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I have to admit, the reason I was first drawn to this book was the edition. It is a regular paperback, except the edges of the pages are blackened. Thinking it was a horror book I just briefly looked at the text on the back. It said something about living forever and middle ages and I figured I’d pick this one up one day. I found it cheap at Waterstones in London on a trip there, so I thought, what the heck, let me get it, and I am glad I did.

The premis of the book is the I-character, a man who was involved in a one-sided car crash and was burnt terribly. The book starts with his accident and his time in the burn ward of the hospital. Soon he starts getting visits from a mysterious woman, Marianne Engel, he has never met before, but who claims to have known him 700 years earlier in medieval Germany. He figures she’s crazy (schizophrenic or manic, he doesn’t know yet), but because it is something that keeps his mind of the burns, he indulges her.

The story moves from the day to day realities of healing from burns to the stories that Marianne tells him. The story is crazy to believe, but is written really well. It involves Japanese, Italian, English and Icelandic legends (which are not authentic I think) and a detailed description of medieval Germany. It also involves a lot of ideas of Dante’s Inferno.

I loved the book and it’s ideas. I think that Davidson is a great storyteller, and I look forward to any other books he may write (this is his first!).

LibraryThing link

I am really pleased with my progress this week. I was motivated from my page finish of last week. By using my new technique (follow a color for a long time, preferably at least half the page) and filling in I finished the top half of the tree on my second page (page 4). The needle organizer helped a lot too, especially with confetti. I think I spent the evenings during the week laying out the base of the tree (the dark parts) and the weekend filling it in with confetti. I try to work on the colors that occur the most so I have a good base for the confetti.

I worked 28.5 hours this week, for a total of 162.5 hours. I’ve set myself the ambitious goal of finishing page 4 in three weeks. This will make my projected total project time go down a considerable lot (from 12.5 years to about 6 years) which makes it a more realistic prospect that I will ever finish this monsterous thing. :D

In a funny post on Always Watching about how Kung Fu Panda is really just a remake of Star Wars somebody pointed in the comments to a book by Joseph Campbell called The Hero With A Thousand Faces. In this book he lays out the theory that in essence all myths are really different versions of the same story. George Lucas has said that he used this book in writing the Star Wars films, and after reading the book it becomes clear very quickly that he wasn’t the only one.

The basic theory is this: There is a monomyth, a base for all myths. Campbell spends a lot of time explaining the reasons behind this from a philosophical and psychological approach. For modern man, who seems to be ‘too civilized’ for myth, he pulls examples from dreams. He is a student of Jung, and this is evident in the book, much is based on theories by Freud and Jung.

Even though the book is sometimes a bit hard to read (it is from 1948, and they had a different view of popular science back then ;)) it is a good read. It shows that myths are much the same across the world, even in regions that have developed wholy separate from everybody else, like the aboriginals from Australia. The reasons Campbell describes are a bit far out to me. Campbell almost describes a world view that can be described on religions. He himself says that buddhism comes the closest to teaching the theory of the monomyth.

Religion and theory aside, it is a good read and the more you read, the more you see that current day hit movies and books are based, conciously or subconsiously on the same base story. I even had to look up if The Lord of Rings was written before or after publication of this book, the story follows the monomyth pretty closely. Apparently we subconsiously relate to and like stories that follow that pattern.

Anyway, the book is a good read and it opens your eyes to the how and why of storytelling, even though the philosophy, psychology and religion might not be your cup of tea.

LibraryThing link

Permin of Copenhagen has been in business since 1854 and are a Danish company. They sell a lot of designs as kits, but the designs that I love by Permin are their samplers. All the samplers they sell are reproductions of historical samplers in museum collections. The Vierlande sampler I bought a few weeks ago is by Permin, and is based on a sampler from 1826. The samplers they reproduce come from The Netherlands, Germany, Denmark and other places. In Europe they are sold as kits with fabric and threads that match the originals (current) colors as good as possible. This makes for a great and classic end product. In the US I believe the patterns are sold as charts, but with a good example picture matching up the colors shouldn’t be too difficult. Also, when shopping around online, I found their prices for kits are not too bad. I have several of their samplers on my wishlist, including the one pictured in this post.

After my stitches were removed last monday I started stitching again. It is still a bit sore, but I’ll manage.

I stitched for 23,5 hours this week, for a total 134 hours. And the best thing? I finished my first full page! To finish that one page (page 3 of the chart) took me 128.5 hours in 8 working weeks (I started on December 6th, so it took me a little over three months real time). This page contained a little over 7300 stitches, and 54 blends of color. I think the rest of it will go faster, because I have started to stitch larger areas at once so I am not slowed down so much by confetti.

The green on the lower right is the beginning of the first tree, and I am really pleased with how beautiful the colors are turning out. Because the original is so large, a lot of detail (for example in the rabbit or the flowers) is lost, and in the tree it returns because of its large size. I can’t wait to finish the tree :D.

Besides stitching larger areas, I have also started using a Pako Needle Organizer to help me. This is a place to keep threaded needles. It originally holds 50 colors, so I bought 50 extra needles (I use Permin Gold 26 cross stitch needles without a point). I have more than 50 blends already though, so now I have two colors in each square, one in the upper right, the other in the lower left. It save me a lot of time I spent on threading and rethreading the needle, especially in the case of confetti where sometimes a color is used for only one cross…

After reading great reviews/stories about Neal Stephenson’s latest book, Anathem, I really wanted to read it. On a recent trip to London I picked the 950 page book up for a reasonable price, and I saved it for when I would have my wrist surgery, because I would have plenty of time to get lost in the story.

The story takes place on a planet called Arbe, where society is roughly split up into two factions, one is a non-technical monastic culture that is based on science (math and physics mostly), the other is a ‘modern’, ‘regular’ culture with technology and faith in (a) god. The monactic culture (living in concents, whose monks are called avout) is split up into unarians, decenarians, hundreders and thousanders. For the unarians the door to the outside world opens for 10 days each year. For the decenarians, 10 days every ten years, hundreders every 100 years and thousanders every millenium. They take great care to not let any outside news in when the doors are not open, meaning the thousanders have no idea what happened outside of the concent since the last time they went out.

The story is from the view point of a decenarian avout, Fraa Erasmas, and starts right before the door to his part of the concent is opened for the first time in ten years. Soon it becomes clear that strange things are happening, but because of their limited contact with the outside world, and their non-access to technology it is hard to figure out. This doesn’t stop Fraa Erasmas of course, and it all becomes the start of a great adventure featuring math, physics and a bit of philosophy too.

I found this book a lot like Sophie’s world by Jostein Gaarder, wherein the reader is introduced to basic philosophy through a fictional story. In this book a lot is learned about math and physics. The avout learn and study through dialoging and teaching and the reader gets to follow all discussions. Some of it was a bit over my head, but all in all I really enjoyed it. None of the ideas are too difficult, and because our Fraa Erasmas isn’t that good of a learner, all gets explained.

In another level of the story, the great adventure part, Fraa Erasmas is as much in the dark as we are, so when he figures things out as he goes along, so do we. This makes things confusing in some parts of the story, but all gets explained eventually. The adventure itself is true science fiction, and the world that is spun around it is vast, and beautiful.

I really enjoyed this book. After reading reviews online it becomes clear that it is a “hate it or love it” kind of book, and for me it is clearly love. Some negative comments were that the story was too slow, to pretentious and that the science part played too big a role. Yes there was a lot of science, but it helped explain the mind and culture of Fraa Erasmas. Yes, new words for familiar concepts were perhaps unnecessary, but that really helped in establishing that while this planet is a lot like earth, it truly is not. And yes, the story might be slow due to all the science, but for me that was part of the culture of the avout, no need for speed.

If you love science fiction, with a big backstory, I recommend this book. It might take time to read, but for me, it was really worth it!

LibraryThing link

The surgery on my wrist went fine, and I will soon be back stitching again. Today we went into Groningen for some shopping and I couldn’t resist the lovely craft shop (Sajet). They had several great sampler kits for sale (mostly Permin). I love the monotone samplers, and when I saw the one on the left for sale (almost 50% off) I couldn’t resist. It is Permin’s Vierlande 1826, an original old design from the collection of Museum Celle in Germany. I bought a full kit with brown linnen (I think it is 32 count) and blue and red DMC. The design features initials and a year (1826) but I think I will change them so they fit me (my and Henk’s initials and the year I will finish it). The lettering is from the alphabets and numbers featured elsewhere on the design, so changing it should be no problem. I am planning to start this when I finish “I love dogs” but I don’t know if I can wait that long… :D

This week just a couple of days stitching. I stitching in the evenings and one full day, filling up confetti between the big splotches of red I finished last week. Total stitching was 11,5 hours for a total of 110,5 hours…
After this week I am in for a stitching break. Thursday my wrist was operated on, and that will need some time to heal. I hope to be stitching again in a week or two, but we’ll see. I hate to not be able to stitch, especially so close to finishing page 1. As I said before, I decided to treat each page as a finish, since stitch-count-wise they are as big as small projects anyway…

After finishing the small celtic knot (see below) I picked up my tapestry again. I managed 13,5 hours of stitching (total is 99 hours now) in between cleaning the house and moving furniture.

I worked my way downwards in single colors that cover a lot of space. All those new stitches are only four colors, with most of it being only one color (the Libra symbol, and I am a Libra… coincidence? I think not!). The rest of it is mostly non-red (branches and flowers, they don’t call it mille-fleurs for nothing), so the rest should take me tons more time, but it is nice to see it going somewhere. The white area on the right is the start of the first tree!

As an in between stitch I made a small celtic knot this week. I wanted a finish (I love finishing something) and I also wanted to try out DMC color variations thread. So I took some left over aida and stitched this up in a couple of evenings.

I used two threads of DMC 4215 (blue/pink/purple) on ? count aida. The pattern is from Ink Circles and can be found here (it’s a freebie!). It is the september pattern.

I liked the color variations. I find that monochrome patterns stitched with color changing threads are gorgeous. I ordered some Vikki Clayton threads that I am dying to try out… maybe I will start on a bigger Ink Circles pattern someday… I have my eye on Cirque des Cercles in the color Dragon Blood (Third picture from the bottom).