My knitting has been moving around a lot this past week. I am working on a cabled baptismal gown for Amelia, a pair of socks for Jerome, Yathrib (my cable edged jacket design for the Malabrigo Freelance Pattern Project), and an adult sized sample of Mozarab. I did a lot of tinking this week, too, mostly to correct dumb mistakes. So, there is not a ton of progress to share. We have a bit of a drive this week for a couple fun events, so I am hoping to get some more progress made while in the car.

Now that my sabbatical month is over, I am working more on my own designs, and will work on the socks and baptismal gown largely on the weekends. The rights to self-publish Mozarab return to me in October, so I would like to be ready to do that, with my own photography. Imbat is supposed to be published at the end of October, also, and I would like to get one of the last two designs in my Tradewinds Color Collection published in the second week of November. Initially, I was not planning on participating in the GAL again this year, but it is the tenth anniversary, so I think it might be fun and worthwhile to do it one more time. The SAL is so much smaller, which makes it easier to participate and get to know the participants. I'm thinking of asking my fellow admins for that if we might hold a more informal finish along of past SAL projects, perhaps in January or February.

My capacity for serious reading has taken a nosedive, to mix metaphors here, and so I read three more of the Crime with the Classics series, Bloodstains with Bronte, Cyanide with Christie and Death with Dostoevsky, and spent precious little time with Milk: The Surprising Story of Milk Through the Ages. The kids and I picked up Chronicles of Avonlea again and have been enjoying our visits to Prince Edward Island

My objections to the Crime with the Classics series are still there, but I have been enjoying the stories. So, I recommend them, but with a caveat. However, this fourth book had a change in it that strikes me as lazy and thoughtless. The main character, Emily, is a professor at Reed College in Portland, OR. The first three books take place almost entirely in a thinly veiled Rockaway Beach, called Stony Beach in the book (even the drive time from the other nearby towns is exactly the same). A few years of establishing that her college is Reed College and three other books which make frequent reference to this, are dashed entirely in the fourth, when the author made the decision to change the college from Reed College to an entirely fictional Bede College. She says that her reasoning was, in part, that she was an alumna of the school, but in the 1970s, and the buildings have shifted and changed, so she didn't want to get the details wrong, but a visit to the school or even online research on their website and mapping apps would have solved that. Her other reason was that she says she didn't want to sully her memories of the place with details of murder. Well, why didn't she think of that three books and several years before?! So, now the reader has this jarring change, with a thin excuse for it, that just makes her sound lazy and a little foolish. The fifth book seems to take place entirely in England, and she officially retires after the fourth, so I don't know that it will come up again. So, why am I continuing to read these? I'm not entirely sure. Like I said, the writing is good, and she writes to an audience she expects to have some literary background, so she doesn't dumb it down or talk down to the reader. I love happy, little murders, and this one is that, which includes faith, knitting, and places with which I am familiar. The moral issues I have with them are still there, and it is getting annoying to keep reading how Emily is a nouveau riche heiress. That doesn't need to be explicitly stated. Or at least, not after the first book when she inherits. There are also some clumsy references to modern "social issues" that don't seem to flow entirely fluidly with the books. They seem forced and are much more like a sermon than she portrays in the scenes involving church. Maybe I am asking too much from modern, light fiction. Nobody claims this as great literature, just a lot of fun.

Linking to Unraveled Wednesday.

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Labels: Around the World Stitch Along, Books, Design, Giftalong, Governor Inslee Needs a Frozen Fish to the Forehead, Grandbaby, Homemaking, Knitting, WIP, Yarn Along

// posted by Ranee @ Arabian Knits @ 9:06 AM