the Village Knittiot

Backpack
I don’t often carry a purse. I opt instead to lug my utilitarian backpack with me wherever I go. It is hard to fit several notebooks, books, pens and various other implements that I might need at any given moment into a purse, while a backpack easily houses two notebooks, several pens, knitting implements, sometimes my laptop and so forth.

Bad Dreams
I still remember vividly the bad dreams I had as an extremely young child. One from when I was about three years old involved a giant estate sale inside a castle, which was actually a fire station near my house on the outside. A skeleton in a trench coat and fidora cackled from a balcony and swung down on a rope. It was very frightening. I remember looking through bins of silverware. There was another one from when I was about five in which our apartment building was on fire, but my mother insisted on cleaning the house before we left the building, which was odd, because she was a terrible cleaner. In a way it made sense because her timing has always struck me as the best example of insane logic - she always has reasons, they are just very odd.

Bear, Pooh (also: Best Friend; Bears, Literary; Bears, Stuffed )
Pooh Bear, in addition to being a childhood literary hero, is what I often call my best friend. Her name is actually Hiroe, and my world is an infinitely better place because more than a dozen years ago she decided to travel halfway around the globe and go to school in the Midwestern United States. Christopher Robin — which for much of my life I was convinced would have been my name had I been a boy, though my mother is not that literary and not that fond of non-biblical names, so I probably would have been named something like Isaac or Ezekial — anyway, Pooh is no good without Christopher Robin, and vice versa. Thus, Pooh Bear.

Book Meme
A long, long, long time ago, Lee Ann taged me with a book meme, and though I am not fond of the meme, I accepted because her entry was lovely and interesting. This will not be lovely or interesting, but most certainly wandery in its attempt to answer some of the questions. Oh and possibly incoherent and most certainly incomplete…

1.) How many books are in your house?
Not enough. Also, lots. The last time Mr. Knittiot and I moved we talked about entering all of our books into a database of sorts, cataloging them by genre, with title, author, ISBN, publisher and various other bits of information (Obsessive? Anal? Us? Why do you ask?). But after giving it some thought, we felt that might be a bit much and, frankly, I just wanted my books out of boxes and on my shelves so I could breathe again. Had we done the whole cataloging thing, I could tell you an exact number, but as we haven’t, I’m gonna go with lots. Here’s a picture of some of our book shelves and a few boxes of books that are still packed:

2. What was the last book you bought?
As a gal on a tight budget thanks to unemployment of spouse and the generally brilliant econmic “plan” of the Bush regime, I am going to modify this to say, “What was the last book you got out of the library?” (which is where most of my books are obtained these days).

The Way of the Peaceful Warrior by Dan Millman. This book is often lumped in with new-agey self-help psycho-babble books of the 80s (kind of a forerunner to the genre really), but I found it to have more substance and quite a lot of useful information. Sometimes the messages we need are obvious and sometimes you have to dig a little. This book manages to walk a fine line between the obvious and the hidden. I emerged at the end with a renewed zeal for putting together some of the less than desirable elements of my life. The writing is plain (and therefore accessible) and tinged with a 60s sort of optimism that those of us on the other side of the 80s may have a hard time feeling. But ultimately, we have a desire to be happy and this book talks a lot about how to find it in lasting doses and as a way of life.

3.)What was the last book you read?
Well, I just finished a very fun comic book collection called Bone. I also recently read The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver which immersed me so thoroughly in Africa that I haven’t yet emerged and I think may account for my present difficulty in getting into the Canadian landscape of The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood, which I am making my way through at the moment. I also am slowly looking through Stephen King’s book On Writing, which has some surprisingly useful nuggets as well as an interesting glimpse into his life. It was recommended by several friends who are writers and I sort of put in on the back burner with no real intention of reading it until Mr. Knittiot brought it home from the library. Someone at work mentioned that he thought Stephen King was a hack. I think that is an unfair statement. He’s a genre writer who has never pretended to be anything else. And as such, he has some interesting things to say about the craft.

4.) Name 5 books that you often reread or that mean a lot to you…
There is no way I can pare this list down to five. So I’ll just do what I can and accept the fact that there will be things that I have forgotten to add or mention.

Pretty much anything by Roald Dahl (especially The BFG and Danny the Champion of the World)
The horrifically dated Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle books, because they can send me instantly into fits of laughter like nothing else
Any and all of the Winnie-the-Pooh books
Emily Dickinson’s poetry and T.S. Eliot and W.H. Auden
The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro
Beyond the Writer’s Workshop by Carol Bly

As for other fiction, I’ve enjoyed many of Margaret Atwood’s writings (especially The Robber Bride and Handmaid’s Tale), John Irving wrote three good books and several really mediocre ones and I sort of can’t forgive him for what he did to Cider House Rules when he turned it into one of the shittiest movies I have ever seen in my life and for which I have also never forgiven Toby McGuire and Charlize Theron and therefore hate them with a passion. Am I the only person in this country who is sick of watching Toby McGuire cry? I think I am. I have loved everything I have ever read by Murakami. I like Banana Yoshimoto. And Shusaku Endo is just utterly amazing (I am incredibly fond of Japanese literature). I stuck with Dickens through David Copperfield and I’m so glad that I did. Cancer Ward by Solzhenitsyn was my favorite of his writings so far. Anne Ursu wrote a book called Spilling Clarence that I thought was just remarkable. Seriously, there are just too many and I am leaving out way too much, but if I don’t stop here, this post will get ungodly long.

Oh, and I love, love, love anything by Annie Dillard (especially Pilgrim at Tinker Creek)

5.) Who will you pass this on to?
Nobody.

Bowling
My grandfather loved to bowl, and I loved my grandfather. Before he died (I was only 5 at the time) he used to take me with him to the Aqua Bowl where he would hang out with his old cronies. The only thing I remember is sitting in a boothe in the little cafeteria and him teaching me how to blow the wrapper off the end of a straw. Up until that point it was a complete mystery to me how people did that. Who knew that all you need to do was tear the end off the wrapper? Ah, the mysteries of the Universe revealed.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 17th, 2005 at 5:49 am and is filed under this Random Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.