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.