Oskar notices several odd things about Eli–he never sees her going to school, and only sees her at night; she’s unaffected by the cold of a Stockholm winter; she’s even more socially inept than Oskar himself–he doesn’t realize quite how unusual Eli really is. Not, at least, until he begins to suspect that she may be connected to the gruesome serial killings he’s been following so avidly in the papers.

I’d been looking forward to reading Let the Right One In since I watched the movie adaptation. It’s one of the best vampire movies I’ve ever seen, atmospheric and unnerving, keeping most of the horror just out of frame, and trusting in the viewer’s intelligence. It does a beautiful job conveying the bleak emptiness of Oskar’s life, and makes us sympathetic to Eli without glamorizing her. She may be the monster terrorizing the city, but she’s kinder to Oskar than his bullying classmates, and more responsive to his needs than his distracted mother. Everyone is damaged in some way; everyone struggles with dependence on others for things they may not willingly give: love, respect, kindness, blood. Is Eli really so different, so much more terrible, than her ‘innocent’ victims?

Given how good the movie was, I expected great things from the book–and was surprised to find it didn’t improve on the movie at all. It was a good book, an enjoyable read, but it never once chilled me the way the movie did. It did offer more depth on Eli’s background, which was interesting, and lengthy diversions into the subplots of secondary characters, which were not. Lindqvist did the screenplay adaptation, and perhaps he should consider working in the format more often: its constraints seem to help him refine and focus on his themes. The book really didn’t add anything critical to my understanding of the story, and the movie was far more engaging emotionally. By all means, experience both if you can and wish to; but if you have to choose, see the movie, definitely.

The Mad Monster Party Purse is complete, finally! I found the pattern and fabulous fabrics while visiting Ramona in June. Creston, IA, is graced with a wonderful fabric store, Quilts and Other Notions; it’s packed to the rafters with gorgeous materials in all colors and for all seasons. It wasn’t easy limiting myself to buying fabric for just this one project; if it weren’t for suitcase space restrictions, I might have come out of there with bolts of stuff.

Put together one novice seamstress (“Uh…where does the thread go, again?”) and one experienced seamster who prefers to work off-pattern, and have them whip up a handbag. Sure, no problem! She can read the instructions, he can interpret what she says into something actually possible. She can do the cutting, pinning, and straight seams; he can step in on the trickier parts. And that’s pretty much how it went, if you sprinkle in multiple pin pricks, a few seams ripped out and re-done, two snapped needles, many bent pins, lots of salty language, and several turnings inside-and-out of the entire project.

Not all the accidents were unhappy ones; the fabric at one end matched up to form a lively tête-à-tête:

This useful little pocket wasn’t in the pattern–Ken suggested it, and it turned out great:

All told, a day’s work well spent. I love my little work of art, and it’s only appropriate a Halloween handbag should be thoroughly cursed, right?

(Ophelia's Going Mad Again, by Jennifer Gordon, altered with permission by Carl V.)

My reading habits follow seasonal trends: in the heat of summer, I want to read lightweight chick lit or popcorn mysteries. I save more serious works for deep winter, when it’s easy to curl up in a warm sweater and read for hours on end. And when the leaves start turning and the days noticeably shorten, I crave the supernatural: vampires, witches, ghosts and werewolves–and all the other creatures of the night. So imagine my delight when I discovered the blog of another seasonally-affected reader, who is hosting his fourth annual Readers Imbibing Peril Challenge. The idea, simply, is to read fiction in the autumnal categories: mystery, horror, supernatural, gothic, thrillers, etc., and to share your reading with other participants–either through commenting at his blog or posting links to entries on your own. This is my favorite kind of competition: the kind where I was gonna do it anyway, so why not join in the fun?

I’m undertaking Peril the First: to read four books in various scary genres by October 31st. I’ll likely add in a smattering of Short Story Peril, as well: ’tis the season for ghost stories, after all! Here’s my pool of books under consideration:

Blood Price, Tanya Huff (already completed)
Blood Trail, Tanya Huff
Sharp Teeth, Toby Barlow (on order at the library, on CountessZ’s recommendation)
The Turn of the Screw, Henry James
The Historian, Elizabeth Kostova

The Historian is on the list through pure wishful thinking; I do want to re-read it soon, but I don’t know about getting it done (along with at least two other novels) by Oct. 31st. It’s not a book I want to rush, even the second time through.

Short story candidates include H.P. Lovecraft, Neil Gaiman, Shirley Jackson, and Angela Carter. Oh, and probably some Tanith Lee, because it’s been years since I read her, and I recall really enjoying her stories.

So that’s vampires, werewolves, ghosts, and unspeakable ancient horrors covered: other suggestions, anyone? Got a good witch book or story to recommend? Want to play along? We can all get good and creeped out together: after all, the dark is less scary when you have a hand to hold!