Sunday!

Brother AaronDavid is going to have us read “Pinball, 1973” (it’s a PDF, you can read it right now!) for our next book club.

As he points out, it’s a short work (a little under 80 pages), and can easily be devoured in a single reading session. He gets into the deeper details in his post. You should definitely check it out.

Also, Zic mentioned coloring books the other day and there are a handful that Maribou has and, when looking over her shoulder, have made me say “Oh, that looks really cool”, I’ll give examples of some of the coloring books I’ve seen lying around the house (along with a couple at the art store that made me say “ooh, that looks cool too”).

Dream Catcher: the tree of life is a bit of a hippieish coloring book. Affirming statements on the left page, intricate nature drawings on the right. Some good meditative stuff in there.

Enchanted Forest: An Inky Quest & Coloring Book does similar, but it’s got more of a fairy tale feel than a naturalistic one.

Beautiful Beginner Mandalas Coloring Book has some lovely designs that are downright soothing to look at. This is coloring geometric representations rather than pictures of trees or foxes or owls swooping down. A lovely entry-level coloring book for before you get to the hard stuff that demands sharpened pencils rather than sharpened crayons.

Oodles of Doodles is the hard stuff. Imagine being asked to color a somewhat zoomed in section of Where’s Waldo? and you’ll have a basic idea of what this is asking you to color.

Intricate Patterns and Designs Adult Coloring Book is what it says on the tin. Keep your sharpener handy because there are a lot of little details in here.

Outside the Lines: An Artists’ Coloring Book for Giant Imaginations takes the idea of taking art from Keith Haring or Shepard Fairey (or from a hundred other artists) and making a coloring book out of them. The difficulty ranges from downright easy to “you’ve gotta be kidding me” (e.g., Amy Kaufman’s “Dots Connected“).

The Keith Haring Coloring Book is what I immediately looked up after looking at “Outside the Lines” because, hey, Keith Haring. I’d probably rather try to color him than Amy Kaufman’s “Dots Connected”, now that I think about it.

There’s also an entire genre dedicated to Stained Glass. Specially designed to be translucent, you can put these up in your window to get the effect of a (granted, smaller) stained glass window. They’ve got everything from real church stained glass windows to simple mandalas to fairy tale imagery (from the fairies walking through a garden to knights fighting dragons) to stuff like Stained Glass Window Designs of Frank Lloyd Wright. (Well beyond crayons or pencils here, you’re into markers territory.)

Those are the ones that have struck my eye as I walk through the room.

So… what are you reading and/or watching?

(Photo is “Movie Night“, taken by Ginny, used under a creative commons license.)