{"id":15096,"date":"2015-07-15T16:55:05","date_gmt":"2015-07-15T20:55:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2015\/07\/15\/15096.html"},"modified":"2018-03-13T19:10:14","modified_gmt":"2018-03-14T00:10:14","slug":"book-report-boys-dont-knit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2015\/07\/15\/book-report-boys-dont-knit\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Report: Boys Don’t Knit"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Obviously, I picked up Boys Don’t Knit<\/a>, by T.S. Easton, because I am a boy who knits. Done.\n

It turns out that it’s quite a good book. Funny, silly, rude, sweet, outrageous. I’ll keep an eye out for the second one in the series.\n

I’m a little curious about the editing for the American edition—this is a very very English book, and it’s jarring when he talks about his father offering to take him to a soccer game. Does Macmillan US really think that American teens would be confused by references to football? Are they right? There were a couple of other places where there were what felt like Americanisms stuck in between the Tesco and the tea cozy, if you know what I mean. On the other hand, I’m told that British English now has Americanisms stuck in like that particularly amongst teens (such as this book’s first-person narrator) so perhaps a British reader of the American edition would find it totally smooth. Dunno, it seemed off to me. Although the choice not to change lollipop lady<\/i> to the American crossing guard<\/i> also confused me, so what do I know.\n

This also connected to a mini-gripe about the knitting talk—mostly it was marvelous, with our main character a kind of savant<\/i> who has to visualize the whole pattern in his head before he begins, and then knits with machine-like precision. Not my way, but I loved reading it; the knitting was an extension of his character. I’m not convinced by the pattern for the easy-knit huge-stitch hoodie, I must admit, but hey, there’s a lot of stuff on ravelry<\/a> I’m not convinced by, with pictures and everything, and that’s presumably real. As an idea<\/i> for a pattern by a teenaged asbo who discovers a gift for the knitting needles, it works. No, my gripe is that in discussing a completed (or nearly-completed) knitted item, he several times says that there were no dropped stitches at all, and I think once says that an item knitted quickly was good, even though there were a few dropped stitches. I don’t know if a dropped stitch<\/i> is something different in American Knitting than in British, but in my experience, a dropped stitch is a significant calamity which is likely to leave a large unsightly hole in the finished product. A twisted stitch is more the sort of thing I think a good knitter in a hurry might do, uneven cabling, or there’s probably a name for it when your stranded colorwork has the wrong tension and puckers the fabric, right? Anyway, dropped stitch<\/i> clanged on my American ears quite badly.\n

But those are minor gripes in what was otherwise a fun YA sort of read.\n

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Which Your Humble Blogger was also disappointed that there wasn’t a pattern in the back of the book.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[194],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15096","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-report"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15096","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15096"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15096\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16502,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15096\/revisions\/16502"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15096"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15096"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15096"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}