2011 Retrospective: Best Books of the Year

It's that time again: the end of the year, when I take a moment to look back over the past year in the dog-eat-dog world of yarn.  Let's start our retrospective with a look at some notable knitting books published in 2011.

We start off with Clara Parkes' excellent The Knitter's Book of Socks: The Yarn Lover's Ultimate Guide to Creating Socks That Fit Well, Feel Great, and Last a Lifetime (Potter Craft), the third in her "Knitter's Book" series. Clara does a great job explaining the technical requirements of a good sock yarn, then presents a beautiful selection of sock patterns from top designers, including Melissa Morgan-Oakes, Cat Bhordi and Ann Budd.

While we're on the topic of socks, Barb Brown's Knitting Knee-Highs: Sock Styles from Classic to Contemporary (Krause) presents a knockout selection of patterns for knee-highs (with pattern variations showing the socks in ankle- and/or crew-length, too).  Lots of beautiful stranded knitting, texture, cables, and lace make for a lovely collection for the sock-knitter. Sock knitters will also want to check out Ann Budd's Sock Knitting Master Class: Innovative Techniques + Patterns from Top Designers (Interweave).

Did someone say lace?  Three standout lace books made their debut this year, each with its own sensibility.  Wendy Johnson's Wendy Knits Lace: Essential Techniques and Patterns for Irresistible Everyday Lace (Potter Craft) presents clear technical instructions for the beginner, and a terrific selection of patterns using fingering-weight and heavier yarns.  The talented Teva Durham presented her own lace collection with a trendier edge; in  Loop-d-Loop Lace: More Than 30 Novel Lace Designs for Knitters (STC) she riffs on standard lace techniques and creates some really interesting and gorgeous garments.  I haven't seen The Haapsalu Scarf yet, but based on Siiri Reiman and Aime Edasi's previous book on Haapsalu shawls, I feel confident this one's just as good.

I'm a big fan of Connie Chang Chinchio, and her first book Textured Stitches: Knitted Sweaters and Accessories with Smart Details (Interweave) is hot off the presses. I like the way Connie combines classic, elegant silhouettes with interesting details, and you'll find some great, wearable and stylish choices here. Wendy Bernard's second book, Custom Knits 2: More Top-Down and Improvisational Techniques (STC), presents another good-looking collection of sweaters knit in the round from the top down, along with technical information to help adapt patterns for a more customized fit.

Noro fans, rejoice:  two gorgeous books devoted to all-Noro designs were published this year by Sixth and Spring.  Knit Noro: 30 Designs in Living Color contained a mix of items from sweaters to accessories, and  Knit Noro: Accessories: 30 Colorful Little Knits is devoted entirely to smaller items. Both contain terrific selections of patterns that make the most of Noro's self-striping and vivid color combinations, and both are elegant enough to serve as coffee table books.

It was a dream of Elizabeth Zimmerman's to publish a book devoted to garter stitch. Even though EZ is no longer with us, her daughter Meg Swanson was able to compile a selection of patterns in garter stitch from Elizabeth's notes.  Knit One Knit All (Schoolhouse Press) contains the kind of creative and fun projects that EZ is known for. Meg Swanson and Amy Detjen also have a book on stranded knitting that has just gone on sale, and although I haven't seen it yet, I expect it to also be a winner.

Knitters hungry for technical instruction had some great choices, including Extreme Double Knitting by Alasdair Post-Quinn (Cooperative Press), which explores in great detail the technique of double-knitting; Judy Becker's Beyond Toes: Knitting Adventures With Judy's Magic Cast-On uses Judy's Magic Cast-on as a jumping point for designs; and Mary Jane Mucklestone's 200 Fair Isle Motifs: A Knitter's Directory (Interweave), provides a comprehensive collection of traditional fair isle motifs. Back in print: Alice Starmore's Alice Starmore's Charts for Color Knitting: New and Expanded Edition (Dover).

For newer knitters, Melissa Morgan-Oakes' Teach Yourself Visually: Circular Knitting (Wiley) provides plenty of photographs and step-by-step instruction on how to knit tubes rather than flat pieces. Once you've been knitting for a while, it's easy to forget how confusing knitting in the round can seem to a newbie, so this book would be extremely helpful for a relatively new knitter.

Last but not least is Anna Hrachovec's Teeny-Tiny Mochimochi: More Than 40 Itty-Bitty Minis to Knit, Wear, and Give (Potter Craft), a whimsical collection of tiny little knitted objects -- everything from volcanoes to robots to armadillos.

With all the concern about the longevity of traditional publishing, it was good to see a strong crop of knitting books released during the past year (and I've only mentioned a handful of the ones that were publishedin 2011). I was happy to see that treasured old titles are being reprinted and in some cases updated (in addition to some of the Alice Starmore titles, look for Principles of Knitting by June Hemmons Hiatt in early 2012, and a revised edition of Folk Socks by Nancy Bush is expected out any minute now).  There seems to be a growing trend of creating knitting books tailored to a specific yarn, such as the Noro and Cascade books, and the renewed emphasis on techniques is also encouraging.

Next up: a look at yarns we said hello and good-bye to this year.....

Now where was I? End of the summer Book Report

It's been a good long while since I told you what I was reading, so I guess it's time to play catch-up. Here is what I read at the end of the summer, for July, August and September:

The Dark Enquiry by Deanna Raybourn, was another entry in the lightweight Lady Julia Grey series. In this installment, Lady Julia is a newlywed, and she and her new husband Brisbane have just returned to London. Lady Julia's brother seeks out Brisbane's help but swears him to secrecy about the nature of his problem, which only serves to whet Lady Julia's curiosity. She ends up following Brisbane to a gentlemen's club -- not the kind featuring pole dancers, but the kind where seances are held. Good escapist fun set in Victorian England.

I next went on a veritable binge of Inspector Montalbano mysteries, beginning with Voice of the Violin and continuing through the series to August Heat.  (Remember, this is over three months, including two beach vacations!)  I really enjoyed this series, featuring a world-weary Sicilian police inspector who has to figure out tricky ways to work within the corrupt and complex Italian justice system. If you like mysteries, I'd highly recommend these -- they are suspenseful and well-written, and Camilleri does a wonderful job evoking the atmosphere of the imaginary village he has created. I was lucky my local library had so many of the books in this series, as I plowed through a bunch of them while on vacation.

I moved back to the cold, forbidding world of Scandinavian crime with Karin Fossum's Bad Intentions.  The book begins with the death of a troubled teen named Jon Moreno.  He jumps into a lake while on a weekend trip and drowns, before his two friends have time to save him.  Over the course of the book, we learn a lot more about all three young men, in more of a psychological study than a police procedural. Creepy and heavy on the psychological tension.

Then it was back to WWI-era England with A Bitter Truth by Charles Todd.  I am a fan of Todd's Ian Rutledge series; this is a second, more recent mystery series set in the same WWI-era time period, but featuring an army nurse named Bess Crawford. This is the third book in the series and I think the series is getting better each time out.  While on leave from duty, Bess returns to her London flat, only to find a woman huddled in the doorway. She invites her in and gets sucked into the woman's life. The woman claims she was beaten by her husband, but wants to returm home -- if Bess will go with her. Once you get past the unlikeliness of a WWI nurse giving up precious leave to accompany a virtual stranger to her country home, the mystery gets interesting.

GKIYH fan Mary Kay has been recommending the Armand Gamache series of mysteries, set in Quebec, and I am glad I took her up on the recommendation.  This summer I read two Gamache mysteries, first Bury Your Dead, in which Gamache spends some time in Montreal recovering from the violent gunfight that ended a recent investigation. This book was really moving in the way it travels back and forth from the past to the present, slowly revealing the events that changed Gamache's life.  The most recent book in the series, A Trick of the Light, didn't affect me as deeply, but was still very good, centering around the death of a thoroughly unpleasant art critic in the garden of a rural village.

I did take some time out from the mysteries to read a few good non-fiction books.  I really enjoyed In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin by Erik Larson. Larson seeks to answer the very compelling question of why the U.S. and other countries either didn't realize what Hitler's intentions were earlier in time.  Thus Larson's book begins in 1933, when William Dodd, a Chicago professor, is named ambassador to Berlin.  Dodd moved his family to Berlin (even shipping his car overseas so he wouldn't have to buy a new one while there) and we see how reports of German atrocities and aggression are tempered by the German government's assurances that Hitler means no harm.  Especially striking is the way in which Dodd, an outsider to the diplomatic corps, has misgivings that keep getting bigger even as folks back in the US don't seem to be paying much attention to what he has to say.

I also read an interesting biography of Mary Boleyn, the infamous Queen Anne Boleyn's sister, called (of course) Mary Boleyn: The Mistress of Kings by noted historian Alison Weir.  Mary Boleyn was the subject in recent years of a lot of historical fiction, and Weir takes a no-nonsense look at what is known about Boleyn (not much) and what has been invented about her (most of what people think they know about her). It's a good book, although the big problem is that when you're writing about a woman who lived so long ago and didn't leave much of a written record about herself, there's only so much to say. Weir ends up with more to say about what Mary Boleyn was not, than what she was, which makes the topic a bit unsatisfying (but is not the fault of the author).

Last non-fiction offering was grim but fascinating.  A Thousand Lives: The Untold Story of Hope, Deception, and Survival at Jonestown by Julia Scheeres is a history of the Jonestown massacre.  Scheeres herself was raised by a fundamentalist Christian family and as a teen, she and her brother were sent to a Christian reform school in the Dominican Republic.  Her perspective gives her, I think, a special empathy for the victims of Jim Jones, and inspired some of the survivors to speak to her for the first time on the record.  She pored over thousands of pages of newly-released government documents, too, for a thorough look at what happened and why.

I continued to read some good young adult books.  In July, I read Revolution, by Jennifer Donnelly. I'd read good reviews of this book and I thought I'd give it a try, perhaps then recommending it to my 13 yr old. I really liked the book, which is set both in the present time and during the French Revolution.   I have since learned that the author is a fellow graduate of the University of Rochester (we probably overlapped by 2 years) which made me like her even more.  When I had the chance to  scored a free copy of a book called The Wild Rose by the same author, I jumped.  While I enjoyed The Wild Rose, it was more of a sprawling family saga (intended for adults) and was the third in a series (I hadn't read any of the earlier ones).  It took place in the years around World War I, and the story stretched from the mountains of Asia and Africa to London to Turkey.

Little Miss spent much of the summer rereading the Harry Potter series, and so in solidarity with her, I reread the first 2 books of the Harry Potter series.  I'd read them when they first came out, but it was great fun to enjoy them again, especially given my daughter's enthusiasm for them.

Somewhere along the way, I picked up a copy of The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane by Katherine Howe, for some absolutely ridiculous price like three bucks on a remainder table.  I enjoyed the book, which tells the story of a grad student cleaning out her grandmother's house, only to find there is a family connection to one of the witches involved in the Salem witch trials.  I felt like I'd read something similar to this before, but it was a good beach book and went fast.

Phew, I read a lot this summer, didn't I?  I found The Devotion of Suspect X by Keigo Higashino at the library, and I'd read some good reviews of it. (It won the Japanese equivalent of the Booker Prize.)  This was one of those books that grabbed me right from the beginning, and I read it in a really short period of time because it was so suspenseful.  The book is about a Japanese woman who accidentally kills her nasty ex-husband, then disposes of the body with the help of her next-door neighbor (who she doesn't really know very well until this point).  The plot is twisting and intricate and I guess you'd describe it as a psychological thriller as much as a police procedural.

The Sixth Lamentation by William Brodrick, is a thriller that begins when an old man asks a monk what to do when the world turns against you. The monk tells him to seek sanctuary. The old man turns out to be a Nazi war criminal and he does seek sanctuary (in the historic sense of the word) in the monk's priory. The monk -- who is a former barrister -- is ordered by his chapter to investigate the old man's case. This was a good thriller which flips back and forth between WWII and the present day.  A quick, suspenseful read.

Last on my list was a book nominated for the Gold Dagger Award (given to the best mystery novel by a crime writers' association),  The Cypress House by Michael Koryta. This novel deserves the word "gripping":  as it begins, we see a Depression-era drifter is on a train to find work at a Civilian Conservation Corps site in Florida.  The drifter, named Arlen Wagner, has a strange gift -- he can see in advance when someone is going to die. (When someone is not long for this world and Wagner looks at him, he sees smoke in their eyes and a skeleton instead of a body.) Wagner looks around the train he's on and sees smoke in the eyes of everyone around him, which can only mean that something horrific is going to happen to the train. He gets off at the next station, taking his young friend with him. They end up at Cypress House, a kind of deserted inn on the Gulf Coast. Wagner and his friend get sucked into the world of Cypress House's owner, the lonely Rebecca Cady and have to face the fury of a Gulf Coast tropical storm along with the twisted and corrupt small town sheriff and his cronies. A really good read (I can just imagine the movie).

So that's what I read this summer. I'll catch up with my fall reading list and give you book reports for October and November next week.

In the meantime, happy Thanksgiving to all those celebrating it. I am grateful for so many things in my life: health, family, dear friends, knitting, bunnies, and of course books.  Thanks for being a part of it.

May & June Book Report

Okay, you know the drill: here's what I read in May and June of this year....comments and suggestions always welcome.

I started out May by reading a couple of books in series that I already knew and liked. First up was A Red Herring Without Mustard, by Alan Bradley, the third Flavia de Luce book. I love this quirky series, featuring an eleven-year-old British girl who loves chemistry and hates her big sisters, puttering around a wreck of a manor house in the days following WWII. In this installment, Flavia goes to the village fair intending to have her fortune told by a suitably mysterious Gypsy -- and ends up burning the entire fortunetelling tent down. Mortified, Flavia invites the fortuneteller to park her caravan on Flavia's family's land -- at least until the woman recovers from the smoke she inhaled. During the course of the novel, Flavia discovers who is behind a brutal assault and a murder, investigates the theft of local antiques, and looks into the mystery of a disappearing baby. Very entertaining and enjoyable.

Heartstone and an earlier book (Sovereign), by C.J. Sansom, are part of the Tudor mysteries featuring a hunchbacked lawyer named Matthew Shardlake. I like these mysteries because they are very well-written, with terrific historical detail and great depth of character. In Heartstone, Shardlake has to untangle two complicated mysteries while England prepares for possible invasion by the French; Sovereign is an earlier installment in the series in which Shardlake accompanies King Henry VIII on a progress to York. I liked both, and am sorry I'll have to wait another year or two for the next sequel.

The Tiger's Wife by Tea Obreht. This was an uncharacteristic impulse purchase for me, after it was highly recommended by the owner of an independent bookshop. It's a foray into magical realism, in which a young doctor, living in a country that sounds a lot like Yugoslavia or Serbia, tries to work through her grief and loss at her beloved grandfather's death, in part by recounting various folk tales that he used to tell (one involves a tiger, hence the title). It is absolutely staggering when the youth of the author registered with me -- she is so young, and that this is her first book is incredible. I enjoyed the book and found it compelling, and was glad I took a chance on it.

While I was breaking out of my mystery rut, I took advantage of the Amazon Vine program to procure a free copy of 22 Britannia Road, also a first novel, by Brit Amanda Hodgkinson. This book is a very affecting story about a couple whose lives are fractured by World War II. Silvana and Janusz are a Polish couple married in the early days of the war. Janusz joins the army, and they are separated for six years. When Janusz finally finds Silvana and their son, he has resettled in England and wants to become as English as he can, looking to the future as a way to get over the past. Silvana and their son Aurek have endured so much in their six years away from Janusz that they are strangers to him. The novel follows their attempts to start a new life together while coping with the unspeakable things each has experienced.

I got a little cocky after breaking out of my rut, and decided to try another free Vine selection that was uncharacteristic for me: Leeches by David Albahari. The plot concerns a writer who witnesses a man slapping a woman and finds himself obsessed with the incident, trying to figure out who the woman is and what happened to her. I should have known better; the book is written in a single paragraph (yes, all 300-some pages continue without a single paragraph break), employs a stream-of-consciousness approach (which I usually loathe), and take lengthy forays into issues relating to Jewish identity and the Kabbalah. It meanders, has an unreliable narrator and is absurdist. I hated it. My bad.

I did try another free Vine book, but stuck more to my traditional choices and opted for The Woodcutter by Reginald Hill (who writes the Dalziel and Pascoe series). This was a stand-alone thriller, and although it was completely conventional by comparison to some of the other stuff I'd read, it was a perfect beach book -- lots of plot, suspense and intrigue, even if not very realistic. Ditto for The Poison Tree by Erin Kelly, which I found at the library. I'd read a good review of this somewhere, and found it to be another plot-heavy, suspenseful thriller, with plot lines that went back and forth from the past to present.

One of the things I've been enjoying in the past year is trading books with my 13-year-old -- it seems like there have been so many really well done books classified as "young adult." He recommended The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin to me. I remember reading The Mysterious Disappearance of Leon (I Mean Noel) by the same author as a kid, and liking it, so I gave it a try. It's a quick read, in which a mysterious man builds a fancy apartment complex and then rents it out to a very specific group of people -- a female judge, a podiastrist who moonlights as a bookie, a family that runs a restaurant, a dressmaker....When the mysterious man dies, he leaves his fortune to whichever resident of the building can untangle his puzzle. I enjoyed this book, which won the Newbery award. I learned (by reading the forward to the book) what an interesting woman Ellen Raskin was -- not only was she an award-winning author but she was an illustrator, too, and designed covers for many books (including the first edition of A Wrinkle in Time).

If you are a bibliophile like me, then one of the best things about reading is discovering a new series or author that you really love, and then working your way through the books they've written. I had the good fortune to discover a few new authors and mystery series.

Amazon has been recommending Aaron Elkins to me for a while, so I found one of the earlier books in his Gideon Oliver series, The Dark Place. Gideon Oliver is a forensic anthropologist called in to consult by the FBI. A body (really, a skeleton) has been found and it looks old. There is a spear point embedded in the bones, which intrigues Oliver: he wonders what kind of incredible strength was required to wield a spear so powerfully. Oliver has to untangle the mystery of the murder, set against the backdrop of the forests in the Olympic peninsula of Washington. Lots of atmosphere and a quick read, too.

First Drop by Zoe Sharp was another book recommended to me. It's out-0f-print, I think, but my library was able to order a copy on inter-library loan. This book features Brit Charlie Fox, a former special forces veteran who joins her ex-boyfriend's security company. Her first job is flying to Florida to protect the nerdy teenage son of a software executive. The book is extremely fast-paced and exciting. Part of the charm is seeing how Charlie builds a relationship with the teenager she's guarding, while trying to protect his life.

The Shape of Water by Andrea Camilleri, is the first of a series of books featuring Sicilian detective Inspector Montalbano. Amazon has been recommending this series to me for a while, and I finally gave it a try. Now I'm hooked. Montalbano is a funny, quirky detective -- impatient, brilliant, cynical, scheming -- and in this book, he is presented with a body locked in a car, pants down. But not all is what it seems, and Montalbano -- along with his amusing co-workers -- get to the bottom of things. Part of the charm of this book is the character of Montalbano; it's hard to come up with a truly original protagonist for a mystery series and yet Camilleri has done so. Another aspect of the books that's interesting is the Sicilian setting (there are actually notes in the back, added by the excellent translator, that explain some of the regional references a non-Italian might not get).

So there you have it: what I read in May and June. Don't be afraid to leave a comment or suggestion (I don't bite!).