Knitting as a popular pastime seems to be making a comeback in the last
year or two. By that I mean that other people besides the die-hard fiber
enthusiasts are taking it up and the publishing industry is responding
with really expensive books geared to the new knitter making faddish
sweaters with ultra expensive yarns. Normally, I page thru the books,
find every glaringly stupid design flaw they have included, sniff and
spend my money on yarn. Badly designed sweaters on twig thin models
aren’t going to look good on the average lumpy body no matter how
expensive that glitzy yarn is. I prefer to spend my book money on books
about knitting history, fiber production and design techniques that work
with more than a $35 dollar an ounce yarn. It really ticks me off when I
see a new knitter struggling with difficult yarn and a badly written
pattern that some shop owner sold her. Anyway, I found this book after
hearing about it at my knitting group and quickly snapped it up.

Annemor Sundbo bought a shoddy factory in a out of the way corner of
Norway as a way to finance her own fiber habit. “Shoddy”, in the textile
industry, is the word for recycled wool. It’s drifted into the common
language to mean “of poor quality” since the recycled wool is no longer
fit to spin for knitted clothing. It’s used, rather, as filler for
quilts, for carpets and for weaving tweed fabrics which are rough and
usually lined in the construction of garments. The factory Sundbo bought
took castoff old woolen garments, and picked and ripped them into shoddy
wool for Torridal Tweeds. However, as she was going thru the warehouse of
old garments she found thousands of garments handknit in folk patterns
dating back at least to the turn of the century. Some were earlier. Truly
a treasure trove for a knitter and a lover of folk knitting. But the
interesting part of the book is when she organizes the garments and then
does historical research using old pattern leaflets, old paintings and
photos and yarn company flyers to date and find the location of where
they came from. She traces patterns to England, Iceland, Sweden, Latvia,
and even Holland in her research. Some of the color designs have roots in
Persian carpet elements. Norway had a healthy sea trade and all those
sailors brought home gifts which were translated into design elements for
sweaters, mittens, and stockings.

The book does have problems. It is badly written and even more badly
translated. There were a couple of times I wondered what she was actually
trying to say and did the translator really know English? Plus, she
bounces all over the place in her organization of the book, making it
difficult to follow the text and giving me a real appreciation of what a
good editor can do for a book. All of that is completely and totally
offset by the fabulous color plates of the sweaters, often placed next to
the painting or leaflet she used to date them with. They were
astonishing. Breathtaking. Inspiring. The pictures are worth the price
of the book alone.

This is yet another Dalziel/Pascoe mystery, and it’s just as much fun as
the others I’ve reviewed recently.

When Dalziel was a young detective, he was involved in one of the last
“Golden Age” country house murders. A guest was murdered, and the lord
of the manor and a young nanny were determined to be the murderers. The
lord was hanged, and the nanny sentenced to life in prison.

It’s now many, many years later. A TV documentary has raised doubts
about the nanny’s guilt, and after some cursory investigations by the
Home Office, she is freed pending a full police investigation into the
case. Early signs are that the result of this “full police
investigation” will be a report blackening the name of Dalziels late
friend and mentor, Wally Tallantire. Dalziel can’t be having this, and
despite being told to leave it alone undertakes an investigation of his
own–and begins to realize that some of the other folks who were at that
country house that deadly weekend are still very important people indeed.

It’s not as good as the best of the series, but I enjoyed it thoroughly;
also, it provides some of the long term background presumed by the later
book Arms and the Women.

After reading The Bohemian Murders, which was ok but not
great, I went
back to the beginning of the series to see if she started out any better.
Not really. Day uses the conceit of the liberated, spirited young woman
defying conventions alone against the world but it’s been done before and
done better as well. I just wasn’t all that interested in Fremont or her
typing service. And she isn’t even a very good sleuth. She stumbles onto
the solution to her little mystery rather than doing any good detecting.
Fire and Fog had the San Francisco earthquake as its background and
that was kind of interesting. Both these books would have been much
better if she had skipped the mystery stuff and just kept it on the level
of a romance. Her love interest, Michael, has many more possibilities for
development than Day gives him. Unfortunately, I don’t think I will read
any more in the series.

I finished reading this book to David the night before last. It’s one I
hadn’t read before; my sister bought it for Dave some months ago, because
my niece had loved it once upon a time. I was initially skeptical: a
vampire bunny that sucks the juice out of vegetables? But the name of
the third Bunnicula book (The Celery Stalks at Midnight)
encouraged me to give it a try.

Let’s see: the Monroe family find a young rabbit at the movie theater (a
showing of Dracula) and bring it home. The family cat,
Chester, is concerned; the rabbit sleeps all day and gets up only at
night, has fangs, and the family has been finding eerie white vegetables,
sucked dry of all juice and color, on the kitchen floor. The rabbit is
clearly a vampire! Something must be done! The tale is told by Harold
the family dog.

The book read easily and well, though it’s a real lightweight compared
to what we’ve been reading together. There were a number of good lines,
and a few nifty if offbeat references; Chester the cat, for example, is
named after G.K. Chesterton. How many kids’ books mention
G.K. Chesterton?

So, bottom line: not my favorite, by any means. But David liked it, and
I liked it well enough to pick up the next two books in the series.

Some time back I favorably reviewed March Upcountry, the tale
of a spoiled young prince who ends up stranded on a nasty planet with
nothing but his personal guard (a company of marines) and a handful of
other retainers. It’s military science fiction, but it’s also a tale of
growth, as Prince Roger MacClintock, detested by his guards, matures into
a capable leader the marines will follow anywhere.

March Upcountry gets Roger and his marines about a third of
the way to his destination, the planet’s only starport, which is
currently in enemy hands. This book takes up immediately afterward, and
suffers all of the problems the middle book in a trilogy usually has.
There’s only limited character development; Roger did most of his growing up
in the first book. There’s no real resolution; we get farther along the
path home, but that’s it. What there is is military detail aplenty, and
it’s very good if that’s what you like, but I’d been hoping for a bit
more.

Nevertheless, I’m quite looking forward to the third and final volume,
March to the Stars; I really want to see what happens when
Roger gets home.

It’s funny, but every time I read this (and I’ve read it three or four
times previously) it makes more sense and is more fun.

When I read this the first time (I was in junior high school, I think)
it didn’t make much sense to me. I got it at the local library, and I
think I must have gotten a badly translated or bowdlerized edition
because I remember some details from it that simply aren’t there
in the unabridged translation I have now. (Of course, I could be
dreaming.)

When I read it the second time it made more sense; but there were some
long digressions, as it seemed to me, that I just didn’t understand the
need for. And I remember it as being a bit of a slog between the good bits,
but I didn’t have that problem this time. Instead it just flowed from
beginning to end in the most lovely way.

Anyway, if you’ve never read The Three Musketeers, and
you think you know the story, you probably don’t. It’s a good one,
and Dumas (and his collaborators) write with romance, flair, and
great good humor.

It must have been in grade school that I first read Jane Eyre.
I suspect
my older sister had a copy and I snitched it. I have read it since, most
likely in high school, and then pretty much ignored it as a nice little
romance. Been there, done that. At the local Large Chain Bookstore, I
saw it on display with a bunch of other “classics” and I bought it, I am
ashamed to admit but it’s totally true, for the picture on the cover.
The Oxford Classics edition has the most interesting painting of a young
woman knitting with absurdly long needles and a cunning little yarn
basket hooked to her wrist. The needles must be at least a yard long and
she is working on a huge ribbed afghan with stripes in teal and white.
Saw the picture, had to have it.

I finally got around to rereading it last weekend. Why I dismissed this
book as a romance is beyond me because it is disturbingly weird. The
basic story is that Jane is an orphan taken in by her aunt by marriage,
treated badly, sent to a horrible charity school where she manages to
learn all sorts of accomplishments and then ends up as governess for a
child whose guardian is enigmatic to say the least and living in a
seemingly haunted house. Not to mention she has all these depressive
thought patterns that could seriously warrant therapy. That’s the first
half of the book. She ends up falling in love with her employer but finds
out at the altar, no less, that he has a lunatic for a wife and he was
just about to disgrace her with bigamy. She leaves in the middle of the
night, spends some time starving on the road and is taken in by a pastor
and his sisters. The pastor sets up a girl’s school for the local peasants
for her to teach in and then thru coincidence they find out that they are
cousins of some sort. He is going to India as a missionary and even
though he doesn’t love her he wants to marry her because she will be a
good wife to a missionary. She refuses and then hears her name called to
her on a dark and gloomy night on the wind by her former employer. She
goes back to see him and finds that his wife has set the house on fire
and he has been blinded and maimed in the fire. She marries him and they
live happily ever after.

Not only does Jane have really bad luck with the guys in her life, she
inhabits a world with of haunted houses and voices calling her in the
night. I used to think Emily Bronte was the sister whose work showed some
scary psychological disconnects with reality but after reading this one,
I think it must have been in the family. If they made a movie plotted
from the book instead of the normal Hollywood sunny, sanitized version,
it would seem more like a Stephen King movie than anything else. What a
weird book!