FO Friday: Socks! Socks! Socks!

Pattern: Basic Sock Recipe
Yarn: Trekking XXL, color 801
Needle: US #1 and #2
Finished Size:  Fitted to my tiny feet!

WiP Wednesday: Socks, again!

I am thisclose to being finished with my overly cheerful socks, and have accordingly started a new pair. I'm using the exact same pattern as before. The yarn is Online Supersocke 100 Butterfly-Color in 1152.

Book Review: Cannery Row by John Steinbeck

Since I'm still doing a lot of driving these days between attending two schools, working, and volunteering, I've gotten back into audiobooks. It's nice to feel like I'm reading again, even though it takes me a lot longer to get through books that way. Currently, I am listening to David Sedaris' When You are Engulfed in Flames, but I finished Steinbeck's Cannery Row last week.

Believe it or not, this is the first Steinbeck novel I've ever read. I know reading Of Mice and Men or The Grapes of Wrath is a high school rite of passage for many, but for whatever reason, my tenth grade English teacher decided that the Honors section would read The Great Gatsby instead. Since I didn't take a lot of American literature courses in college, I never had the opportunity to read Steinbeck in a formal setting. I stumbled across Cannery Row in the audiobooks section a few weeks ago, and decided to give it a try when I saw that the recording was only around six hours long. 

Overall, I really liked it. The voice acting was very good (this is a critical thing: I have abandoned several audiobooks over that) and fun to listen to. The story wasn't half-bad, either. While I'm not generally a fan of Depression-era literature, Cannery Row was funny, interesting, and gritty, all without being plagued by the preachiness common to literature of that time. Steinbeck deftly creates a world and populates it with all kinds of unique characters, each of whom has his own clear voice. I'll probably read more of his work in the future.

5 out of 5 stars.

Saturday Hexapuffs

In an effort to blog a little more, I'm going to devote Saturdays to an ongoing knitting project of mine: the beekeeper's quilt. It's a good project for me, as most of the things I knit are made out of sock yarn, and I never seem to use 100% of the skein. This is especially true when I make socks. I have very small feet, after all. Since I've been knitting for five years now, I've accumulated a pretty impressive quantity of sock yarn leftovers. I'm looking forward to using them all up and getting them out of the stash box(es).

I bought the pattern back in August, but between starting grad school, learning Spanish, and the breakup from hell, I haven't had a lot of time to work on it. So far, I have completed eight hexapuffs, but, as you can see, I have enough yarn for many more.

Book Review: A Mercy by Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison is one of my all-time favorite authors, so much so that I wrote my undergraduate thesis on her novels. A Mercy is her most recent work, and while I enjoyed it immensely and highly recommend it, I'm not sure what to say about it. Even though I finished it over a week ago, I'm still processing it. This is unusual for me, but for the time being, I'll roll with it.

5 out of 5 stars.