My Classics List, a work in progress

A couple of days ago, I decided to accept the challenge of reading 50 "classics" in five years.  The first step is to make up a reading list, which I have been working on.  I found several lists online and started to note which ones I haven't read or want to re-read.  Since I will be exploring "classics," I want to make sure I include a variety of genres, fiction and nonfiction, and non-western literature.  It's fun to think about what a classic truly is, also.  Right now I'm reading Prague Winter, a new book about the history of the Czech Republic by Madeleine Albright.  A departure for me, it's really interesting.

So far, my classic list looks like this:

1.      I Promessi Sposi

2.  The Grapes of Wrath – Steinbeck

3.  Of Mice and Men – Steinbeck

4.  Slaughterhouse Five – Vonnegut

5.  Things Fall Apart – Achebe

6.  Madame Bovary – Flaubert

7.  The House of Mirth – Wharton

8.  If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler – Calvino

9.  Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl – Jacobs

10.  The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas – Stein

11.  Animal Farm – Orwell (reread)

12.  A Midwife’s Tale – Ulrich

13.  Pygmalion – Shaw (reread)

14.  Our Town – Wilder (reread)

15.  Complete poems – Dickinson (reread)

16.  Complete poems – Frost (reread)

17.  The Heart is a Lonely Hunter – McCullers

18.  Howards End – Forster

19.  Native Son – Wright (reread)

20.  Pilgrim at Tinker Creek – Dillard

21.  The Rest is Noise – Ross

22.  A Prayer for Owen Meany – Irving

23.  The Handmaid’s Tale – Atwood (reread)

24.  David Copperfield – Dickens (reread)

25.  The Assault – Mulisch

26.  Autobiography of a Javanese Princess – Cartini

27.  The Wind-up Bird Chronicles – Murakami

28.  The Education of Henry Adams – Adams

29.  The Book of Abigail and John – Addams

30.  The Strange Career of Jim Crow – Woodworth

31.  Mornings on Horseback – McCullough

32.  The Making of the Atomic Bomb – Rhodes

33.  Silent Spring – Carson

34.  The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat – Sacks

35.  Ceremony - Silko

If you have a recommendation, please don't hesitate to comment!

Bindings

Whenever I can this week, I've been hand stitching bindings from fronts to back.  First finished was a Stack and Whack "leftovers" quilt, using the triangles at the beginnings and ends of the rows I cut my Lemoyne Star pieces from.  It's about 36" square.  Next was the "ocean" throw, using batiks my mom gave me for Christmas.  I used orphan blocks in pink and brown on the back, and Lisa quilted it in waves and swirls.  I finished sewing down the binding this afternoon.

I pushed ahead and sewed a label on the Christmas Stars quilt I made with swap blocks.  Lisa quilted leaves and berries throughout, and it looks lovely.   I started on the binding and will probably be working on it for a few days because the quilt is a "generous throw" size.   I'm expecting my brother and his daughters tomorrow, so my sewing/guest room has been vaccuumed and cleaned up a bit.  So has the banjo repair area (a/k/a the guest bed) in the basement.  Paul seemed surprised that he filled up a whole trash bag in the process, but of course I wasn't.  :-)

State Quilt Guild meeting

Saturday I won the mother lode of fabric pieces in an auction at the Green Mountain Quilters Guild spring meeting here in Barre.  I have been washing and folding like crazy but haven't reached the end yet.  Chris asked me to make some curtains for his apartment, and I offered up the kelly green fabric with black tractors (with John Deere trademark on the selvage).  I was going to put it on the "free" table at guild, but he said that would be fine.  Green is his favorite color, and I can probably add a little black to tone it down. 

I had been worried about the meeting arrangements since it was the first time we've held it at our Knights of Columbus Hall.  But everything went fairly well.  People pitched in to move furniture as needed, and although we couldn't hang show and tell quilts from the ceilings as we can at Whitcomb High School, people were good sports about holding them up and carrying them around the room while we voted.

The main speaker, Joanne, told about how she became entranced with crop circles during a trip to England several years ago.  She showed slides of several of these phenomena and then also showed some quilts that she made based on them.  They are amazing!  You can read about Joanne's talk at Sonja Hakala's blog - there are some great photos there, too.  She sticks to greens and grain colors since those are the colors of the crop circles.  I don't think I could do that, though, since I love color far too much to restrict my pallette. 

All in all, it was a good day, and about half of the people said it was a good location.  So we booked the hall again for the November meeting.  :-)

The Classics Club

I just heard about the Classics Club in which people promise to read and blog about 50 classics from a list they devise themselves within five years.  I signed up for the group on Goodreads even though I haven't yet created my list of 50 classics.  I always have a hard time picking classics, even though years ago I wrote two bibliographies for Vermont librarians on this very topic.  This point in my life is a good opportunity to read some books I have never read and always thought I should, and also to re-read some old favorites.

One of the resources for building the list of 50 books is a website called 100 Essential Reads for the Lifelong Learner, organized by broad topics and including history and biography along with fiction.  I really should read more nonfiction and hope this activity leads me to do so.  Another resource is called The Well-educated Mind which has some more unusual titles on it.  I'm making a note of these lists here so I don't lose the links.

I think my personal list will be a mix from a number of resources and, probably, my own mental "wish I had read that" list.  For example, a priest who used to read widely and came to the library frequently always recommended I Promesi Sposi.  It's been on my "list" for nearly 40 years!  I have never read Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, nor have I read The Grapes of Wrath.  Both seem appropriate for a lifetime reading list.  When the list's ready, I'll publish it here.

A fabric diet

Phew!  I bought some fabric for the back of my red and white quilt the other day, and it cost nearly $100.   I love it, though, and hope I'll have some left over to add to the row-robin I hope to put together later in the summer.  I have a Joann's coupon that I plan to use this week on batting so I'll start quilting the red and white flimsey soon.  I will also have to get some white thread.

Meanwhile, I've decided to go on a few months' fabric diet.  My Calico County guild is planning a trip to Keepsake in NH for June, and I may bow out.  A Quilter's Garden offers a discount half a person's age during the five days before and after one's birthday, so I'm going to wait until the end of July for a big shopping spree at 32% off.  Until then, I'll shop my stash for the scrappy quilt I'm making for a friend and to finish that row-robin and the square-robin that's been going around to guild members.   I'll need to keep an eye on the Joann's coupons for batting since I have come to the end of the useable big pieces in my closet that I can piece together.  Of course, I am always telling myself to start making smaller quilts but that doesn't seem to happen!

Block Lotto

I signed up for a block lottery recently.  This is the first 12" block in the set, which features black, white, and brights.   Each month, someone in the group wins the whole bunch, and we mail our block(s) to her.  We can make up to four, but this month, I only made one in the prescribed royal blue and another in red to go along with the black, red, and white rows I received from guild members.  I am hoping to use the rows as borders for a medallion.  Obviously, I'm not in a hurry to finish this one because I have lots of other projects going on at the same time.

I am pleased that I finished three quilts in the last month - the guild raffle quilt, a baby string quilt for Paul's niece Meg's new baby, and the guild mystery quilt.  Hope I can keep this pace up because I have just too many UFOs for comfort!  Next up:  the red and white quilt in three sections.  I'm planning to wash the backing early this week.

Flimsey Friday

I've been machine quilting that "flimsey" (the guild mystery quilt top pictured in my last post) all week, not just today.  After stitching in the ditch around all the center blocks, I worked on the borders for a couple of days.  Now I'm back working on a grid in the center.  It's tiring because each line of stitching is fairly long and requires a bit of measuring before I lay the painter's tape down.  It doesn't always stick, so I pin it, too.  But it's coming along, slowly but surely.  Yesterday, a friend from guild called to commiserate about the mystery quilt.  I told her it took me about a week to put the borders on, and that seemed to make her feel better because it had taken her that long, too.  It's always nice to have a friend to whine with!

Since I have to take regular breaks from machine quilting, I went to the garden center and planted some perennials in the new flower bed in the front yard.  It's very shady, so I got two kinds of hosta and an astilbe.  Someone in the garden group gave me a wild geranium which I hope lives in the deep shade.  After the daffodils finish blooming, I'll put in some impatiens for a load of color under our living room windows.  The crabapple tree out front is blooming and the guys just cut the grass, so it looks really nice outside.  And it's going to be a sunny weekend!