What I'm Reading Now

no, this has nothing to do with knitting. Maybe I should rename my blog...

Currently in the midst of the Daughter of the Empire series by, darn, I don't remember who. Read two of his other main series', and thought they were good. Nice, solid, 'I want my cliches and I want them now' sorts of books. Lots of heroes acting heroic y'know. And he writes a darn good tactical siege. But anyway. M proclaims this particular one is one of his favorites. So far, I'm not seeing it. I'm getting a lot of thematic elements I like and could possibly reuse elsewhere, but the rest is kinda 'meh' They're intrigue style books, lots of plotting. I don't think plotting is his particular strength. It's not *bad* but it's not really enough to hand the whole book on. The individual bits are ok, if a little simplistic, but they're very discrete, which takes away from things. Some tangleage could do some good here.

In completely different genres, I finished AspectJ in Action by Ramnivas - ah, someone. (not good on the names today). and man, that thing was thorough.
Normally I read a code book, and it tends to ramble off into directions that I don't really understand at times, and I'll read a paragraph multiple times to get the point. Or they're overly simplistic, with huge sections on 'this is a variable' or some drivel like that. Most often a combination thereof - lots of useless basic information coupled with a few dense paragraphs of 'huh?'.
This, no, this beats it into you. In a good way. Very thorough, repeats the important bits often enough to reinforce them, not often enough to make your eyes glaze. I did end up skipping sections, but it was mostly implementation details I knew I could look up if/when I actually, you know, implemented it. Big fan of, the 'cookbook style' practical applications, an approach I hadn't seen in other books, again, very useful and thorough at the same time.
Only complaint is the book spends a lot of space convincing the reader that the subject matter is worth considering. When, I'd assume, If you've bothered to acquire and read a book on it, you're already past that threshold.

Jane Eyre

Apparently there's a Jane Eyre miniseries coming out a la Pride & Prejudice? I've no idea when this might be airing, and it's quite likely we don't get the channel anyway, but it makes me think. Particularly, this entry made me think. I generally agree with her commentary, but not completely. In my eyes, Jane Eyre is largely a useless book, except for as a set up for Wuthering Heights. While I haven't read extensively in this era, it's my understanding from High School literature classes that Jane Eyre was the archetype of a genre I like to refer to as 'English Heroines Lost on the Moor' there are a couple others of that vein I've read, and even P&P shares some common ground. But I ramble. The gist of the genre is that all grouchy rich men exist solely to reform and marry poor English heroines and make them rich and happy beyond their dreams.
Heathcliff turns this all on its head. Wuthering Heights without the context of Jane Eyre is just sort of morbid and depressing. With it, it's delicious, because to the bitter end there will be some people who just expect him to be Rochester.

I've started my Forest-Pathing. I kinda dig the seed stitch. This may be because I cut the obscenely large border down to two stitches. I think the seed stitch looks very neat and textured in the triangles, but the whole big border was overwhelming. I'm also knitting the border along with the rest, since there was no way in heck I was going to go back and pick up a two stitch border back and forth along the entire edge. For now that seems like this will work fine. Is there something I'm not thinking of which will bite me in the butt later? I also made it narrower by about half. (I'm doing 2-3 squares across, as opposed to, if memory serves, 4-5) I'm a little concerned that this will be too narrow, and I should have done 3-4. I'll make a call at some point. There is also a plan to attach an as-yet-undetermined edging after I finish.

I really, really meant to take pictures of last night's progress, but when I actually got in the vicinity of the yarn, I couldn't bear to not just work on it. So, I'll try harder tonight.