Some thoughts while listening to Lucia di Lammermoor

Yesterday I stayed home and listened to the Met broadcast of Lucia di Lammermoor, the opera by Donizetti. It is a ridiculous story, loosely based on Sir Walter Scott’s  The Bride of Lammermoor, but it i was just the right thing for my last free day of Spring Break.

It was just the right thing to do. It gave me an excuse to stay home and begin working on the sweater I will knit for the Oregon Basset Hound Games this summer. I had this idea of putting a basset front view on the front of the sweater and a rear view on the back of the sweater. I discovered a tool that will convert pictures to knitting (and cross stitch) graphics called the KnitPro Chart generator. I played around with that for a bit, while Lucia and Edgardo pledged their undying love for each other.

While Lucia’s brother, Enrico plotted to wed her to Arturo, I got out the yarn and cast on. As I knit, I wondered, what Sir Walter Scott would have thought of this adaptation. That got me thinking about my all time favorite book: Les Miserables. I have never seen the play or the movie. I don’t plan on doing so either. I love the book too much to see it turned into something I might not like. Everyone thinks Les Miserables  is about the love story, but it isn’t. It is about forgiveness and repentance. Maybe that is in the play and movie, but I doubt it so I’m steering clear. I wondered what Victor Hugo would think about the play and movies. How knows, maybe he’d have loved them and I am just being a stick in the mud.

By the time of Lucia’s mad scene, I was madly knitting the ribbing. I may even have shed a few tears as the opera came to its terrible sad ending. But I was ready to begin the color portion of the sweater and the initial rows require a bit more concentration, to get things centered and set up.

I knit into the afternoon and have left things at a place where I can manage it once I go back to school and have less time to knit and read. Good thing the sweater doesn’t have to be finished until July!

2015 Hub Reading Challenge Check-In #7

It was a light week for the Hub reading Challenge, mostly because I finished 4 books for the Morris award. But I can’t tell you about those.

The only book I actually finished was The Young Elites  by Marie Lu. The first in a fantasy series.

I have to be honest, if I weren’t reading it for the Challenge, I probably would have abandoned it. Lu has certainly created a rich fantasy world, and yet, it smacks a lot of the dystopian world she created in The Legend  series, which I liked more, though I didn’t love it.

Both series have a disease. Both are narrated in alternating voices. Both have a characters on both sides of power and one of these characters goes over to the other side.

As much as I love things foreign and exotic, the names in this book drove me crazy. It is as though Lu sat down and asked her self, “What are the most pretentious sounding names I can think of for the characters in my new book?”

I’m reading All the Light We Cannot See now, a much better book. But more n that next Sunday.