Book Review - Knitting Yarns, ed. by Ann Hood

 

For some reason I had been unaware of this book, published in 2014, until recently.  When I discovered my local library had it, I requested it because it was a book of essays on knitting (and other fibre crafts, as well.)

All of the contributors are writers, and each of them has told a 'story' about knitting - how it has helped and enriched their lives, even when it might not be themselves doing it.

I knew Barbara Kingsolver was a well known writer, although I had not actually read anything by her (that may change now!).  Other writers in the book were known to me, like Sue Grafton, but most of them I did not know much about.

This has been a very pleasant book to read.  The essays are fairly short, which suits my current attention span.  Some are amusing, some tug at the heart strings.  Some are eloquent, some more 'essay' or 'scholarly', some delving into the history of knitting or the psychology of doing repetitive 'work'.

I'm not quite finished the book yet, but have found more than enough of interest and value to highly recommend it.  Rather than say more about it, I'm going to include the final paragraph from Kingsolver's contribution.

"And in the gloaming, when the ewes high up on the pasture suddenly raise their heads at the sight of you, conceding to come down as a throng in their rockinghorse gait, surrendering under the dog-press to the barn-tendered mercy of nightfall.  It starts where everything starts, with the weather.  The muffleblind snowstorm, the dingle springs, the singular pursuit of cud, the fibrous alchemy of the herd spinning grass into wool.  This is all your business.  Hands plunged into a froth of yarn are as helpless as hands thrust into a lover's hair, for they are divining the grass-pelt life of everything:  the world.  The sunshine, heavenly photosynthetic host, sweet leaves of grass all singing the fingers electric that tingle to brace the coming winter, charged by the plied double helices of all creatures that have prepared and justly survived on the firmament of patience and swaddled children.  It's all of a piece, knitting.  All one thing."

Nuff said.