Friday Fancies

How clearly do you picture fictional characters when you're reading a book? When I read, I can see the story playing out as a movie in my head, but characters' faces are the one area where my imagination suddenly turns blurry. I typically have a very clear image in mind of every other detail in the story, including characters' hair, clothing, skin tone, and general shape and size. For some reason, though, it's only very rarely that I can clearly picture their facial features. More often, I see a blurred out haze over their faces, as if I was looking at them without my glasses. I assume this has to be common to other readers besides me, but I'm still puzzled as to why I have this one blind spot. Despite that, I still hate it when actors' faces from film adaptations start to creep in and replace the blurry faces of my imagination.

All of that was really just leading up to saying that I'm about one-third of the way through Cloud Atlas and am having a really hard time keeping myself from looking at the cast list for the upcoming movie. I know a few of the actors who are in it, like Halle Berry and Tom Hanks, and have guesses about who they are playing. I'm really curious to find out who was cast  for all of the other characters, but don't want to spoil my reading experience with too many outside influences. I think this may be the first time when the chance to look at IMDB is serving as my motivation to race through a book!

(image via here)

A random assortment of links that caught my attention this week:

I've been loving the flavor of sage lately and think that this pasta recipe looks just about perfect for the fall.

Wouldn't these fox masks make a quirky Halloween costume?

Some entries in the International Book Cartoon Contest.

An interesting look at how Fashion Weeks are portrayed online versus how they actually look in real life.

And speaking of Fashion Week, these elevators take the concept of a runway show to new heights.

(P.S.- Anyone else having trouble editing image sizes in Blogger? Every time I change the size in the HTML, my images disappear, so for the moment I'm limited to the preset settings of large, extra-large, etc.)