Some of my favorite series are guilty pleasure books: Charlaine Harris’ Sookie Stackhouse books. The Cat Who… by Lilian Jackson Braun, introduced to me by my great aunt. I liked His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman quite a bit and I’m one of the six people who is a bit disappointed that the movie was such an abysmal flop (how is it possible that it was so bad? Sam Elliott was in it…) and movie versions of the other, better books in the series won’t be made.

That said, there were several candidates for Day 03. I mean, obviously Harry Potter was amazing and I love it like everyone else. And I have intense feelings about The Hunger Games (one of them is that Lenny Kravitz is a woefully poor choice for the role of Cinna in the movie. Come on.) But obviously, there is no choice but this:

I have intensely, obsessively, loved the entire Sandman series up to this point. I had no idea that Volume 5 (pictured above, released yesterday) was even happening until last week. I read the first four volumes of The Absolute Sandman back to back a couple of years ago, then immediately started them again because I wasn’t ready for them to end. I even had a custom bracelet made with my favorite Neil Gaiman quote from the series:

Sometimes you wake up. Sometimes the fall kills you. And sometimes, when you fall, you fly.

I mean, that’s what it’s all about, in a nutshell. That’s the power of all of Neil Gaiman’s writing. He sums it all up in something that will blow your mind, in a way that makes it all okay. I can’t recommend it enough, any of it… Sandman, American Gods, Neverwhere, Fragile Things… All brilliant. All perfect.

Day 01: The Best Book I’ve Read This Year (Book Memes are for Suckers)

Day 02: A Book That I’ve Read More Than Three Times (In Which a Mouse is Drowned in a Bucket)

Somewhat partial to these, for obvious reasons.

What a wonderful shop. Understated and elegant. Check it out.

As a Hamlet enthusiast and lover of quotes in general, I absolutely adore this charm by Green Girl Studios. I felt as though it called for some of my favorite blue agate beads and a simple design to showcase the pendant. This is a two-of-a-kind design. One is up for grabs.  Sale is pending. The other is worn often, with love, by me.

This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
Farewell, my blessing season this in thee!

Really, this would be true of the entire David Sedaris catalog. The kicker on this one for me is that 1) this is the book that David Sedaris signed for me, and 2) this is the one with the story about how he drowned a mouse in a bucket.

My favorite book signing (and yes, I have been to enough that I have a favorite, and no, I haven’t been to nearly as many as I aspire to go to) was for this book. It took place at the ever-excellent Alabama Booksmith and David Sedaris chain smoked the entire time and read a story with so much cursing that a mother who had for some reason brought her toddler had to step out. My friend and I waited in a line that snaked in and out of the bookshelves, while a good friend from high school who worked at the Booksmith at the time managed the crowd. We later realized that it was taking such a long time to get to the front because David Sedaris takes time to talk to everyone. Which is rare, and awesome.

(I went to a John Updike signing when I was in college and he sneered at me for handing him a paperback to sign and didn’t remember that I’d met him earlier in the day with a small group of English majors for a Q&A. So that’s my second worst signing, topped by Richard Paul Evans, whose book I was having signed for my mom, and who was a bit of a toolbox.)

During his reading, Sedaris had referenced having the worst job you can possibly find (and he’s had many) so that you have the motivation (and material) to write. At the time, I had just come off of jobs at a dry cleaner’s (where I learned that people are horrendous and filthy and unwilling to simply throw away a tie that has been vomited upon) and a daycare (where I learned that a lot of parents will avoid changing their own child’s diaper for hours so that you, the unlicensed, unqualified person they have never met can have the pleasure) and was working as a receptionist at a hair salon. So I told him I had enjoyed that part of his reading because I was right in the middle of that job (it might not sound like the worst job, but do not underestimate the misdirected wrath of the WASP woman whose frosted hair does not gel with her expectations – she doesn’t want to make her stylist angry but for some reason does not see the problem with throwing her credit card at the receptionist’s chest). He was interested in this anecdote and asked me the name of the salon.

“Beauty One,” I told him.

“Beauty Worm?” he responded.

“Pretty much,” I would have said, were I quicker on my think.

I then told him that I loved his favorite charity, Helping Hands: Monkey Helpers for the Disabled, and had heard of a similar charity who sponsored mini-guide horses for the blind. He gave me a big packet of information about Helping Hands and told me about a monkey that had come to one of his signings and handed him a pencil.

At some point during all this, he signed my book with the following:

To Katherine – I look forward to reading YOUR book

I look forward to writing it, eventually.

So anyway. Any book by David Sedaris would have fit this day.

But in this one, he drowns a mouse in a bucket. So… this one.

Day 01: The Best Book I’ve Read This Year

Day 01: The Best Book I’ve Read This Year

I sort of hyperventilated and rang my hands for a while as I was trying to pick a single book. It was really a toss up between this, East of Eden, Neverwhere, and State of Wonder. But this was the first book I thought of, and therefore, it wins.

A Good Hard Look fictionalizes Flannery O’Connor’s final years and her life in Milledgeville, GA as she suffers with lupus and its impact upon her craft. It’s also a commentary on life in a Southern small town, a genre I like very much (one which is absolutely, screamingly perfectly done by one of my favorite authors, Joshilyn Jackson*, as well as Kathryn Stockett and many others).  I’m not a great fan of writing book reviews, since I get a little breathless about it and want to quote too much and tell you about all the best parts which inevitably are spoilers. And then you hate me like I hate Oprah for putting the biggest spoiler in Anna Karenina in her magazine after I had already slogged my way through 3/4 of that hateful book. Anyway, Joshilyn Jackson reviewed it and interviewed the author, (which is why I read the book, making all of this go full circle) so suffice it to say, all of that is acres upon miles better than anything I could come up with.

* Whose own latest book, A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty, will be in my hands in 78 days** and I could not be more impatient.

**Highest level book nerd. Not kidding.

(This little bracelet has already found a home thanks to a dear friend of mine, but it is very likely that a quite similar one will appear in my Etsy shop very soon, since fancy jasper is one of my favorite gemstones. And not just because I like to imagine a Dickensian urchin taunting poor Jasper about his sartorial choices. Though that factors.)

So Slight Design has stuttered around a bit. I still do graphic design. But not so much in a freelance business capacity anymore. I am decidedly not cool with doing unpaid spec work and having my designs ripped off by disloyal people. And that’s what the past several years of attempting to have a freelance design business have brought me.

No more! So Slight Design is now my imprint for my jewelry design (which is one of the aforementioned things).

I have an Etsy shop. It’s not much at the moment, but it will grow with some nurturing and care and hopefully it will bring at little of the love I have for making simple, wearable things to people who love simple, wearable things.

So this blog, should you choose to read it, will be a little about that.

It will also be a little about me. I have things to say about music and books, and life and pictures, and pop culture and whatever else. So maybe it too will grow with some nurturing and care, and be a journey of a sort, however So Slight.

Second in a series of birds and their hobbies.

Part of a series of little bird innovations and inventions. Ladder Birds use their considerable knotting skills to avoid all the tedious flying.

What I find fascinating is the fact that the octopus can be readily trained to distinguish between shapes and patterns, meaning that they would be better than at least a couple of graphic designers I’ve encountered. You know the ones. They like Comic Sans and design in MS Paint. An octopus would never do that.

It’s called DIGNITY. And octopi have it.

This work is available in limited quantities and several additional iterations with different colors and other appropriate flair. Contact for purchase information or wait until I eventually set up an Etsy shop.