this must be thursday

On this particular Thursday, I want to write about socks, but since I wanted to be able to show you my newly knitted socks when I wrote about socks and DP has borrowed the digital camera it'll have to wait. Perhaps I could bring my socks to work and take their picture here.

Enough, there are more things in life than socks.

There are jumpers and scarves and hats and gloves and mittens and...books!

I'm currently re-reading Pride and Prejudice not only because it's wonderful and makes me smile and because I want to have read the book recently when I go and see the film but because I'm studying it in my Open University course this year. Yay being a part-time student! The new course starts on 1 October and once it gets going, there isn't going to be much time for knitting.

At the moment I'm wondering whether there's going to be enough time for reading. I used to read lots on the way to work, but cycling most of the way to work means I have about 10 minutes of on-the-tube reading time per day. I can stretch that a bit by reading as I walk to the tube station, but the number of days it takes me to read a book is significantly longer than it was in the days when I had 40 minutes of train time per day. But I still read pretty quickly, so I'll just have to get clever at finding times and places to read.

What else have I got to read this year? Great Expectations - I've read this before for GCSE and it took me forever to get through because I got so fed up with Pip. Frankenstein - I finally overcame my fear (it's not really scary, but the cover of the copy I've got put me off) and read this when I was doing my MSc, where we looked at it from the point of view of fears about science and technology. It'll be interesting to look at it from a different perspective. The Color Purple - I remember reading this sometime at school, probably around the time I wrote an essay comparing Meridian, The Mayor of Casterbridge and Gormenghast. A bit of a strange combination, but good fun. It was something about union with nature bringing both freedom and destruction.

Texts new to me are A Doll's House, Fathers and Sons, Top Girls, Henry V, Othello and As You Like it. I'm sure I've seen the latter in some form at some point, but I can't remember anything about it if I have.

It looks like lots of people taking the same course as me are buying their books on Amazon. If you look at the "people who bought this book also bought..." section, the same books keep recurring. It must be quite a puzzling combination if you're not buying for that course.

So there you are: if you ask me what I'm reading over the next few months, it's quite likely the answer will be one of these books.