a birthday present! i’ve been a pretty bad knitter and crafter and maker in general in the past couple of years. i really need to get out of my unfinished scarf rut and get on an actual project. there are some good patterns in here, so maybe it will help. seems like a decent book for beginners. i’m not sure i could have learned the basics from diagrams, but some people can, and everything is explained well here. the caution on p. 38… if only someone had told me that!

corrections for errors in the book are available online! as well as lists of stitch ‘n bitch groups worldwide.

i thought that i hadn’t read all of this several years ago when it was one of the books in an existentialism class that i took, but it turns out that i just skimmed through a lot of it—which is pretty much what i did again this time.

most of the book is a monologue and the rest is one-sided dialogue between a french expatriate who meets another frenchman in a seedy bar in amsterdam and begins a mammoth confession, over several meetings. i like his recurring image of the cloudy sky of amsterdam as layers of doves and the earlier part of the book better, but the last third of the book just drags for me, now for the second time.

at least i know not to pack this one.

a random choice at the library. i like the words she uses, the sound of them together. but feel like my brain is too concrete lately to fully take this in.