Books: October 2005 Archives

For a long time I've wanted to have a section of my blog/website in which I shared information about the books I have in my collection. If there's anything that is true about me, it's that I love to buy books. Any time it's time to learn something new, the first thing I do is go and see if there is a book I can add to my collection. This means that I've amassed a pretty large collection of knitting books and other fiber arts related books over the last several years.

This morning, while I was going through my list of "in progress" projects that I would like to have to wear this fall, I decided that Liberty needed to be my next thing to complete. I chose Liberty for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that I am concerned about having enough of one of the colors and if I need to get another ball of Mist, I want a halfway-decent chance of still being able to find the dyelot somewhere on the planet. So in order to get the right front cast on and on its way, I had to remember how to do a tubular cast on. And the first book I reached for was Nancie Wiseman's "The Knitter's Book of Finishing Techiques".

As I was paging through the book, I realized that I had used this book enough to give it a good evaluation. Relative to it's size, it's not a cheap book, but I find myself coming back it over and over because her explanations and illustrations are excellent. And that got me thinking about getting a little bit more serious about sharing my opinions on books. In many cases, it takes a long time of living with a book, especially a technique or pattern book, before it's really possible to talk about what makes it good or not so good. I've been blogging and knitting and buying books for quite some time now, and I've definitely got both a good library to talk about and a growing collection of books that I've had time to live with and really understand whether or not they are treasures, trash or fall somewhere in between. I hope that my growing expertise in knitting will be able to give me a good perspective from which to judge new and old entries into the field and that my writing skills are sufficient to provide anyone who reads my reviews with a good overview of the book in question.

So today is the day that the book reviews start. You can find them over at The Keyboard Biologist Collects Books. I've also added a link to the page to my side bar for easy access. I don't anticipate that I will have a regular schedule for updating this blog, nor will it be totally restricted to kntting books. Not surprisingly, given the subject of this post, my very first entry is Nancie Wiseman's book. I invite you to read, leave comments and add anything that you think would help me or someone else understand what the book I've reviewed is all about. My goal is to help others get a good picture of what's between the covers of my selections.