My second gift to myself has also been a long-time coming. For years I have been circling Garthenor Yarns and their organic, sheepy goods. Their yarns are produced from sheep kept on organic lands and the yarn is spun with minimal processing and no dyeing. I finally cracked earlier this week and now my Shetland single ply laceweight in ‘light oatmeal’ has arrived.

Oh, but it is beautiful. It reminds me of the Faroese laceweights I have been using: the same self-assured simplicity and honesty that says ‘this has worked for centuries, so why change anything?’. This yarn is as far away from novelty yarns or instant gratification yarns as you can get – and for my money it is all the better for it. Although I’d love to see Karise knitted up in this sort of rustic yarn, I think I’ll end up writing an entirely new pattern for it.

Okay, I have also bought fabric but it is less an indulgence than a response to ‘oh dear, I have just thrown out half my wardrobe’. I did try to find tops I liked on the high street, but eventually I just went to Mandors and bought several yards of pretty polycotton in their January sale.

I intend to make several Art Teacher tunics – I’ll be tweaking the pattern, though. The original Art Teacher tunic had a zip which I confess never using as the tunic easily slips over my head. I’ll also lengthen it a tiny bit, make it slightly more A-line and I’ll try very hard not to have ironing mishaps during construction. Scout’s honour (I was never a Girl Scout).

Finally, I’m going to read James Joyce’s The Dead tonight. Why? The story takes place on January 6.

Joyce is one of those authors with whom I have not really made peace (having said that, I think that is everyone‘s relationship with Joyce). I have read Dubliners from which The Dead is taken. I have made headway into Ulysses and Portrait but never attempted Finnegans Wake. I could happily drown in a sea of Joyce’s words – Listen, a fourworded wavespeech: seesoo, hrss, rsseeiss, ooos – but I never connected with him the way I connected with TS Eliot.

Having said that, if you have not read any James Joyce and you recoil at the very idea, sit down and read The Dead. It is a fairly quick read, you won’t need a spreadsheet to help you understand it and – best of all – it is wonderful.

It seems, as one becomes older,
That the past has another pattern, and ceases to be a mere sequence—
Or even development: the latter a partial fallacy
Encouraged by superficial notions of evolution,
Which becomes, in the popular mind, a means of disowning the past.
The moments of happiness—not the sense of well-being,
Fruition, fulfilment, security or affection,
Or even a very good dinner, but the sudden illumination—
We had the experience but missed the meaning,
And approach to the meaning restores the experience
In a different form, beyond any meaning
We can assign to happiness. I have said before
That the past experience revived in the meaning
Is not the experience of one life only
But of many generations—not forgetting
Something that is probably quite ineffable:
The backward look behind the assurance
Of recorded history, the backward half-look
Over the shoulder, towards the primitive terror.

Today works by James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Henri Bergson and James Frazer all enter the public domain. All eminent modernists or people whose work influenced High Modernism a great deal.

I am perusing The Dalkey Archive Press – that great publisher and re-issuer of modernist works (among other things) – whilst pondering what to pick up. I have pledged to read a modest twenty books this year – a modest amount as I want to read better books, not more books. I have begun by finally reading Lionel Shriver’s We Need To Talk About Kevinwhich is hopefully a step in the right direction? I am 150 pages into it and it reads like, well, a coiled-up snake waiting to strike (what an unsuccessful simile!). I have several books lined up: The Picture of Dorian Gray(in a beautiful edition given to me by D.), Jamaica Inn, and James Robertson’s And the Land Lay Stillare the first three.

2012 is off to a quiet, thoughtful start. This is good.

2011 was also the year I finally signed up for GoodReads which influenced my reading a great deal. As my profile shows, I found adding books somewhat addictive. I began reading more and – crucially – I began reading better books. I began using my local library a lot more and I kept track of my to-read list via GR too. Huzzah for getting organised!

The worst reads: Alan Hollinghurst disappointed me big time with the Man Booker long-listed The Stranger’s Child. Hollinghurst is one of the finest writers of his generation, but TSC just did not deliver. It read like a reiteration of everything he has ever written filled with token, tired literary allusions. Emma  Donoghue’s 2010 short-listed Room made me angry. The Testament of Jessie Lamb was long-listed for the Man Booker prize this year. The first chapter was spectacular: a dystopian novel with a feminist bent. Oh yes! Unfortunately life is cruel and the rest of the book was a poorly-constructed and badly-written teen novel. I felt like giving up reading after Zadie Smith’s On Beauty. And don’t get me started on Lev Grossman’s The Magicians. I really read far too many bad books this year.

The honourable mentions: Margaret Atwood’s In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imaginationwas uneven but well worth my time. While Atwood writing about other authors is not her at her most interesting, I really enjoyed the section dealing with her childhood and the general overview of genre.  Jasper Fforde redeemed himself with both the delightfully metafictional and whimsical One of Our Thursdays is Missing and the far more sinister Shades of Grey. Jonathan Stroud’s The Ring of Solomon was good – Stroud is quietly turning himself into a very reliable source of entertaining YA fantasy novels – and actually the book rekindled my desire to read. Isherwood’s Goodbye To Berlin and Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time were both unsurprisingly solid. Finally, Susanna Jones’ The Earthquake Birdwas a quirky, psychologically interesting read which reminded me of Murakami mixed with early Iain Banks.

The very good reads: After a year of mostly disappointing books, I re-read a few of my favourite novels.

AS Byatt’s Possession: A Romance was one of those re-reads. I love it with quiet intensity as only a lonely girl who grew up surrounded by books could love a book about lonely people surrounded by books who in turn love reading about lonely people surrounded by books. Another re-read was Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. It floored me.

My best new read of the year was China Miéville’s Embassytown. How interesting that in a year when mainstream literary fiction faltered so spectacularly a so-called genre novel took on all the hard questions and pulled it off flawlessly. Embassytown is not only incredibly well-written and tightly-plotted – it is also a challenging, sophisticated read that delves into the philosophy of language and notions of identity. It is absolutely splendid and deserves as much praise as possible. How very silly that some people will not give it a try because it is speculative fiction, gasp.

Moving Forward: I am not such a fool that I will announce how many books I will read next year. I will crash and burn out if I make any such pledges. However, I do hope that I will read far better books next year. This year was a real downer in terms of quality – even the books I thought would be decent reads turned out to be on the dubious side of things (HOLLINGHURST!)

Margaret Atwood’s In Other Worlds mentioned the concept of ‘slipstream’ books which can be ‘defined‘ as “the fiction of strangeness”. I looked into what kind of book that may be and the loosely-defined canon include so many of my  favourite books and authors that I will probably use the ‘canon’ as a source of inspiration (sans John Barth). I have never been able to pinpoint what type of books I enjoy but I might have a new vocabulary. We shall see.

(2009 entry; 2010 entry)

I first read Jane Eyre when I was fourteen. I had this mad, mad notion of ‘reading all the classics’ before I turned fifteen. My school library had the Danish equivalent of Everyman’s Library, and so I just started with the first book in the series. I did not get far, of course, because I read indiscriminately and without any real understanding of what I read. Jane Eyre was one of the books I did read (alongside Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights) and I remember thinking it was ‘okay but a bit dull’.

Then I decided to revisit Eyre a few weeks ago and I am so very glad that I did. It took my breath away. What an intelligent, passionate, fierce book it is. Then I took it upon myself to watch a few adaptations of Eyre: the recent Wasikowska/Fassbender film was difficult to pin down (this is a compliment of sorts) whilst the 2006 BBC mini-series was atrocious and hammy. Eyre is an oddball of a novel – it is easy to describe it as an exterior novel because so much happens on the surface with storms raging and mad women running around, but I actually read it as an extremely interior novel with so much thinking going on. No wonder it is difficult to adapt satisfyingly. I won’t leave it another twenty years between reads.

I finished my Red Cardigan of Doom during my Eyre marathon. Want to see?

Pattern: Patsy by Kim Hargreaves
Yarn: Rowan Baby Alpaca DK
Verdict: Mneh.

I started this cardigan last summer and finished knitting it around Christmas 2010. I did some provisional seaming just to see how it looked, and it was Not Good. The sleeves were particularly problematic because I have quite long arms and there was some weird chicken-fillet-dangling-in-the-wind action going on somewhere south of my elbows. Don’t ask. It wasn’t good, mkay? So this cardigan languished and languished until I finally decided to perform some sweater surgery (complete with scissors and assorted weirdness). I finished the cardigan on Wednesday and wore it to my meeting on Thursday. I still haven’t found the buttons I bought for it last year, so I’m just wearing it with a shawl pin.

And I’m really unsure about it. The yarn is heavenly soft, drapes so beautifully and is wonderfully warm – I’d use it again in a heartbeat – but I’m really not sure if the cardigan suits me. I do like Kim Hargreaves’ patterns but this one was perhaps not the right choice for me.. or maybe my body shape just doesn’t work with Kim Hargreaves patterns which is also a point worth remembering.

I have another Finished Object to blog but that is for another day..

And I think that is why Emma Donoghue’s Room makes me so damn angry.

A brief synopsis: Room is the story of a young girl who is kidnapped by a loner and kept in a tiny room in his back-garden. She gives birth to a boy and raises him within the small room where they are at the mercy of the loner. The story echoes recent real-life crime cases – Josef Fritzl and his daughter, Natascha Kampusch, and Jaycee Lee Dugard – but is a work of fiction detailing life within confinement and subsequent events. Room has been shortlisted for the Man Booker prize and has won many major literary awards.

The subject matter is not the problem. Although it would be easy to step into “misery literature” territory, Room sidesteps this neatly by leaving out most of the actual abuse. Indeed, Donoghue is not preoccupied by the grisly details (which may disappoint some readers, I am sure) but instead she wants to explore how human beings respond to extraordinary situations and to each other. She employs the five-year-old boy, Jack, as the narrator of the story – undoubtedly to defamiliarise to an already unreal scenario.

And Jack as the narrator is the problem with Room.

I can understand the lure of using Jack as the narrator as it avoids a lot of sticky situations for Donoghue as a writer (as discussed above) but Jack the five-year-old narrator is wildly inconsistent. He uses abstract concepts like “sarcasm” in context and says “hippopotami” with correct declension – but Donoghue also has him saying “I finded him” and “I knowed.” So, the five year old kid can wield correct Greek grammar, but not use standard English strong verbs?

Russian literary critics used to differ between fabula and syuzhet: fabula is what happens; syuzhet is how it is told. Emma Donoghue has a firm grasp on the fabula part of her story, but Jack-as-narrator is a structural (syuzhet) problem that messes up Room in a very big way. It is not just that his language usage is woefully all-over-the-place but the pacing is off, any characterisation is by necessity very flat, and the internal logic has extremely big flaws.

And, so yes, reading Room made me angry.

I thought it was awful.

I have been reading a lot lately, but I don’t write much about the books I read for some reason. As always, feel free to catch up with my reads on GoodReads – the widget is to the right.

My first thought? “It’s a geek thing.” Emme responded to say that my response was a cop-out, it had to be something a bit more profound.  And so I’d like to ask you, dear readers, why this overlap between scifi & fantasy geeks and knitters?

(From my own observations, there are also huge overlaps called “librarians & knitting” and “GLBT-orientation & knitting”, but we’ll have those discussions another day..)

I like reading books, full stop. I like imagination. I like books that take our mundane lives and turn them inside out; books that take our world and expand upon it. Many of my favourite books tend towards the speculative end of the spectrum with a healthy dollop of misanthropy and dystopia. And I’m horrifyingly entertained by dragons, airships, and ray guns (not necessarily in the same book).

And I knit.

And I think it has to do with imagination and creative space. Knitting is just a ball of string which you loop together in a manner which you find pleasing. You can have an entire jumper in a ball of wool: it’s bigger on the inside, if you like. You can knit optical illusions, crochet ray guns and buy steampunk-themed patterns. And make your own chainmail, of course. All these things that you can create yourself whilst playing with numbers and watching Game of Thrones – what’s not to like?

(Or could it just be that fantasy/scifi happen to be very, very popular genres?)

I still need to steek and block it, but I’m very happy with how it turned out. I also learned that I have to watch my tension on the diagonal stripes section as it does pull in a bit. I cannot wait to start knitting the jumper in the DK weight.

The yarn is very soft – softer than I thought it would be, actually. The red shade – Bainbridge – has lovely tiny flecks of orange running through it. I love that about it. However, I’m wondering if the single-row stripes shouldn’t be a third colour? Navy? Apple green? Brown? Brown might just work.

We watched Roman Polanski’s The Ninth Gate which I remember seeing in my favourite Copenhagen art-house cinema back in the late 1990s. I remembered it as a real Euro-trash turkey and I was right. However, I had forgotten its high camp value which went some way towards making it watchable. Look! Depp has grey temples! Now he doesn’t! Oooh, the bad stunt double is flying and you totally cannot see the wire-work!

I remember liking the book, The Dumas Club, on which The Ninth Gate was based. I also remember the book having a great of interesting sub-plots which had been completely exercised from the Polanski film – most notably the The Three Musketeers sub-plot which gave Pérez-Reverte’s novel its title. Oh, when bad films happen to decent books.

Speaking of books, I am current reading Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle. I shall be forever grateful to Lori that she made me pick up a Vonnegut book in the first place. I’m having a slow day, a day off, and I shall now return to my favourite reading space with a cuppa tea, my favourite blanket and Cat’s Cradle. August is off to a good start.

PS. thank you for your comments on swatching/not swatching. You are a bad bunch – just as bad as me! – for not always swatching!

Recent events in Casa Bookish:

• We went to see the new Riverside Transport Museum here in Glasgow. It is smaller than you think and the interior is painted a strange lime-green hue which makes everybody look jaundiced – but it is an interesting space. It’ll be good to see more imaginative projects shoot up alongside the Clyde river.
• When Jonathan Stroud’s Bartimaeus: The Ring of Solomon is the third-most intellectually challenging book I have read this year, you know I’m in trouble. It was hugely enjoyable, actually, but I feel guilty for not reading Clever Stuff. Maybe I should consult this.
• Don’t knit lace when you are tired and stressed. Trust me on this one.
• As a household of news junkies, D and I have been glued to BBC News 24 and The Guardian’s coverage of the UK phone-hacking scandal. MetaFilter has a great primer if you are unaware of the scandal (and stay for the comments).
• I had a stressful day trying to upgrade my blog software which turned out to be incompatible with my host company’s servers. As you can tell, I managed to work things out, but I’m always thankful for UK hosting suggestions.

Glasgow had her annual Two Days of Summer but we are back to heavy rain, grey skies, and woolly-wear appropriate temperatures, huzzah! I am tempted to re-start Fenris which I had to rip out as I had grossly mis-calculated my measurements vs sweater measurements. Are you still working on your summer knitting?

Mostly I have been working on my jumper, Fenris.

I have just finished the body; it includes so fairly dramatic waist-shaping, short-rows to shield my lower back (which is always cold) and short-row bust shaping ala Knotions’ excellent guide. I am now working on the sleeves using the method I ‘unvented’ when knitting Snorri. I suspect I will also snip off the bottom ribbing and reknit it again like I did with Snorri. We shall see.

Fenris will have a circular yoke with some colourwork. Fenris is, of course, the monstrous wolf in Norse mythology which bit off Tyr‘s hand. While I am not planning on having disembodied hands nor wolves roaming around the yoke, I am idly pondering some Norse-inspired motifs. It all depends upon the colours I will have at hand. I only have the one colour in the yarn I’m using but its texture and appearance matches New Lanark Aran fairly well, so I have been digging through my stash to find suitable oddments (successfully locating some green, grey and brown bits).

Which brings me to: If any of you have oddments of New Lanark Aran (5g – 10g) in pinks, cream or blues – or in a similar yarn – please do get in touch and we can work out a swap or something. I refuse to spend £10+ just for a few yards of contrast colour.

I’m still working on my Fancy but I think I’m going to turn it into a shrug. Despite swatching and going down a size, it is still coming out huge. Future plans include writing up a couple of patterns (two freebies, one non-freebie), sewing a few skirts, and hopefully then have cleared out my knitting basket in time for the winter collections to arrive. Mildly ambitious..

A few recent favourites from Ravelry:

• Paper Daleks: this one caused a minor discussion in Casa Bookish. (I’m still not going to knit you a Doctor Who scarf, Dave. It doesn’t mean I don’t love you. It just means I think it’d be a great beginner’s project and I’d be very happy to teach you how to knit)
• Cactus Blossom: I love the vibrant green colour coupled with Noro. Yum.
• Julia’s BSJ: So awesome-looking in Kauni. I’m leaning towards making one for my pregnant colleague. I do not know that many pregnant women so it’s now or never..
• Vintage St James: So gorgeous, it makes me want to make a striped sweater with a big kick-arse bow.
• Grey Miette: How pretty! How wearable! I must, must, knit myself a grey cardigan!

I love the public library service for what it did for me as a child and as a student and as an adult. I love it because its presence in a town or a city reminds us that there are things above profit, things that profit knows nothing about, things that have the power to baffle the greedy ghost of market fundamentalism, things that stand for civic decency and public respect for imagination and knowledge and the value of simple delight.

Philip Pullman reacting to UK library closures