Books about knitting?

[jackandahat]

What are your favourite books about knitting? Not pattern books, but books talking about knitting - things like Yarn Harlot's books or It's My Party And I'll Knit If I Want To.

What do you like about them?

Any you'd say to avoid? (I know some of that is going to be personal taste, but I'm interested to know why.)

Comments

[jenna_thorn]

I love the Yarn Harlot's books and have chased my husband around the house, reading bits to him. I've read bits of her essays over the phone to my mother and to friends.

I was disappointed in Sweater Quest: My Year of knitting Dangerously.

It's a neat idea - she sets out to knit one of Alice Starmore's fair isle sweaters and documents the process, but the later chapters are more about name dropping as she travels to visit known knitting personalities to talk about her project and endlessly angsting about whether substituting yarns invalidates the authenticity of the project.

I'm a fan of knitting, and I'm a bigger fan of biting off more than you can chew, and who hasn't looked at Starmore's stuff and thought, Can I climb that mountain? (I've got a tag on Ravelry of doihavetheballs for stuff like that - anything requiring steeking, anything with more than ten colors, anything that requires more than 2K meters of yarn, anyanyanything in threadweight, are you kidding me?), so the idea is right up my alley.

But the second half of the book felt repetitive in her resentment of Starmore's attitude toward her fanbase (Starmore comes across as vindictive and petty and there's got to be a second side to that coin) and self-congratulatory and irritating about setting up artificial obstacles. But that may be rolling my eyes at her insistance on using original yarns and not allowing any improvisation.

Maybe because I call improvisation personalization. Maybe because her obsession with authenticity struck me as an artificial barrier, a created dramatic conflict, a false restriction. I just don't think that she and I knit for the same reasons. Quite honestly, I have heart stopping moments of terror every single time I kitchner; I don't need to set myself a task of hunting down one dye lot of an obsolete yarn to keep interest. Color changes in self striping yarn are interesting enough. I'm easy that way. 8-)

[jackandahat]

I've read bits of Yarn Harlot out to my housemate - she doesn't knit but she is Canadian.

What you're saying mirrors a lot of the reviews I've seen of that - I thought it sounded interesting so I looked it up, and... yeah, a lot of people loved the first half then wanted to shake sense into her by the second. Someone said it sounded like the writer had got bored of things by the end, and it reflected in the book.

[geeksdoitbetter]

"I just don't think that she and I knit for the same reasons."

~nods~

that's because, she knits to write books

she came to my LYS and was mildly charming, but didn't have more than one note to pipe: out of date yarns!