Heart of my heart

Heart of my heart

Originally uploaded by Persian Fire

Laura has been busy crafting in recent weeks. She has discovered Sublime Stitching and has begun creating some funky designs using their embroidery transfers. Her sets include Vital Organs, Sexy Librarians and Wild West. There’s also a pirate one I’d like her to get but she’s keen on taking the next step and designing her own patterns.

In related craft news her wonderful colourful quilt was on show at the Festival of Quilts last week. It didn’t win anything but one of the judges left her this comment which for me, and I think her, is just as good as a prize: “a quilt made in the true spirit of patchwork”

Ripening tomatoes

Ripening tomatoes (2)

Originally uploaded by Persian Fire

I just went out to feed my tomatoes and was pleased to see that they’re finally starting to ripen. I’ve had fruit for about a month now and they’ve been steadily getting bigger but staying green. This first sight of red is very exciting.

In addition to this my courgette are finally starting to take hold (photos also on Flickr).

It seems the secret to growing your own fruit and veg is patience. A quality I am attempting to learn.

Postmodernism

I’ve never really been able to grasp the concept of postmodernism. I remember a long conversation at book club once where one of our members tried to explain it to the rest of us but despite her efforts I was still none the wiser. Until now.

I am currently reading Land of Lincoln: Adventures in Abe’s America by Andrew Ferguson. In Chapter 5 of this book Ferguson gives an example of postmodernism which to me summed it up perfectly. He is talking about Lincoln collectors and the extremes they will go to for anything remotely connected to Lincoln:

“many catalogs published to advertise the sale of Lincoln items are now themselves collectors items, trading for hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars – which means, in typical postmodern funhouse fashion, we have collectors collecting catalogs of collectibles rather than collectibles themselves, a bit like a gourmet gnawing at the menu instead of the dinner.”

The Dark Knight

I was very excited about this film in the run up to its release. In fact I can’t remember another time I’ve been this excited about the release of a film. I was even more excited to find that some leave I’d booked ages ago happened to coincide exactly with the release date. So I took myself off today to see the very first showing.

When I got to the cinema the doors were yet to open and there was a queue forming. I had imagined it would be busy but I hadn’t even considered there’d be any need for a queue. Well it turned out that the cinema wasn’t that full but I strategically placed myself behind a seat that wasn’t in use to protect my view, just in case.

So really there’s been just one question on everyone’s mind when it comes to this film. And the critics are right, Heath Ledger is bloody good but one man does not make a movie. Christian Bale builds on Batman Begins’ preparation of the Batman character – this film is dark but it isn’t just the villains that make it that way. There’s strong support from some acting legends; Gary Oldman, Morgan Freeman and Michael Caine. Maggie Gyllenhaal replaces the simpering Katie Holmes as Rachel and Aaron Eckhart steals the show as Harvey Dent. But the real credit has to go to Christopher Nolan for putting all the pieces of the puzzle together.

The opening sequence sets the mood of this film well, unfortunately it’s followed by five or ten minutes where chaos seems to reign, at this point I was beginning to wonder if my expectations were about to be crushed. But thankfully from then on it just kept getting better and better. In fact by the end I felt like there wasn’t a single word or shot out of place. What’s even better is that I really felt I got two films for the price of one out of this film. The running time of 150 minutes didn’t matter when every moment was crammed full of action and/or emotion.

In conclusion all I can say is that I simply can’t wait to see it again.

Reading List

Apparently the National Endowment of the Arts estimates that most American adults have read just six of the 100 books on the list below. There’s much speculation in the blogosphere about where this list actually came from as there’s no sign of it on the NEA website or the site for their Big Read project. It looks very much like the Top 100 list on the BBC’s Big Read website to me.

Well, wherever it came from, let’s see how well I do.

Here’s how it works:

• Look at the list and bold those you have read.
• Italicize those you intend to read.
• Underline the books you LOVE.
• Reprint this list on your own blog.

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – A. S. Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

Here are my stats:
Read: 31/100
To read: 9/100
Favourites: 7/100

Notes: a few things occurred to me while I was going through this list. There are a couple of titles I have read and wish I hadn’t (The Da Vinci Code and Five People You Meet In Heaven). There were a few titles which I have tried to read but failed (Catch-22, The Harry Potter series and The Lord of the Rings). And there are two titles which I’m not sure anyone could say they have read from cover to cover (The Bible and the Complete Works of Shakespeare).

Another thing I thought is that there are quite a lot of titles which I probably should have read as a child. However, I wasn’t much of a reader until I reached my late teens, I much preferred story tapes. Therefore there are a few books on this list which I feel like I’ve read but actually haven’t. They are:

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl