Sunday Knitting

This is my finished Cabled Baby Raglan Sweater. The photo isn't fantastic - I had a choice between too bright from the sunlight or too bright from the flash. But you get the idea.

Pattern: Cabled Raglan Baby Sweater, a free pattern from Knitting Daily
Yarn: Jaeger Matchmaker Merino DK
Needles: Size 4 Addi Turbos

It took me just under two months from start to finish, but I had a couple of false starts. Then after I finished the knitting and weaving in of yarn ends, it languished for about a week before I washed and blocked it, finally adding the snap and button on the day I gave it away. Had I focused on the project a bit more it could have easily been finished in a few weeks.

I made it for a friend who will be having a baby in a couple of months. Turns out that her husband knits and I got to see several pairs of booties he's made. The sweater was very well received!

The Fault in Our Stars

The Fault in Our Stars by John Green (2012)

In John Green's newest young adult novel, two teenagers meet and fall in love at the unlikeliest of places: a cancer support group held at a church ("in the literal heart of Jesus" according to their moderator.) Hazel is terminally ill and needs to lug a tank of oxygen with her everywhere she goes. Augustus has lost a leg to osteosarcoma. They meet through Isaac, who is about to lose his second eye from a rare form of cancer. It doesn't sound like a very cheery setup, but this book has a great deal of humor and heart.

Hazel's favorite book in the world is An Imperial Affliction by Peter Van Houten, and more than anything in the world she wants to find out what happens after the book ends. Augustus will do anything to help her. Hazel is stand-offish at first because she knows Augustus's last girlfriend died and doesn't want to put him through that again, but she finally gives in to his irresistible wit and charm. Together the young lovers embark on a trip to Amsterdam to seek out Peter Van Houten and get some answers. Events take a different turn, however, and everything is different after they return. 

There were some pretty sad parts of this book, as you can imagine, but despite all of that it was fairly uplifting. Hazel and Augustus were clever, yet pragmatic, even as they philosophized about life, death, and how they want to be remembered. I especially liked how down-to-earth they were about dying and how much it sucked. They both hated the stories about kids heroically facing their mortality and fighting until the bitter end and being such role models for other dying kids. Because it's not usually like that, even when people say it is, and although Hazel and Gus had basically positive outlooks, they still kept it real. As Augustus says, "The world is not a wish-granting factory." They were just great people to be around, and their story can teach us a lot about dealing with the pain that life inevitably brings us.

To paraphrase a passage from his own book, you have a choice about how to tell sad stories, and John Green made the funny choice. Very well told, Mr. Green!

This is truly a book full of quotes, many of which you can find here. I also have to put in a good word for the incredible job of narrator Kate Rudd on the audiobook - I highly recommend it.

The town where I work has just chosen The Fault in Our Stars as the community reads book for this year, so I'm quite excited that I'll soon see it everywhere, and everyone will be talking about it. I already want to read it again!

Going Bovine

Going Bovine by Libba Bray (2009)

Cameron is coasting through life, apathetic about school, family, and his job. Then he is given the bad news that he has the human form on mad cow disease and is going to die. As he lies in his hospital bed waiting for the inevitable, he receives a very strange visitor in the form of Dulcie, a punk angel/possible hallucination. She tells him that he needs to go in search of a cure and possibly save the world while he is at it. Cameron recruits his hospital roommate, Gonzo, a hypochondriac dwarf, and they set off on the trip of a lifetime.

I read this for my Not-So-Young Adult book group and wasn't crazy about it. It was obvious early on that the whole adventure is just a dream, so it seemed rather pointless to me. (I think that's supposed to be a spoiler, but seriously, if you cannot tell what's going on then you just aren't paying attention AT ALL.) It was also really very long, and I grew impatient with the flitting from one place to another in a mostly random fashion. 

But once we talked about it at book group, I felt a little better about it. I considered how much I liked some of the characters, especially Balder the yard gnome, and the book does actually have a point that I can't argue with (although "live life to the fullest" is a little overdone). I'm not a big fan of the surreal and trippy, but it was funny and entertaining even if it could have been a little shorter. 

Sunday Knitting

I've begun working on a wrap made with lace weight yarn and a series of yarn overs and dropped stitches. This may sound like a disaster waiting to happen but it should turn out something like this (though not, obviously, yellow.)

After knitting it will be felted, which makes all measurements imprecise. The pattern doesn't even include a gauge, which concerns me because although the wrap doesn't need to fit exactly, I would like it to come out the size in the picture. But alas, there are no measurements of any sort given. Thankfully, I have faith in the magic of both felting and blocking and I'm confident that I can force the thing into submission.

I've always kind of wanted a Matrix-style sweater and this may satisfy that urchin/dystopia need. I expect it to move along at an absolutely glacial pace though, so I may not actually have it done until the apocalypse, at which point it should be the height of fashion.

The Shuttle

The Shuttle by Frances Hodgson Burnett (1907)

I knew Burnett only as the author of The Secret Garden and The Little Princess, but I didn't realize that she even wrote adult novels until I read this review of The Shuttle. The title of the novel is a reference to the back and forth motion of ships between America and England (much like the back and forth motion of a shuttle on a loom), bringing the two nations ever closer together. America is treated as a progressive and ambitious nation full of people with new ideas, suggesting that England lags behind. It had lately become a trend for wealthy American women to marry English men and one such story forms the basis for the novel.

The Vanderpoel family is incredibly rich and live in New York. One of the daughters marries an Englishman, Sir Nigel Anstruthers, and moves with him to England. Rosalie writes home at first, but her communication becomes more sparse until her family fears that she has forgotten them. But her much younger sister Bettina, who remembers her own strong dislike for Sir Nigel as a child, vows to visit Rosalie as soon as she is old enough, and so she does. 

Twelve years after the marriage, Bettina arrives at Stornham Court unannounced and finds Rosalie a pale shadow of what she once was, dressed in rags and living in a once-grand house now fallen to ruin. Her husband is off in Europe somewhere spending all of Rosy's money while she is left alone with her hunchback son, Ughtred. Bettina, ever smart and industrious, begins to set things right on the estate and begins to rebuild Rosy's confidence from the battering it took from horrible Sir Nigel. Meanwhile, Betty develops a growing affection for the mysterious Lord Mount Dunsten, a local outcast who lives at a neighboring estate.

Sir Nigel Anstruthers is probably the most despicable character I've encountered in quite a while, and I must admit how much I enjoyed hating him! He was completely backwards in his notions about women and their rightful place, plus he was a little crazy and had an undefined illness that I suspect was syphilis. He was manipulative, behaving cruelly towards Rosy but twisting everything to make it look like she is just hysterical. Luckily, Betty is too smart to buy into it and doesn't believe him for a moment.

Betty Vanderpoel, however, was just one of the best female characters I've read in quite a while. Not only intelligent and strong, she was insightful and caring and completely willing to help out everyone she met with her loads and loads of money. It was as though a fairy godmother has descended on their village, bestowing goodness and hope upon its residents. She has good judgment, keeps her cool under pressure, and more than once was told that she "should have been a man" because of her competence. 

I won't lie - this book is over 500 pages and took me quite a while to get through. But it's really a wonderful story, and well told. The Shuttle is also a great feminist novel, and I'm surprised it's not considered a classic and read more widely. 

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!