The Elements of Style

The Elements of Style (Illustrated) by Strunk, White, and Kalman (2007)

Between all the long and slow-moving novels I've been reading lately, I snuck in a short book about grammar. I read The Elements of Style in high school (or at least referred to it) but only recently discovered this beautiful edition illustrated by Maira Kalman. (You may remember her from Daniel Handler's Why We Broke Up.) 

Divided into several sections, the book covers everything from basic grammar and spelling to writing more effectively by using an active voice and placing emphatic words at the end of a sentence. The longest section was "Words and expressions commonly misused," a mostly useful reference guide to misuse. I was surprised to see that Strunk recommends using the word "persons" instead of "people" and says that "prioritize" and "finalize" are "abominations." This may be because the book was originally published in 1959.

Many times while reading I felt validated by Strunk's advice. For instance:

"Dialogue is a total loss unless you indicate who the speaker is. In long dialogue passages containing no attributives, the reader may become lost and be compelled to go back and reread in order to puzzle the thing out."

One of my biggest frustrations with reading contemporary fiction is that authors will not tell me who the hell is speaking. Does this bother anyone else? I don't understand why the simple but helpful "Sally said" or "Tom replied" is so out of fashion. Following dialogue has become almost impossible. Along the same lines, I miss the semi-colon and do not understand why it has fallen out of favor; Strunk would agree, as the semi-colon makes more than one appearance here. In summary, reading The Elements of Style has reminded me that modern fiction is a mess of confusing dialogue and run-on sentences. But I digress.

I should mention the illustrations, which are what induced me to pick up this edition in the first place. Each illustration accompanies a quote from the text, and they are all just wonderful. Sometimes they are quite literal - a picture of an egg beater accompanied by a quote about an egg beater, but just as often the relationship was not as obvious. For instance, the cover art is paired with the quote, "Well, Susan, this is a fine mess you are in." I just loved it.

This is a handy volume for anyone who ever writes anything, and if you're going to pick it up you may as well do yourself a favor and go with this beautifully illustrated edition. And no, it's not lost on me that I've probably broken several of Strunk & White's rules just in writing this review. Knowing is half the battle.

Monday Knitting

This is a little late because yesterday was my birthday and I couldn't bring myself to do anything I didn't absolutely want to do.

Remember this?

I added some length before starting the peplum because I don't like cropped tops very much. Although it looks ok in the pictures I took, it became apparent that there's a reason why peplum tops are always so short. This sweater just looked weird. I've never worn it. But every fall, I pull it out with my other sweaters and every spring I wash it and pack it away again. This time, however, I decided to buck up and fix the damn thing.

Even though the sweater is top down, there's still a bit of difficulty in that the button bands - and buttons - were added after. So yesterday I sat down and removed all 11 buttons and undid the button bands. I can do this less painfully now that so much time has passed since I had to pick up all those stitches and sew on all those buttons.

Today I pulled out the peplum, more difficult than it should have been since I couldn't find the stupid end of yarn and so started in a mid-peplum spot where I had switched yarn skeins.

Next step: start knitting!

11/22/63

11/22/63 by Stephen King (2011)

Jake Epping is a divorced high school English teacher in Lisbon Falls, Maine who learns about a door to the past - to a particular day in 1958 - and decides to use it to prevent JFK's assassination. Since that doesn't happen until 1963, he has some time to make a life for himself as he follows Lee Harvey Oswald's path towards that fateful day. Jack gets a job as a teacher, makes friends, and falls in love. He also learns that the past is obdurate - it doesn't like to be changed. He faces many obstacles to his goals, as well as strange coincidences that he is convinced aren't actually coincidental at all.

After finishing this book, I felt like I'd just returned from a long and harrowing trip. It wasn't as harrowing as Jake Epping's trip from 2011 to 1958, but just watching him was quite exhausting (plus I had to turn every one of those 849 pages.) This was a long freaking book, but not unnecessarily; there was a lot of story. Before undertaking the JFK trip, he tried to change a smaller event, just to see if it would work and how it would affect 2011. Then he returned to 1958 for the long haul.

I liked the parameters of time travel as Stephen King created them. Epping used his first trip to prevent a family from being murdered, but when he went back a second time everything was reset. So he had to prevent that murder again before moving on to his JFK project. It makes sense. Interestingly, every trip through the time travel portal was only two minutes in 2011. So after spending 5 years in an earlier time, Jake returned to 2011 and went home and fed his cat who probably didn't even miss him yet.

For those of you who avoid Stephen King books because you don't like horror, take note that this is not a horror novel. It's pretty straight fiction with a little history thrown in, and a love story. The romance between Jake and school librarian Sadie Dunhill was a major focal point of the story. Certain events conspired to draw Jake away from his intended purpose and there were moments I thought this book would go in a direction I was most unhappy about, but it didn't, and that's all I'll say about that. I was very satisfied with the ending.

Although it took me a while to get into, I was soon so engrossed in this book that I wanted to just sit at my desk and read all day at work. (If only that was actually what librarians do!) King has such a gift for getting us inside his characters' heads, and in many cases that is terrifying, but in 11/22/63 it was just incredibly compelling. I tend to shy away from long time-consuming books, but this story was worth every moment.

P.S. Did you know that Stephen King is working on a sequel to The Shining? OMG!

Sunday Knitting - Coraline

Yesterday I got dressed up all in jeans and wool and went out into the 85 degree day to get pictures of my long-awaited (by me anyhow) Coraline cardigan.

The back

And a close up of the smocking and buttons.

Some quick stats:

The pattern is Coraline by Ysolda Teague
The yarn is Queensland Collection Rustic Wool DK
I used needles sized 3 and 4
I started in late September, which made this an 8-month project for no good reason.

In addition to coming up with beautiful designs, Ysolda is a very meticulous writer of patterns. Not only does she provide the largest range of sizes of any designer I know of, but her patterns are very clear and detailed. Although she has been published in magazines from Knitty to Interweave Knits, she primarily sells her patterns directly and manages to cobble together a living from knitting. All this to say, this was a nice pattern!

I liked the yarn as well. It's so hard to find DK weight yarns that don't break the bank and this was fairly pricy if I remember clearly, but it was worth it for the color alone. After blocking, this sweater is every bit as soft and drapey as I had hoped. One of the balls was a bit defective as it had several knots - technically you can return it when that's the case, but who's going to rip out all that work? Luckily, out of the 11 balls of yarn I bought, the others were all fine. (I actually have 3 partial balls left, probably equal to about 2 full balls.)

My gauge was a bit off, despite swatching before I started and getting correct gauge (but we all know how swatches lie) so I was bit worried because the smocking requires accurate row gauge. However, the stars aligned and it came out perfectly.

The only part I'm not happy with is the button loops, but you can't see them (thank goodness.) I have a vague plan to redo them, but knowing myself as I do it seems unlikely to actually happen. This is ok because they're not visible. These are the instructions, if you're curious. I used 2 plies of yarn as thread but I think it was a little too slippery and moved around and looks very messy. If I were to do it over, I'd try to find matching embroidery thread.

The only thing I changed was to use fewer buttons, just because mine are larger than she used on the original. I felt lucky to find buttons in that color, never mind finding the exact size I wanted. I did something a little different on the hem as well, unintentionally, but that was so long ago now that I don't even remember what. I remember being concerned about it, but it looks fine now.

All in all, a success! I look forward to wearing it a lot next fall and winter.

Help me choose some summer reading

There are a few authors I want to re-visit so I think I'm going to try and read another book by each of these authors this summer. But which books should I pick?

Maggie O'Farrell - I've read The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox

Penny Vincenzi - I've read Sheer Abandon

Sarah Waters - I've read The Little Stranger and Tipping the Velvet. I'm thinking of reading Fingersmith next.

Have you read any of these authors? What do you recommend I read next from each of them?

In One Person

In One Person by John Irving (2012)

Billy is raised by a single mother in the small town of First Sister, Vermont. As he grows up, he begins to have what he calls "crushes on the wrong people," such as a guy on the high school wrestling team and the local transgendered librarian. Spanning the better part of Billy's life from childhood into his sixties, the novel weaves a complicated tapestry of Billy's life and relationships and features a large and colorful cast of characters. 

This is actually a tough story to describe. There's not really a plot, but many threads of stories about Billy's family, his missing father, his friendship with Elaine, his romantic relationships, and his obsession with the wrestler Kittredge. Much of it seemed comically exaggerated and outlandish, which makes it all rather unbelievable, but fairly entertaining. The narrator is prone to melodrama (and can be annoyingly whiny), yet is fairly flip about serious things like a second-hand story he hears of a woman seducing her own teenaged son. The most prominent characters, Billy and Elaine, didn't develop much over the course of the novel and even in their later years I kept picturing them both as I pictured them in high school. They spoke and acted the same as they did when they were younger and I had to keep reminding myself that many years had passed.

I feel a bit conflicted about this novel. On the one hand, I want to complain that it's unrealistic for a small town in Vermont to contain so many people who are gay, trans, or cross-dressers. But on the other hand, once I got into the story - and it did take a bit - I was quite content keep reading and reading it in every spare moment I had. Although at times it felt like a lesson in tolerance and AIDS-awareness, I couldn't help but enjoy the humor and the quirky characters. 

More than anything, reading In One Person has made me want to go back and read - and re-read- older John Irving novels. I loved some of his earlier works and although this isn't nearly as good as The World According to Garp or Cider House Rules, it did remind me why I like Irving so much.

Sunday Knitting

This month's bus knitting is another sock.

I bought some Regia self-striping yarn so I could knit socks that don't require concentration but still look interesting. Regia is a pretty sturdy yarn, so these should hold up well.

I'm using the same size needles and same number of stitches as some other stockinette socks I've made, but I just tried this on and it's a little tight. I'll wait until after the heel and try it on again - if I have to restart it I will, but I think it should be ok. I wonder if I'm knitting with a tighter gauge these days?