Medium

I'm not sure how you define a reading slump. Usually I'd say it was one of those periods when you have lots of things that you could read, but you just can't get into anything. And I suppose that's been true for me, but I don't know if it counts when the reason I haven't been able to get into anything is because I've been so exhausted from work. Anyway, it doesn't really matter whether you call it a slump or not - I haven't read (or knitted) an awful lot since my last post. But my lovely boyfriend took me away for a couple of nights at the end of October, and promised me lots of time to spend chilling out with a book, which obviously necessitated having a bit of a think about what to take. I'd heard a podcast (You Wrote the Book, with Simon Savidge) interview with Val McDermid, and she sounded interesting, so I thought I'd have a bash at her Wire in the Blood series. I finished one before we left, and took the second with me, and I've just finished the third (reading time having reduced significantly since being back at work). And I think I'm not going to read any more of them. It's been a bit of a weird one, this. I've read a lot of books in my time, and usually one of a few things happens: either I love them; I find them to be enjoyable trash; or I don't like them and stop reading. But these were different. The first one was ok. It was well-written but residing firmly in the 'enjoyable trash' category, until I saw the big clunking plot "twist" coming from a mile off, at which point I was a little bit disappointed, because well-written crime novels should be a little more subtle than that. But hey, I'd managed to read all of it in a couple of days, and it was published 20 years ago, so it's possible that Val McDermid was still honing her craft - maybe it was worth seeing what the second one was like. And I enjoyed that much more, partly because it was one of those "opposite" crime novels where you already know who did it and you just have to find out how they get caught, thus avoiding big clunking plot twists. So, onto the third. And cue another problem, because the two main characters are now leading such different lives that getting them back together is a little bit contrived. And in order to make the plot work, they have to do really stupid things that I'm fairly sure people as good at their jobs as they supposedly are wouldn't do. And inevitably, they get themselves into danger and nearly get killed at the hands of the criminals. Again. I mean, seriously. If this sort of stuff happens to you on a regular basis, you're either rubbish at your job, which they're not supposed to be, or you have an unnatural, unrealistic amount of bad luck. It's the old Midsomer Murders problem. And I'm kind of... over it. The three books I've read weren't bad. But they weren't really enjoyable trash either. They were just... fine. Ok. All right. Distinctly medium. And if I'm going to spend some of my limited time reading, I think I want something just a little more extraordinary than that.

A post of two halves

Part One - Rejecting the Premise

Towards the end of a summer of excellent books, I picked up this one - One Summer by David Baldacci - from the pile of unread things. It came in a pack of 10 books that I bought on a whim a while ago, so I had no idea what to expect apart from a light read, but the blurb piqued my curiosity. Apparently the main character Jack has only weeks to live and is preparing to say goodbye to his family when his wife is killed in a car accident - who will take care of his children? Well, "something remarkable happens which gives Jack the valuable second chance he'd only dreamed of". Interesting, you think. Transplant? Drug trial? Oh no, dear reader. It takes quite a lot for me to throw a book down in disgust after 60 pages, but the premise of this one is just so blindingly contrived as to be ridiculous. I won't spoil it just in case you want to read it, but it did make me consider how important it is to have a solid premise for your novel, and how books with ridiculous premises get out there. Surely at some point when you're writing it, or at least at some point when you're publishing it, someone's going to ask you what it's about, and when you give them the three-line plot summary, surely that someone's going to say "Sorry, what now? Really?". But David Baldacci is evidently either so famous that no one dared say it, or someone said it, he ignored them, and the publishers figured they could sell it in packs of 10 books so people would buy it before they realised that the premise was... well, disappointingly dodgy.

Part Two - Stash Crisis!

A friend happened to mention the other day that she really wanted to have a go with a drop spindle. I happen to have a drop spindle, and some fleece to go with it, from the days a couple of years ago when I wanted to have a go with a drop spindle, so I said I'd dig it out and send it to her. I was pretty confident that I knew where it was. And even if it wasn't there, my stash of yarn and yarny things isn't that big, so there weren't many other places it could be. Indeed, it was in the second place I looked. However, in the first place I looked I also found a whole host of yarny things that I'd forgotten I had. Completely and totally forgotten. Nice things, don't get me wrong (isn't it always nice to find yarn you didn't know you had?), but the finding of them did lead me to have a bit of a stash-related crisis. How much yarn is too much yarn? If I don't go through the boxes of yarn I have often enough to have an accurate mental catalogue of what's in them, then do I have too many boxes? Should I weed out some of the stash? If I'm going to weed out some of the stash, which of the nice things do I get rid of? If I have a jumper's worth of yarn but absolutely no plans to actually knit a jumper, should I get rid of the whole lot? Even though it's really amazing yarn in a really beautiful colour that I coveted for ages and that (I think) someone finally bought me as a present? If I have a lot of yarn that I'm not using, it it ok to spend the yarn shop voucher that a very special person bought me as a present because he didn't know that I shouldn't be allowed more yarn? Does the fact that I'm planning to move house in the next year mean that culling the stash is even more imperative? So far, all I've managed to conclude is that it would probably be a good idea to go through the stash and log everything I have on Ravelry. That way a future stash crisis is much less likely. Though it doesn't really help with the problem of buying more yarn...

Knitterly types, how do you organise your stash?

Finished

May I present to you the 18 Hour Dice Bag?

 

I started it at 6pm last night, and it was finished before 12pm today, and I even slept in the middle. The quick finished-ness of it makes me very happy indeed. I even MacGyvered a 3-needle cast-on with a safety pin because I foolishly just grabbed a ball of wool and one circular needle before leaving the house, then realised that I have a house full of knitting-related bits and bobs for several reasons, and that two of those reasons are sewing things up (tapestry needle) and complicated techniques (extra knitting needles). Anyway, the cast-on worked, with a bit of necessary swearing, and the ends got woven in thanks to Asda, who apparently have all the equipment I need for sewing sails as well as weaving in ends (I'm not kidding - I live about as far from the sea as you can get in the UK, and the local small Asda sells, along with the usual sew-on-a-button basic kits, a set of 7 multi-purpose sewing needles "for use with canvas, carpet, leather, sacks, sails and upholstery."). The boyfriend is also happy, because now he has a dice bag that will make all the other geeks in the games shop jealous. Success all round!

In other finished news, All the Light We Cannot See was phenomenal. Lyrical and beautiful and heartbreaking and brave, and another one that you should definitely read. I don't want to say much more about it, because it's not the kind of book you read because the plot sounds interesting (although the plot is interesting), it's the kind of book you read because you open it to the first page in the bookshop and then don't want to stop. Up there with The Paying Guests as one of the best books I've read this year.

And hey, look, I've finished a blog post as well! Good things come in threes.

In pictures

Well, this is exciting. So far, all my posts have been composed on my Android tablet, which does the job nicely though it has several limitations, one of which being the difficulty in seeing the entire width of what I'm typing all at the same time (makes proofreading a bit of a challenge), and the other of which being a difficulty with images. The interface is the same - it is after all a web page - so it claims I can insert pictures, but then it doesn't seem to want to upload them, and although my best friend, who inspired this blog, says she just copies and pastes them, copying and pasting on the tablet isn't as simple as Ctrl-C / Ctrl-V.

You didn't need to know all that. Suffice to say that, as evidenced by the picture that will hopefully appear below this paragraph, I've given in and am writing this on a laptop, thus activating all manner of shiny features.



Ta-da! So, Alice Bliss. This is one of those situations where I'm going to sound a bit mad (those who know me in real life are now raising their eyebrows at "a bit"), because I'm probably going to end up talking about Alice as if she was a real person, and referring to the character when I actually mean the book. (I maintain this is partly the author's fault for naming the book after the main character.) So, Alice is an American teenager whose reservist father goes off to fight in Iraq, leaving her with a depressed mother and a precocious younger sister. She's well-written and sympathetic as a character, so although she does some pretty stupid teenager-y things, the things that happen and the way she reacts to them feel very real. I think this was helped by the fact that although Alice's father being away is a huge part of the story, it isn't the whole story - Alice still has to navigate being a teenager while he's gone, and although the way she deals with life is coloured by his absence, her life is still full of school and family and boys and all the things that exist for every teenager. It was a really good read. And when I'd finished it, I was telling my boyfriend how good it was and what it was about, and I said how the absence of Alice's dad was a big deal because he was such a good man and a good dad, and then as I said it, I realised that although the book is written in the third person, it's really Alice's point of view, and that when you're a teenage girl, if you're lucky, your dad is the best man you've ever met, and you do idolise him, and that missing someone often means you forget all the times when they were annoyed, or tired, or frustrated. So really, you spend the whole of this book building an image of a man who probably doesn't exist, and that thought adds a whole extra dimension to the reading experience. Read it. If there is such a thing as a good Summer Read, then this is definitely it.

Secondly, to follow up on my last post and capitalise on my new-found ability to post pictures, here's the haul I got from Waterstones:

                

(Plus a copy of Elizabeth is Missing so I can make other people read it - it's quite difficult to lend someone your phone for 10+ hours so they can listen to the audiobook!)

I've started the Maths book. It's fascinating, very well-written and very entertaining, though I keep having to re-read pages when it starts to make my brain hurt. The book on the Greeks is also very good for dipping in and out of. Peter Jones is the author of Learn Ancient Greek, which basically got me through a GCSE in the subject (hey, it got me out of a session of PE in order to read more books), and he really knows his stuff.

All the Light We Cannot See has been vaunted as one of the books of the year, so I really wanted to read it, but I made a false start a few months back in trying the audiobook narrated by Julie Teal. I'm not entirely sure why, but for some reason it just wasn't working for me. It turns out I'm not the only one though - my best friend said she'd had exactly the same problem so had bought the paperback, which turned out to be brilliant. So I bought the paperback, and it's turned out to be brilliant. More on that when I've finished it.

Oh, and I do occasionally do some knitting as well, but at the moment I have the wrong number of stitches at the end of the most complicated row of the little tiny fox feet, so I'm summoning the peace, quiet and patience to tink it, one complicated stitch at a time.

Where did we get up to?

You know you haven't updated your blog in a while when you have to go back and check what you wrote in your last post. But hey, apparently I was talking about The Paying Guests, which means I can now say that it was brilliant. It's a bit of a tome, but it never felt long - I was carried halfway through it on a wave of thinking that something was about to happen, and then scoffed the rest of it in one sitting because something did indeed happen, and I was desperate to find out the end. My best friend wasn't sure about the ending, but I loved it. I can't really say more than that because I don't want to spoil it, but I HIGHLY recommend you read it for yourself.

Since then I've been wandering round in a bit of a reading daze. I tried to start I Saw A Man by Owen Sheers, which I was really looking forward to, but it's a bit of a slow burner compared to The Paying Guests so I didn't get too far into it before my attention wandered. I spent a while not really reading anything, then listened to an audiobook instead - Elizabeth is Missing by Emma Healey, narrated by Anna Bentinck. This was a recommendation from my aforementioned best friend a while ago, and I wasn't disappointed. It's very clever, narrated in the first person by a woman with dementia, so you can't work out if the mystery she is trying to solve is really a mystery at all, and Emma Healey does an absolutely brilliant job of showing how her dementia progresses through the way the narrative threads get increasingly muddled, as well as through the events in the story. I was also really impressed with the narration in the audiobook - Anna Bentinck uses her voice wonderfully subtly to show the changes from one narrative thread to another.

Since finishing that, I've read another Faye Kellerman to try to get my reading mojo back on track, and been disappointed that there is a gap in the series on Kindle now, so I might have to see whether the library can plug it. I've also started Gretchen Rubin's The Happiness Project, which is interesting. And this weekend I started Alice Bliss by Laura Harrington, because I fancied something else and I had it on my shelf, and I'm really getting into it. I'm also enjoying reading a "proper book" again - almost everything else I've read this year has been on Kindle. I'm enjoying it so much that I'm not entirely sure how I managed to contain myself in Waterstones the other day. I think it was only because I was with my lovely boyfriend (he was buying a board game) and I'm still kidding myself that he doesn't yet know the full extent of my book habit. I say kidding myself, because he asked me for my Waterstones points card, which he just assumed I had (and of course he was right), and then wasn't surprised when I also produced my "spend ten pounds and we stamp it" loyalty card thing. I think the cat is probably out of the bag. Which is good, because I'm going to be spending my summer holiday within walking distance of a large and very lovely branch of Waterstones, and... well, you can guess what's going to happen next.

Full stop, followed by capital letter

I read The Gracekeepers, and loved it. There are a couple of things in it that might ordinarily annoy me about a book, but I still loved it. It was beautifully written and the characters were so real to me, even in their strange fantasy world, that I couldn't put it down. And books like that cause the age-old problem of what to read next, because surely nothing could compare? Well, a friend recommended The Vagenda by Holly Baxter and Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett, which seemed like it would be sufficiently different for comparison to not be an issue - it's non-fiction, for starters. And I loved that as well, for entirely different reasons, but mostly because it was smart, and funny, and true. More people should read it, men and women alike.

So then, what next? Well, the podcasts I've been listening to on my way to and from work (Books on the Nightstand, Adventures with Words, both interesting and highly listenable) have been discussing the books shortlisted for the Baileys Prize (eventually won by Ali Smith) and some of them sounded vaguely readable (I have a bit of a lingering prejudice against "Booker" books, the ones awarded things by panels of literary types). Armed with the Kindle free sample option, I waded in, beginning with The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters. I expected not to like it. In fact, I expected to dislike it. I downloaded a book I really wanted to read (I Saw A Man by Owen Sheers) for when I'd read enough of the free sample to really hate it. And then, unexpectedly, I loved it. So Owen Sheers is going to have to wait a while, because Sarah Waters has put a group of flawed, interesting, contrasting characters in a house, and something is clearly going to happen between them, and I need to know what that something is!

In other news, the little tiny fox feet have reached the mythical stage of finishability. Exactly when this stage occurs varies between patterns, and I think it happens in books as well - that moment when something that was pootling along quite happily suddenly becomes something that has an end. It might be an end you've been looking forward to, or one you dread, but there comes a point when it's there, visible, real. I have 4 pattern repeats left. I'll miss knitting it, but wearing it is a whole new thing to look forward to.

Recommended

Today I visited a new craft emporium. It's mainly sewing-based, but it did have a rather nice selection of buttons, and they do crochet classes, so I think it counts as knitting-related enough for this blog. It was lovely. I think I might want to sew things. (Because I need another hobby that I don't really have time for.) But it got me thinking about recommendations, because I first heard of this place last year when a friend said that she had heard about it and that we should go. (I think we didn't get round to it because at the time it didn't do tea and cake, which are obviously necessary to complete the crafting trifecta.) Then this year a very lovely colleague of mine did a dressmaking course there and was waxing lyrical about how good it was, and they now have a tearoom, so off I went. With my mum, who is also skilled in the ways of buying pretty, crafty things she doesn't need or have space for. (Nature or nurture?) So how many recommendations does it take to get someone to act on the recommendation? Generally, if you recommend something once I'll file it under "interesting" and think no more of it, until someone else recommends it, even a significant amount of time later, when I will literally think twice about doing it. (Or I'll file it until such time as I need whatever it is you've recommended, but everyone knows that craft shops are a constant need.)

Case in point, a while ago a book called The Gracekeepers was recommended on the radio. It sounded like something I'd enjoy, so I filed it under "interesting" and then thought no more of it. Until it was mentioned in an episode of the Books on the Nightstand podcast (another double recommendation), at which point I thought "Yes, I thought that was interesting before. Must read." (Books are a constant need too.) So now it's on my TBR list. (Still currently on the mental list rather than the physical pile, but it's just a matter of time.)

So if everyone is like me and needs two of them, how do recommendations get started? Well, like this I suppose. Round the corner from the lovely craft emporium, I happened to have parked my car outside a little yarn shop. And obviously we had to go in, because... well, I don't need to explain this to you by now. Pretty, crafty things. And it turned out to be one of the best yarn shops I've ever been in, with lots and lots of extremely pretty, crafty things. Let the chain of recommendations begin.

Throw(n)

I'll be honest, 3 rows in, one pattern repeat (6 rows) doesn't seem like much of a challenge. I did design it to be deliberately easy so I had some hope of achieving it this week, but I'd also offer in my defence that I am a madwoman and decided to make the thing 180 stitches wide, because... well, it's supposed to cover a sofa. It takes quite a long time to complete one row. Anyway, I'm halfway there, which is good because work and social life are probably going to steal a couple of nights, so I figure pictures to celebrate. (A picture, anyway.) The camera doesn't like twilight very much so the colour isn't quite right, but you can see the pattern. Big, basic, simple. But as I'm knitting, I'm thinking about the sofa with the throw on, and the person I'm making it for snuggled under it, and there's some of that, invisible, bound in every stitch. 180 of them, multiplied by... quite a lot.

Rut or run?

So I've been reading the aforementioned Faye Kellerman books for over a month now. I think I'm on number 10, and while I can't say I'm bored of them yet, I am starting to wonder what constitutes a reading rut, and whether I might be in one. As readable and enjoyable as the books are, reading them one after the other does highlight the repetitive little details and phrases that form an author's stock style. I suppose if you read them as they were published in the 1990s, then after each interval of a year or so you might need reminding that the main character was once shot, or that he gave up smoking. But I basically live with this guy (yep, this is what my social life has come to), so the reminders can grate a little. Then again, sometimes it's nice to have that familiarity - like an old friend at the end of the day. I wonder what will happen when I run out of books, and that friend becomes just another acquaintance, one of the many characters that we readers love and let go all the time. Will I miss him? Actually, I've had The Wolf Border by Sarah Hall (one of my favourite authors) to read for a while now. It might be time to meet someone new.

On the knitting front... well, the demands of work have kind of put paid to that for a little while, but I'm setting myself a challenge to do at least one repeat of the sofa throw pattern this week, because it's sitting next to the sofa mocking me. Plus it gives me a reason to update the blog more often. Updates and photos to come.

Gobble gobble munch munch

Well, after reading quite a lot of Jon Ronson, I delved back into fiction with one from the Shelf of Unread Things - One Moment, One Morning by Sarah Rayner. People thrown together by a random event makes for a readable concept, but this one suffered slightly (for me at least) from the fact that the thrown-together people were all women with a variety of relationship issues. I don't think I'm spoiling it for you by saying that said relationship issues were all solved, or in that optimistic "healing" phase, by the end of the novel. And if I'm honest, at least one of them could have been solved a whole lot sooner than that, prompting me to get slightly irritated with one of the characters until she grew up and realised what everyone else had known all along. Still, it was readable and mildly interesting, so I'm not going to complain.

It did get me thinking about trash fiction, though, and things you can digest in very little time at all. As a teenager I used to read a lot of American series crime fiction, which often serves that purpose. One of my favourites was the Peter Decker series by Faye Kellerman, because the detective, as a result of events in the first novel, becomes and marries an Orthodox Jew, and the books are full of well-researched details about the religious life and how he makes it work with his job, which makes the novels interesting as well as being extremely readable cop stories. I looked them up, just out of interest. I thought it might be nice to read one for old times sake. Unfortunately for my bank account, here's where a Kindle and wifi access get dangerous - I've read 3 in 4 days and have just downloaded the fourth. It was a lot cheaper when I used to get them out of the library. Though in my defence, it was a lot harder to read them in order.

Metaphor

After a bit of a hiatus in favour of a sofa throw for the boyfriend's new house, I've picked up the little tiny fox feet again. (Not that the sofa throw is in any way finished, you understand, but it's big wool on big needles with a pretty but fairly mindless pattern, and I missed the intricacies of the fox feet.) Picking it up again after several weeks away, I've been reminded of the experience of knitting the very first repeat of the pattern, when I had no idea what I was doing and how it was going to work. Because this pattern gets ugly. If you click on the link and look at the photo, you can see how it knots itself up into lumps. At this stage in the repeat, there's none of the 'give' that you normally get in knitting. It's tight and lumpy and makes your hands ache after half a row. And when I first saw it looking like that, it was a real leap of faith to keep going. I thought maybe, best case scenario, it would eventually be fine after some serious blocking. Worst case scenario? Maybe I was using the wrong size needles. Maybe my tension was completely off. Maybe I was just going to end up with a colourful disaster of knotted string. But for some reason (sheer stubbornness?) keep going I did, and... well, you've seen how it turned out. Today it struck me as a good metaphor for life. Sometimes it gets ugly. Sometimes you just have to keep knitting.

Binge reading

It all started with a recommendation from a friend, who was reading Reasons to Stay Alive by Matt Haig. You should read it, she said, it's brilliant. Said friend happens to be my best friend; we survived an English Literature degree together; we have much the same taste in books. Sitting as I was in my boyfriend's kitchen, waiting for him to get home from a night out, with only my Kindle for company, I downloaded it. I probably read for an hour that night. And the next morning I read for another couple of hours. In fact, I finished the book, but I was enjoying lying in bed reading so much that I immediately downloaded (the benefits of wifi) another book that I'd heard about on the radio - So You've Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson - and started that. And I was enjoying that so much that I read a lot more of it over the next couple of days. And then I had a work trip coming up, and thought I might finish it on the train, so I downloaded The Psychopath Test as well, because Jon Ronson was just the right balance of interesting and readable. I stopped reading the news while eating my breakfast and started reading the book instead. And last night I was getting towards the end of it so I thought I'd download something else for when I'd finished. Aforementioned best friend and I had been bookshop browsing earlier in the day and I'd seen another book that had been on the radio a while ago - The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion - so (in true Burglar Bill fashion) I downloaded that. And then I lay in bed this morning and just read it. All of it. All in one go. And then I finally stopped, and thought that 4 books in a week is pretty good given how little time I think I have to read, and how many books I've tried and failed to get into in the last few weeks. Next up... who knows? I'm contemplating Nelson Mandela's Long Walk to Freedom. Or The Rosie Effect, sequel to The Rosie Project. Or maybe something from the stash of unread things. It's been a while, but it turns out I still love reading after all.

Continuum

It's been one of those weeks where I've spent a lot of time muttering darkly to myself. If only I had more time, I could get everything done and not be running round like a maniac. I've had too much of the wrong kind of time, short bursts in between meetings so it's been impossible to be as productive as I'd like. I want time to go faster, things to happen quicker. I want time to slow down. I need to spend more time with the people I love. 5 minutes here and there is not enough, and yet it's everything. I want more time to relax, to do the things I want to do. I want to be able to read for more than the 10 minutes before I fall asleep at bedtime. I want to be awake enough to knit when I have the time.

And yet, and yet... when I do have the time, when I am awake, when I could spend an afternoon reading, when I get this thing called a weekend, I spend that time cleaning, or food shopping, or cooking. I can't sit still. Reading for a couple of hours would be a complete waste of that time, wouldn't it?

But time works in mysterious ways. This weekend I went to stay with a friend. I had exactly the same amount of time, but I spent it knitting. I spent it reading. I read a whole book in the space of a weekend. (More on that in another post.) So maybe it's not about time at all. Maybe it's about space.

Justification

In my darkest moments, sometimes I think that I might have too much knitting-related stuff. Actually, that's a lie, I never think that, but sometimes I think I should. There is a lot of stuff in my flat at the moment (not all of it mine), and if I didn't keep all my leftover half-balls of yarn, if I didn't have duplicates of every needle size, then maybe all of that stuff could look slightly more... arranged, as opposed to just stacked. (That's a big maybe. There's a lot of stuff.) But tonight I am justified. Tonight I knelt on one of the very beautiful wooden needles that I am currently using for the little tiny fox feet (see previous post), heard a small snap and had a moment of heart-stopping distress, before realising that, of course, I have another set of those needles. Broken needle changed for spare, job done, happy knitter. Plus I get to spend a happy few minutes buying more needles, so I have another spare for next time. Totally justified.

Oh, and even though my book collection probably takes up more space than the knitting stuff, there is simply no such thing as too many books. A book collection doesn't need any justification at all.

Meaning in mistakes

So, the current knitting project I said I'd tell you about. Meet the tiny fox feet.

The pattern is deceptively simple. On some rows you make more stitches, which gives you the 'lumps', and on other rows you decrease lots of stitches, which gives the furrows between them. These increases and decreases act to 'bend' each row, so a straight line of colour becomes a wavy line. Pretty cool, if you're a massive knitting geek and that kind of thing floats your boat (that'd be me, then). It's not actually particularly complicated to knit - it just requires a bit of concentrated counting in places. This, it turns out (fairly predictably), is more difficult with a head cold. So today I made a counting error, which left me with more stitches than I should have had. But that didn't matter for the next row. It was only when I had some spare stitches at the end of the row after that when I realised that something wasn't right. Cue much concentrated counting and muttering to myself (key knitter traits) and undoing of one of the more complicated rows, before executing a slight bodge to hide the spare stitches and fix the problem. The point, lest you be dozing off with boredom, is this: ordinarily having to undo a row would be cause to bookmark a project for a month while I knitted something else. But I like the little tiny fox feet too much to do that. And it turns out that the mistake was worth making. In the process of undoing and redoing I have discovered more about how the pattern works, and found I love it even more as a result. Oh, and the bodge? You totally can't tell.

Bookmarks

I started thinking about bookmarks last night, having found a rather beautiful promotional one in the shape of a feather inside my new book (The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender by Leslye Walton). I have a bit of a strange relationship with bookmarks. If I don't have one to hand when I start reading, often I don't use one at all, and then get annoyed every time I pick the book up and have to hunt for the page. I like "found" bookmarks - old train tickets and gift tags and shopping lists. I particularly like other people's "found" bookmarks, which they leave in library books by accident. And then I got to thinking about the concept of a bookmark. If you put a book down for 5 minutes, you don't really need one, you can remember the page number. They're handy for a book you only pick up at bedtime (most of the books I read fall into this category), unless you fall asleep with your face in the book and lose the page anyway. (Faces do not make for good bookmarks.) But I have a lot of books with bookmarks in that I haven't picked up for months. Years, even. I lose bookmarks this way, leaving them in books that live in piles of other books, forgotten. The bookmarks say "you were here", but "here", years later, isn't always a place you recognise. Often you have to start again, paradoxically, in order to work out where you were. Maybe the bookmark in that case just acts as a reminder that at one point you thought the book worth reading, or that you changed your mind and decided it wasn't.

I've realised that I bookmark knitting projects too, in a similar way. For the project I pick up every day (this never happens), I don't need a bookmark. Ones I pick up less often, it's good to have a note of where I was in the pattern, otherwise it's tedious to go back and count things and try and work it out. And other projects are like the half-read books on my shelves. I don't know that I will go back and finish them. Maybe I got bored or changed my mind. If I wanted to go back to one of them I'd probably have to start again, not least because in all probability I'd have appropriated the needles for another project and wouldn't remember what size I was supposed to be using. But I did start it, once. So it sits, bookmarked, in a collection of other bookmarked things. Pending.

Reasons

1. If you're going to start a blog, the beginning of a new year seems as good a time as any.

2. I've just finished a pretty good book (The Amber Fury by Natalie Haynes) and am in that lovely limbo of working out what to read next, so I can start a new book with a new blog and a new blog with a new book.

3. My current knitting project (of which more in a later post) makes me very happy indeed, and whilst my very lovely non-knitter boyfriend is doing an amazing job of asking interested questions and admiring it at regular intervals, a blog where I can post pictures and get all geeky about it might take the pressure off a bit.

4. My best friend convinced me it was possible to blog about both reading and knitting at the same time, which is almost like being able to actually do both at the same time. If you close your eyes and squint a bit anyway. It's all her fault.