mousme | There. Now you have a sock.

My sock knitting lesson continues. I've finished the ribbing on my first sock and just started the first row of knitting, so I have a ways to go yet before I get to turn my first heel, but if I apply myself I might be able to get to it tomorrow night. My coworker and I have two more night shifts together after tonight, so I want to try to finish this sock by Saturday morning, so that I will have at least a sock to show for our efforts this week. Of course, if work gets very busy that may not happen, but you never know.

I should figure out if I can load photos from my phone to LJ somehow. It doesn't have an app that I know of, and that's how I've become accustomed to handling pictures these days. I think it's probably still easy enough to upload photos to my LJ albums, so I'll do that for now.

Huh. I appear to be unable to resize the images the way I used to in the past. That's frustrating. Well, I have put the beginnings of the sock behind a cut so it doesn't overwhelm people's pages.

I am going to keep going in a minute once I've finished writing this post. I've been knitting while ploughing my way through the Wuthering Heights audiobook. The version I'm listening to is narrated by Jane Froggatt, best known (I think) for playing Anna Bates on Downton Abbey. I must confess now to never having watched Downton Abbey, although I suppose I will get around to it eventually. I thought for years that I had read Wuthering Heights as a teenager, but it turns out that I read the other Brontë sisters and never Emily. I was passingly familiar with the story just because people around me talked about it so much, and it also turns out that I had some pretty serious misconceptions about the plot. I somehow imagined that Heathcliff's love for Catherine was unrequited, and didn't know at all that half the story is actually about the generation of children that came after them. Oops?

Anyway, I am not really enjoying this book. Almost everyone is cruel, selfish, capricious, or some combination thereof. As my friend Autumn put it to me very aptly, it's a fascinating study about how cruel people treat each other, and about how they breed cruelty in their children. Inhumanity begets inhumanity, or as the modern saying goes: "Hurt people hurt people."

The reading by Jane Froggatt is going a long way to making the listen more enjoyable, in spite of my lack of sympathy for the characters (with the occasional exception of Nellie, although I find myself losing patience with her a lot of the time as well). I didn't know that the book was set in Yorkshire, and her voice acting has breathed life into the dialogue that I think I likely wouldn't have appreciated if I'd just read the text on the page. Her ability to switch fluidly from one accent to another is really impressive, too.

I'm looking forward to being done, and to move onto a hopefully more enjoyable book. I am also going to try to read/listen to more "classic" literature this year. I have some significant gaps in my classical education. I will also be on the lookout for great books from more diverse authors, and hopefully broaden my horizons. My friend Sarah, in the wake of the Neil Gaiman debacle, commented that she'd stopped reading books by white cishet male authors a long time ago for precisely that sort of reason (not that she had a crystal ball about Gaiman, it was just on general principle).

I think my next one will be a regular murder mystery type, hopefully a fun easy read with nothing too dark and horrible. The previous book I read wasn't super dark, but it dealt with a lot of rape/sexual assault, and I could do with some lighter fare as a palate cleanser. I have about 30 minutes left on Wuthering Heights, so I shall get back to it now and hopefully progress on my sock.