Book Report: At Knit’s End

OK, do you know the thing where you’ve just dropped by the library to drop off books, and you take a few minutes at the strategically-near-the-dropoff-slot rack of CDs, and you grab half-a-dozen of them because you’ve been driving in the car a lot lately and want something new, and then you are kind of embarrassed to just check out CDs because, you know, the librarians will think you don’t read, and you do read, but you don’t feel like browsing and besides you used up all your time looking through the CD rack, so you grab two or three books off the new book shelf more or less at random?

You don’t?

Neither do I. Of course not. Nobody would do that.

Anyway, I carefully chose At Knit’s End: Meditations for Women who Knit Too Much, by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee aka the Yarn Harlot for my reading pleasure. And it turned out to be a pleasure. Sure, it’s all recognition humor, which gets old after a while, and, of course, only about one out of five is really funny (which is a pretty good ratio, actually). Still, I got a pretty high quantity of chuckles, and a few guffaws. Ms. Pearl-McPhee (or should I say Ms. Harlot) spices up the recognition humor with a nice sense of the absurd, as when she points out that when you discover that you made a mistake in the pattern several inches back, you have three choices: ignore it and hope nobody notices, tink your way back to it for hours, or bury the whole thing under that oak tree in the back yard and never discuss it again.

I’d have to have a whole forest of oak trees.

Actually, much of her book is not about women (or men) who knit too much, but women who buy too much yarn. YHB is quite familiar with this: a yarn store appears to be a corner of perpetual hope and optimism, but is actually a quagmire of sunk costs. It’s worse, I think, for a sensitive male such as YHB, who on occasion feels he must actually purchase something to prove that he actually does knit, and isn’t cruising the yarn shop to pick up the cool chicks. But that’s not what Ms. Harlot is on about. She’s on about the behaviour pattern that may be more familiar to Gentle Readers of this Tohu Bohu from bookstores: something looks good in the store, really specifically speaking to a deep need of the browser, and then when you get it home you realize that you are already in the middle of three books, and you can’t face starting the new one just yet, so you just set it on that stack of books you have been meaning to read, and damn it fell over again and I’ll need to buy another bookcase.

Heck, yarn is easy to store. It squishes. We used yarn as packing material in the move. Books, though. Whew.

On an only marginally related note, evidently Yarnivore is closing, and never got to call me mother. I am disappointed. Now that I am in Southern New England, there is a chance (just) that I will make it to The City sometime this Winter or Spring, and I was looking forward to going in to the shop. Not that I need more yarn, or more needles, or more stitch counters, or more patterns, or ... ooh, that’s a great color!

chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.