books: on books and socks

The semester starts tomorrow. I didn’t get as much stash/stacks book reading as I’d have liked, nor did I do three trillion other things on my list. Oh well. Completed reading was pretty light this week, but I’ve been working on most of the other reads on the sidebar:

Lord of the Libraries by Mel Odom. This is a continuation of The Destruction of the Books which I had read a few weeks ago. Oh I’m such a sucker for this type of writing and will look for the first one in the trilogy soon (the second two can be read before the first). Here are my two of favourite quotes (which I can share without feeling I’m giving away too much):

"I don’t care," Juhg declared, and felt a twinge of fear. "Don’t you see what I— offers?"
"What?" Craugh snapped.
"Safety and room and wealth."
"And none of those things they would be willing to share."
"That’s the environment it takes to educate a population," Juhg said. "Take children and give them those three things, and you can show them the world. But it is hard to enjoin a child to be grateful about receiving an education when he’s threatened and has no room to be himself or lacks enough to make himself comfortable with himself and his friends…" (p110)

woah.

It only took Juhg a moment to see the problem behind that line of logic. "Their first task would have been to build a better book, one that wasn’t so perishable."
…
Too long, Juhg realized. And how would a book have been that wasn’t made of paper? All the beautiful laminated manuscripts would not exist.… (p114)

What is a book? What is a document? ;)

Sensational Knitted Socks by Charlene Schurch. I had read many reviews of this book and had a 25% coupon and $7.95 in “holiday money” burning a hole in my pocket. I like the stitch dictionary, the sizes (this pretty much was the selling point), the ideas for self striping yarns, the nice diagrams on how to pick up stitches… and for the price. It’s no Knitting on the Road but I’ll be patient and know that one day I’ll further build my small fibre-arts library. I must say I don’t understand all this fuss on the number of needles to use. Once you grok the basic format of a sock just use stitch markers and decrease or whatnot as appropriate.

• Category: books