Happy New Year to everyone!
First some old business:
I didn’t get much book reading done in December. Work is so crazy during that time that I only felt like reading magazines. I would pick up a book and my attention span just wasn’t there. I only managed to finish 3 books last month.
Knit Two by Kate Jacobs – this was the sequel to The Friday Night Knitting Club, which I loved. This one? Not so much. It’s 5 years later and the fate of the shop may be in jeopardy. At this point I just didn’t care. The problem with sequels to regular fiction (which I learned from trying to read Chasing Harry Winston), is that there is none of the drama involved that made you want to get to know the characters. By this point, you already know who they are and their motivations and sequels (unless they are action thrillers or mysteries) tend to be mundane.
Sex, Mu
rder and a Double Latte by Kyra Davis – I wanted to like this as much as Doret did, but just couldn’t connect to the main character. It’s a mystery surrounding a mystery writer who finds strange things happening around her and they all appear to be taken from scenes in her books. It was funny and clever; maybe my expectations were too high. She has written more in this series and I am not giving up, I will read those, too.
Sex and Lies by Donna Hill – You know I had to squeeze a Kimani romance in there! This is the beginning of a series of books 
about the ladies of TLC (Tender Loving Care) cosmetics. On the surface, TLC cosmetics is like Avon or Mary Kay, but this is a front for The Ladies Cartel – an undercover investigative organization. You may see your sister, mother, wife, friend with her bag of samples, but you don’t know that the moisturizer bottle really contains a set of listening devices and the shower gel may contain one of the pieces needed to assemble a gun. In this first book Savannah Fields is new to the group and is given her first assignment to investigate some shady dealings at a construction site that her husband is involved in. Really good.
Hip-Hop Wars by Tricia Rose – I wasn’t able to finish this book because I had to return it to work, but I really enjoyed it. Ms. Rose presents arguments on both sides of the hip-hop wars and shows the strengths and weaknesses of them all. Definitely pick this up if you are tired of hearing the same old arguments against and in defense of my favorite music genre.
Total books read for 2008 (not including Hip-Hop Wars, because I didn’t finish): 63, about 10 more than 2007!
New business:
I had planned to do a post on resolutions, blah, blah, blah. I was even going to sit down with one of my favorite books, Write I Down, Make it Happen, yesterday to create some concrete goals for 2009. Then I decided not to, because it is a pattern that I need to break. See, I am a planner. I will research the hell out of something and come up with a concrete program on how to make it happen and gather the materials and organize them. But after that I lose interest. I am not a doer, just a planner. So, no lists this year. That doesn’t mean that I am flying by the seat of my pants; I know the things I need to do. I’m just not going to stress about them right now. Maybe later.
I am not using any of these patterns (I have more; these are just the ones in my current size), to sew the above fabric:
I am not using this “Wall of Inspiration” to inspire me:
I am not finishing these U.F.O.’s (unfinished objects, for the uninitiated):
I am not turning these jeans into a skirt:
(off subject – I got a signed copy of the latest Alexander McCall Smith book from Susan, it came the same day as these patterns from Vogue)
