3CKBWDAY7: Crafting balance

I confess it, I'm multicraftual.  If it can be made with thread, yarn or fabric, I'm right there.  Most of my crafting time is spent on trains these days, so knitting is dominant, but that's only been so since November 2007.

I've always knitted - well, since I was 11 or so; and that's been a constant for the last 34 years.  I'm not sure I remember a time when there wasn't a knitting project of some sort on the go - it just wouldn't be right.

Again, since I was 11 or so, I've been making my own clothes on a semi-regular basis.  These days, it's mainly pyjama trousers (because there's more nice fabric out there than there are people producing affordable cute PJ bottoms) and knitting bags, but I've made more elaborate things in the past including my wedding dress.  As I've blogged before, I love my sewing machine.

About 18 years ago I joined rec.crafts.textiles.needlecraft - and that was an eye-opener; there was So Much Stuff out there.  I found myself able to order threads and fabric from the US I'd never even dreamed of, and patterns, too.  This is Summer Sampler, by Marilyn Leavitt-Imblum (a woman whose rightful enforcement of copyright makes Alice Starmore look like a total slacker).

I also love the Hardanger embroidery which has developed from traditional Norwegian embroidery.  Scandinavian Americans have taken it from skirt and apron edgings into a more decorative sphere and included modern materials like space-dyed threads.  This piece won Best in Show at my village show in 2005 or so - the first non-food exhibit to have done so, so yes, I was chuffed about that...

In the mid-90s, I was getting completely hacked off with my job, and signed up for a City and Guilds qualification in Creative Embroidery, which was an eye-opener on many levels.  At the time, the tutor was recovering from a couple of serious illnesses; but the design substitute was very inspiring.  We learned to dye, to make felt (this was made at Wingham with their felting machine),

...to stitch, to design...  It gave me confidence in so many ways.

This is part of a 180cm by 60cm opera stole I made; based on the work of Gustav Klimt.

This is a close-up of a box-top I made while part of the Fibrefusion group.  Work mine, photo (c) Kevin Mead.  For info on Kevin's lovely textile photography, contact Art Van Go.

Most recently, I've got into weaving, which I love.  Before that, I also started spinning.... but maybe more of both of those later...

And yup; there's something missing here.  I think we were meant to be talking about a balance between knitting and crochet...  I love what you get out of crochet.  Looking around my living room, I have two pillow-sized (as in UK bed-type-pillows) cushions on the sofa, and a throw over both chairs, all made by Wibbo who literally wrote the book when it comes to crochet.  I also love what someone like Amanda from the Natural Dye Studio can do with crochet patterns. - you can't get that effect with knitting.

Me, personally ... well, I've made a couple of pot-holders and frilly scarves; but fundamentally, I can't quite work out what to do with a crochet hook.  I'm left-handed but do a lot of things right-handed (including knitting, using scissors and manipulating a computer mouse), and am in a perpetual state of indecision as to which hand to use to hold a hook...  I've had teaching from the best (along with a huge degree of hilarity as to my clumsiness)... One of these days, maybe.  Until then, I just live in awe.

This is me, signing off from the blog week.  It's been fun.

3KCBWDAY6: Improving your skillset

My knitting skillset seems to proceed in fits and starts.  It took me 20 years to realise there were things you could knit which weren't sweaters or cardigans, for instance; there were shawls, but those always came with the word "christening" or "baby" before them; and the cardigans and sweaters could also be made in baby sizes...  Having said that, I knitted for my local Phildar shop between the ages of 16 and 18, and I knitted lace and cables there...  And also a vast array of mohair batwing sweaters in 1980s colours (grey, cerise and white anyone?)

I'm not sure when I first started knitting socks and hats, but it was relatively recently, in the last 10 years, anyway.  Felting knitting in the washing machine happened at around the same time.  The development of online yarn stores meant that as-yet-unexperienced delights such as laceweight yarn, unobtainable in colours other than cream in my local shops, opened up the possibilities of what could be made.  Reading a library copy of Debbie New's Unexpected Knitting made me realise that knitting could be mathematics and art simultaneously.  Meeting Rosie in the spring of 2004 got me into the world of knitting groups, and meant craft was no longer a solitary activity.

And finally, along came Ravelry, and everything exploded.  I joined in July 2007 (I'm greensideknits over there - the name of this blog was 2 characters too long!)  and the amount of help, information and advice available is stunning.  There seems to be a YouTube video for every technique; and if there isn't, someone may well just make one for the purpose.  There's information on extra-stretchy bind-offs, magic cast-ons, ways to avoid that irritating jog in stripes if working in the round, advice to new designers, new shop-owners, indie dyers...  And I've met people on Ravelry who I now know in real life and would consider friends.

So I feel as if my personal skillset is still expanding, probably by tiny increments, and probably while I'm not looking.  I do have a couple of things on the list though.

I'd like to learn to knit brioche stitches - I have this wonderful book, and haven't yet used it despite admiring the huge amount of technical information it covers.  I admired someone beautiful brioche stitch scarf at Knit Camp, and only later found out it was being worn by the author of the book.  (Probably best I didn't know that at the time, as I might have come over all fangirlish...)  So that's on the list.

And I'd like to be more confident in designing things.  I have one design for sale on Ravelry and it has a trickle of sales; I'm told by people who've knitted it that it's well-explained; but I'd like to do more.  No idea what - it's just sitting there as an ill-formed idea in my head at the moment...

2012 books, #36-40

The litigators, by John Grisham. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2011.

David Zinc goes to work at his soul-crushing corporate law job one morning, has a panic attack in the lift and spends the day in a bar.  When he gets out of there, the only address he has on him is that of a two-person ambulance-chaser practice at the wrong end of Chicago, so he goes there.  Zinc decides he's going to practice law with Wally, an unscrupulous chancer, and Oscar, a slightly less unscrupulous but still broke partner with a wife everyone hates.  For a while life is good for David, but then comes a cholesterol-lowering drug called Krayoxx, a class action which spins out of control, and a Big Pharma company which is desperate for a quick legal win against a small law firm with no trial experience.  This is a wonderfully engaging and occasionally laugh-out-loud book - Grisham brings all the whimsy and charm he usually reserves for his non-legal books, and the tone has something of the Carl Hiaasens about it.

Pray for silence, by Linda Castillo. London: Macmillan, 2010.

The second of the Kate Burkholder books, again set in Painters Mill Ohio. A whole Amish family has been killed in their farmhouse and barns, the girls horribly tortured.  There are hints that one of the girls may have had a secret, but otherwise nobody has any idea why the Plank family would have suffered this fate. Burkholder's slightly odd position in the community, as someone brought up Amish but who had decided not to join the church due to an incident in the past, is to her advantage here, and the presence of John  Tomasetti, disgraced federal agent, as an assistant, adds an extra touch.  Another excellent book by Castillo.

The enemy, by Lee Child. Whitley Bay: Soundings, 2004.

A Jack Reacher - but this time set in 1990, when Reacher is still a major in the military police.  Child says these books can be read in any order, and it seems that he also writes them in any order!  The Berlin Wall is coming down, the Cold War is ending, and Reacher has been dragged back from the search for Noriega in Panama to a temporary command.  The first call he gets is to the dead body of a two-star general, supposedly of a heart attack, in a local motel.  When Reacher goes to notify the next of kin, he finds that the general's wife has been murdered in their home.  Reacher's own family ties are also involved in this novel, and provide some of the more fascinating moments.  This is an extremely intriguing novel, showing new aspects to a character who risks becoming stereotypical in some of Child's other books.

Blood trail, by C J Box.  New York: Berkley, 2009.

A Joe Pickett novel; and one I nearly gave up on due to the US mass-market paperback size and type-style; but these are books which need to be read in order.  Pickett's own life, and the lives of his family and friends, are as important as the plots of the individual books.  Once I'd read the first couple of chapters, I was, as ever, hooked.  (According to the blurb on the back, so were Lee Child and Michael Connolly, which I can understand.)  Someone is slaughtering hunters in the same way as hunters slaughter elk, and Joe's ultimate boss and hated adversary Randy Pope is inexplicably asking for Joe's help, as is Governor Rulon.  I came to two completely wrong conclusions as to the identity of the murderer before Box revealed it; which is always fun.

False picture, by Veronica Heley [audiobook]. Read by Patience Tomlinson. Whitley Bay: Soundings, 2008.

Bea Abbott's old friend Velma asks her to investigate the disappearance of her stepson Philip, who seems to have absconded with a Millais from the flat of his godmother, who has been murdered.  Bea's assistant Maggie moves into Philip's flat to investigate.  However, an art thief is also on the trail of Philip and the painting, and not above using the housemates to do some smuggling for him on the side.  Set between London and Bruges this is fairly flimsy on plot, but the characterisation is nice and it's an excellent audiobook to listen to while pottering about.

3KCBWDAY5: Something different

I thought about a wordless post, and a sonnet.  And a crossword.

But here's my contribution - and a competition. Yes, it's a wordsearch.

A number of fibres/materials commonly used for knitting (more than 10, fewer than 20) are concealed in this grid.  All are included in Ravelry's yarn list.  The fibre starting with Q which is very difficult to spell isn't here.

Tell me how many you've found in the comments, and let me know where to find you (Ravelry name, blog, whatever... )

If I have any entries at all, I'll close entries at midnight BST between 1st and 2nd May.   In the unlikely event of two people finding the same number, I'll need a list...

The winner will receive a skein of good-quality sock yarn in a mutually happy colour and my enduring thanks....

I'll post the results when the winners are announced...

3KCBWDAY4: A knitter for all seasons

I think one of the best things about living in the UK is that we do quite often get proper seasons.  Sometimes, like this week, the weather can't decide whether it's winter, spring or summer, but it is a season.  I can't imagine living somewhere where it's hot and sunny all year round.  Nor can I imagine living somewhere it's regularly -30F in the winter and +90F in the summer with very little transition...  I love the colours of the seasons, and the way they change.  I'm not a great fan of winter but only because of the lack of light.  I'm sure if I weren't leaving home 3 hours before dawn and getting back 3 hours after dark, I'd enjoy that one too.

But a knitter for all seasons?  Nope, not me.

I knit in all seasons - I have the same rail journey to work all year round, and knit during it.  I tend to knit for myself in the first half of the year, and for others in the second half, because the small people I knit for have birthdays in the late summer and autumn, and I have family members who seem to appreciate knitted Christmas gifts.

It's been an incredibly long time since something in a Spring or Summer edition of any of the online magazines, or the print magazines, caught my eye.  I don't like sleeveless tops - big boobs and narrow shoulders mean the armholes need major engineering (of the Isambard Kingdom Brunel level of skill) to fit  - and so many of the summer offerings are made for little sylph-like things, or are shruggy things which really don't work on me.  I could knit diaphanous wafty things in the summer, but really, I'd just get them caught in a Tube door and do an Isadora Duncan.

I do have one cotton sweater.  It's made of Rowan Denim (24 balls of the stuff); it wears like iron, and it's warmer than a lot of my wool ones.  So that probably doesn't count as summer wear either...

I remember two idyllic summers at the ages of 14 and 16, knitting under shady trees in Provence with my penfriend's mother and aunt knitting and quilting beside me.  And I remember the projects - one was a big black 1980s boxy jumper in 4ply; and the other was a school tank-top in navy blue with little cables, also 4-ply.  (I learned early from Françoise and Monique that you got more knitting-hours for your money with fine yarns...)

Whatever the season outside, I seem to be perpetually a girl in winter.  Knitty's move to a Spring and Summer/First Fall/Deep Fall/Winter publishing schedule made total sense to me.  I love nothing more than knitting outside on a bright summer day - just don't expect me to be knitting something summery...

3KCBWDAY3: Knitting heroes

There are people I know in person who I'd think of as knitting heroes - people who use their craft to sustain their sense of self-worth amid mental or physical illness or disability; people who will rip and re-knit the same yarn a dozen times until it becomes that perfect item; people who'll take on a complex project as a relative beginner and come out with a stunning finished object.  And then I was going to play this conventionally today and go for two of the Big Beasts of the knitting world, Kaffe Fassett, king of colour inspiration and Debbie New, knitting genius.

But while I was coming home this evening on the train, reading the business pages and thinking of a couple of conversations I'd had over the last few days, I totally changed my mind.

Knitting hero: Emma Jacobsson


Some of the details here are from Wendy Keele's Poems of Color; some are from Susannah Hansson's wonderful Bohus class last summer at Knit Nation, and some others are from Kjell Andersson's brilliant and moving film on Bohus (available on DVD from Schoolhouse Press).  All errors are my own.


Emma Jacobsson's husband was the governor of Gothenburg in Sweden, at a time when the stone-miners in the Bohuslän quarries were hit by both the Depression and the Second World War.  Thinking of production which could be done without too much equipment but which would bring in a significant amount of income, she settled on knitting - but knitting to rival the great couture houses of New York and Paris.

At one stage, a Bohus twinset, sweater or cardigan rivalled anything available in New York department stores from designers like Ralph Lauren.  The knitting was done on 1.75mm or 2mm needles throughout.  The designs used several colours in a row, and a combination of knit and purl stitches for texture.  The yarn used was a wool and angora blend (again sourced by Jacobsson), which fuzzed out into the most beautiful colour blend.

There are photos of everyone from Princess Grace of Monaco to Audrey Hepburn wearing these sweaters and cardigans.  They were knitted top-down, but worked with seams after the yoke shaping/underarms to give the feel of other couture garments.

The knitters were paid by garment, and quality was strictly monitored.  However, for an industrious knitter, the payment was a huge help to the family; such that it actually caused some family rows on occasion because it meant the woman was earning more than the man.

Gradually, as clothes became more throwaway, it became more difficult for Emma Jacobsson to find new markets in North America, or preserve existing markets.  In the end, the Bohus enterprise closed in 1969, to the regret of many of the knitters, despite the packet of yarns they received as thanks.

I don't think I'd have liked Emma Jacobsson if I'd met her in person.  She seems to have been a somewhat relentless, pushy person who really didn't take "no" for an answer.  In my head, she was a cross between The Killing's Sarah Lund, The Archers' Lynda Snell and Princess Michael of Kent.  And all of those women get things done.

Emma Jacobsson ensured employment for hundreds of women, making a high quality product which was desired worldwide, and for which the knitters were adequately paid.  The knitting itself was extraordinarily beautiful, as seen by the colour combinations above.  The Bohus designers and knitters corresponded back and forth, and all were very skilled.

For 30 years, women in one of the poorest areas of Sweden made knitting pay, thanks to Emma Jacobsson and the team she assembled around her.

All photos taken by consent of Susanna Hansson from her personal collection of Bohus Knitting.  For details on her work,go to http://oneofsusannas.com - if you can attend one of her classes, it's a treat.

3CKBWDAY2: Photography challenge day

I'm not going for technically clever here; I'm just hoping for awesomely cute.

The wool dormouse (glis glis lanamicum) in its natural setting. Click to embiggen.

3KCBWDAY1: Colour Lovers

I'm somewhat ill-prepared for this - it was only after Hoxton's post (I love her Electric Sheep podcast) earlier on today that I realised this was happening again this year, and I hadn't missed it...  It's only a week, I thought, when I signed up at lunchtime... and then I looked at the prompts for the week...

But this evening's is relatively easy.  Colour... shutting me up about colour is easier.

As an example, this is a quick snap of my dining room/door into the living-room taken after I came in this evening (work bag still on the table, but as it's Monday night there isn't a heap of post and other detritus on there...).  I love bright, vibrant colours.  I like to think I don't "do" subtle.  There's weaving, knitting, feltmaking, crochet, embroidery, cross-stitch and stained-glass visible there, and it's all pretty bright...

(It seems that after a brief heady period where Blogger and Flickr frolicked happily together, they're completely incompatible in any of my 3 browsers.  Apologies.  It's taken me over 2 hours to work this out...)

I have Views on certain objects.  Work shoes, my everyday small handbag, my everyday coat, camera bags and my favourite small-project knitting bag need to be black, or as near black as readily obtainable.  Likewise most of the work wardrobe.

This is mainly to provide a backdrop for other things though - nice knitted items; excellent not-everyday-small bags; cool jewellery.  Excellent curtains and beautiful cushions. (The cushions aren't made by me - Wibbo saw my pathetic attempts at crochet and made these two utterly beautiful pillow-sized ones...)

Commuting from a flat Fenland village to central London, for 4-5 months of the year I leave home in the dark and I arrive home in the dark.  I see grey, grey daylight through office windows and on the occasions I force myself to walk on cold streets at lunchtime.

I have colours I gravitate towards; I'm a fan of purple, and burgundy, and magenta; and jade, and turquoise, and aquamarine.  But now I realise I also love golds and yellows, leaf greens and even, god help me, sometimes browns and neutrals.  I think the greyness actually helps to make the idea of colour more valuable.

When yarn clubs work (and there are currently a couple of infamous examples of dysfunctional ones from one UK source), they're brilliant.  They take you out of your little corner and present you with something new - you wouldn't have chosen this one off a table if there was, say, purple, around, but once presented with it in a parcel,on its own, your mind starts reeling with the possibilities. I'm currently signed up to the second part of Yarnscape's Wheel of the Year club, and to a Clan Surprise from The YarnYard; both have opened my mind to the possibilities of less intense colours in the past few months, and beautifully so.

2012 books, #35

What it is like to go to war, by Karl Marlantes [audiobook]. Read by Jeff Harding. Rearsby, Leics. : Clipper, 2012.

This merits a post on its own.  I think it's probably the modern equivalent of The art of war, and was certainly an excellent thing to be reading over Easter.

Karl Marlantes went to war in Vietnam, and wrote a novel called Matterhorn, which was made into one of the first Vietnam films.  He also writes with the perspective of someone who left a Rhodes scholarship to go to Vietnam and returned to it later; and with the perspective of someone who believes there's a spirituality to war, completely divorced from any individual faith - he calls it the arena of Mars.

This is a considered book, with perspective right up to last year's Libyan conflict, which aims to analyse and give advice on how government, society and the armed forces should look at the very young people who wage war on our behalf.

Marlantes believes we should prepare young soldiers psychologically for war before they are deployed - he asks "Why put on the armor after the war?".   He has interesting things to say about very modern warfare; there are people who are commuting daily to their homes while deploying drones flying in and out of Iraq, Afghanistan and other locations, for instance; soldiers in the field can be shooting at insurgents at 7pm and be talking to their friends and family via Facebook at 8pm.  In Marlantes's opinion, this makes the likelihood of post-traumatic stress greater, because there's less of a distinction between being at war and not being at war.

There's a chapter on the honesty, or lack of it, in reporting of war.  Lying covers up the lack of meaning of war.  Body count statistics count more than strategic importance, and at least in Vietnam, there was no way of independently verifying the field reports.  Within that, there's the idea of standards rather than ideals; everyone knows what the ideals are, but standards can be steadily eroded by the experience of war.

One of the more moving chapters was an account of how Vietnam soldiers were returned to their families, discharged before they returned home, and (until the current post-9/ll fervour) were largely ignored or an embarrassment.  Marlantes fervently believes there should be "some sort of commitment to the future we are returning them to", with a ceremony of handing over weapons and compulsory psychological assessment.

Above all, Marlantes remains a warrior, with the knowledge that in the heat of situations, there's something beyond the individual which needs to be acknowledged in the current bureaucracy.  I'm probably not explaining this very well, but to my mind, when I finished this book on Easter Sunday, the statement that "Some people obviously rate victory as greater than their own death. This does not make them irrational" made a lot of sense to me, while also terrifying me because yes, this is the justification suicide bombers will also use.

2012 books, #31-34

The drop, by Michael Connelly. London: Orion, 2011.

Another Harry Bosch book, and another excellent read.  Bosch has two cases to investigate; one is his Open-Unsolved work - DNA found on a victim is found to be that of a convicted paedophile; but the man was only 8 years old at the time of the murder.  The other case is the apparent suicide of a councillor's son; unfortunately that councillor is Irvin Irving, Harry's nemesis and himself a former senior policeman.  Office politics and some of the darker parts of the history of the Los Angeles Police Department come to the fore, and Bosch risks losing both a good friend and his shift partner while trying to solve both cases.  This was pretty unputdownable; Connelly's consistency is amazing.

Blood hunt, by Ian Rankin writing as Jack Harvey [audiobook]. Read by Christian Rodska. Bath: Chivers, [1995].

Gordon Reeve is a survival expert in the Scottish Highlands, with an SAS past.  Then his journalist brother dies in San Diego, and when Reeve starts to disbelieve the official theory of suicide and investigate the matter, someone starts trying to kill him too.  The action criss-crosses back between Scotland and California, as Reeve goes on the run and tries to shelter his family.  There's a fair amount of gore in this book, and Reeve is seriously out of control at times, which makes for uncomfortable reading.  I think I'd probably have given up on this one before the end if it hadn't been superbly read by Rodska, who slips in and out of Scottish, English and American accents in a convincing way.

They also raise chickens, by Martin Parker. Kindle edition, 2011.

This is a very strange book.  It dots between 1918, 1962 and 1988, sometimes slightly confusingly.  The title comes from a quote by Antoine de Saint-Exupery in The little prince:  "Men", said the fox. "They have guns and they hunt. It is very disturbing. They also raise chickens. These are their only interests."  Two series of murders in the same small town, normally a tranquil place, alert both Harry Dangerfield (then a police sergeant, now an inspector) and his ex-wife Susan (now chief editor of the local paper).  Surely there must be a connection between the two groups of killings, despite the 1962 sequence having been closed after the suicide of a local policeman?  Dangerfield has never really subscribed to this theory, and the repeated rumours of the presence of a WWI soldier in the area enhances his suspicions.  The tone of the book is quite jokey in parts which doesn't really fit with the crimes being committed.  Patchy, but good fun in general.

Tom-all-alone's, by Lynn Shepherd. Kindle edition, 2012.

A new detective novel set among the characters of Dickens's Bleak house (published as The solitary house in the US); but you don't need to have read your Dickens recently (or at all, probably) to enjoy this for its own sake.  Shepherd captures the squalor and degradation of 1850s London, and the lack of law or order in the poor neighbourhoods (it's amusing to find with hindsight that these are Seven Dials and the Strand). The omniscient narrator is able to draw sly 21st-century parallels; this sometimes works very well, and sometimes breaks into the narrative in a disruptive way. The main character, Charles Maddox, is hired by the lawyer Tulkinghorn to investigate a case of anonymous letter-writing, but all is now what it seems with the assignment.  There is also a parallel narration by Hester, as there is by Esther in the original novel; but again, there is a much more sinister story behind this.  Shepherd is able to deal with even more disturbing themes than Dickens was, and Charles's investigations strip away the veneer of respectability to uncover some chambers of horrors.

2012 books, #26-30

Double wedding ring, by Lizbie Brown.  London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1999.

The tone of this book is slightly strange - the protagonist (and I'd imagine the author) are from the US, and it definitely reads like one of the US "cozies" produced around quilting, knitting, sewing etc. - this is set in the UK, and seems to stand out from the rest though, and the first scene - a wedding at which the bride not only turns out not to be the groom's fiancée but is also pregnant with his child - is somewhat arresting!  When the false bride's body is discovered the next morning, Elizabeth Blair (a semi-retired private detective who also runs a quilt shop in Bath) is called in to try to prove that the obvious suspect, the groom, is not guilty of the murder.  It rattles along very nicely; not anything particularly special but a good couple of hours' read.

Lost light, by Michael Connelly [audiobook]. Read by John Chancer. Bath: BBC, [n.d.].

I don't know where this fits into the Harry Bosch series, other than that it's after he was married to Eleanor Wish, after she's had their child, but before he finds out about this...  but as ever, the library gubbins was stuck all over the bibliographic information!  Just when I think I've read all of the Bosch stuff, another one I haven't found yet comes along; which is great, when someone can consistently write at this standard.  Harry has left the LAPD, but is unable to forget one particular case, that of a young woman murdered in the wake of a $2million robbery on a film set.  Released from the day job and unable to decide what to do next, Harry takes the file and continues the investigation, pissing off just about everyone he knows in the process.  Really good stuff, and Chancer reads it very well, as ever.

The secret life of France, by Lucy Wadham. Kindle edition.

Lucy Wadham was married to an upper-class Frenchman for the best part of two decades, has two teenage children and moved from the 16e arrondissement  to la France profonde  following her divorce.  She talks about her experiences of France and the French as someone who married very young, finished her degree at Oxford after having a child and then worked freelance for UK newspapers and the BBC over the years.  A surprising amount of the book is spent on discussing sex and infidelity in a particular very elevated stratum of Parisian society; but when she gets down to subjects such as the French education system, French bureaucracy, the conflict between secularism and Catholicism and so on, she's fascinating.  And it was heartening to find that someone had to go back to the office near Parmentier métro station even more often than I did to obtain that elusive permis de séjour which was needed by all EU citizens before the dawning of the single market in labour, and was notoriously difficult and time-consuming to obtain...  She's loved and hated France in almost equal measure over the years; but despite having children who are now rediscovering the joys of the British sense of humour, she's still there.  And if you want to follow up on a social history of France from the mid-80s to now, Wadham's journalistic sense means she's documented all her sources in the references at the back, which take up nearly a quarter of the book.

The knitter's book of wool: the ultimate guide to understanding, using, and loving this most fabulous fiber, by Clara Parkes.  New York: Potter Craft, 2009.

I'm fairly sure this was a present from Wibbo.  I had a flick through it and registered the lovely patterns in it at the time, but a couple of weeks ago, after I came back from a spinning day at Rampton, I got it off the shelf and took it up into the bedroom as bedtime reading (most of my reading is done in transit, but this is a sturdy hardback with a nice dust-jacket).  And it's fascinating.  Parkes is the person who created the Knitters' Review website, my primary source for all things fibre before Ravelry and still a site I visit, and here she goes back a step from her previous book, The knitter's book of yarn, to talk about sheep, and sheep breeds, and the way that taking raw fleece and turning it into yarn works.  She doesn't automatically assume you want to spin your own yarn, but she does assume that if you're interested in yarn, you have some interest in understanding how different breeds work, and what you might be able to use each yarn for.  However, if you do want to spin your own yarn, there's lots of information there, too.  It's about half information, and half patterns; and the patterns are good, and explain why each yarn has been chosen for each project.

The death of Amy Parris, by T. R. Bowen.  London: Penguin, 1998.

One of the books I picked up while weeding the crime/thrillers at the local library - this one is set in and around Cambridge, and gets the geography right, although there's an awful lot more driving between Cambridge and the North Norfolk coast than most locals would be prepared to do!  John Bewick, formerly of Cambridgeshire police and now seconded to an advanced training unit, is asked to re-investigate what looks like an open and closed case, because the son of friends has been arrested for a murder he claims not to have committed.  Meanwhile a body is found on a North Norfolk beach and turns out to be the best friend of the murdered woman, lost at sea a year before.  There's a very creepy dénouement to this one, and it's tightly-plotted throughout.

Like clockwork

It's that day - the day the clocks go forward.  Couldn't come soon enough as far as I'm concerned...

I don't hate the cold of winter; as long as my feet are warm and dry, I'm OK.  What I do hate is the lack of light... for the last nearly-six-months, I've left home in the dark and I've got back here in the dark; and more often than not, I haven't been able to leave the building at lunchtime either because there's been a meeting, or something to do over lunch, or whatever... I am so very, very glad for the prospect of light evenings.

I do like clocks though.  This one is about 4" in diameter and made by Impossible Fossils in resin, with clock parts and burned paper dial.  I bought it to put up in the bedroom, but the light from the lamp in the dining-room makes it look so nice it's never made its way up there.



I also have this, made by an Extreme Scroll-Saw Man in California - it took me a year to find a clock I wanted for my 40th birthday (parents gave up and sent me a cheque after several months of dithering) and this was it, found on Etsy and assembled with instructions once it got here (sadly, I can't remember the maker's name...   There are 8 angels on this clock, six of them visible in this photo...



To give you an idea of what the light levels are like in the Fens in "spring", this was what the Green looked like at 10:45am today, just as the fog was clearing:



Yes, we haz European Market!  Not a great one (when I say that the cheese stall was provided by the Brits, and consisted mainly of cheddar and Wensleydale adulterated with various fruits and herbs...) but I got olives, feta, duck sausage and a chocolate confection for a present...

When I came out of the house, the guys on the bread-and-olives stall at far right had obviously pegged me as a soft touch, wondering where they could get hot water for a cup of tea...  but the guy who asked looked so very like an Algerian friend from France years ago...  So I went home and put on the kettle (I did get a good discount on olives and feta cheese a bit later.).  I also had take-away tartiflette for lunch.  And warmed-up same for dinner.  I do hope they come back.  Preferably with a better vendor of cheesy comestibles.

And because posts with song-titles need context: here's the Boomtown Rats in 1978, on ToTP.  Probably one of the worst attempts at the obligatory lip-synch in that period of the history of ToTP, although David Coverdale's rendition of "Here I Go Again", where he can clearly be seen saying "oh, f**k this", is also good.

2012 books, #21-25

Homicide: a year on the killing streets, by David Simon. Kindle edition.

This year-long biography of a homicide squad in Baltimore first formed the basis of a 1990s detective series called Homicide, and then led the writer to go on and write The Wire. Simon was allowed to take a year's sabbatical from his job at the Baltimore Herald and spent 1988 in a squad-room, documenting the cases and lives of the men (and at the time they were overwhelmingly men) trying to hold back the mayhem on the streets which led to 250 deaths in the year.  None of the police depicted are stereotypes, although a few are certainly eccentrics.  It's a fascinating look into a world without much in the way of modern forensics, without mobile phones, without much in the way of CCTV footage, and how detection was done.  If you enjoyed Life on Mars, you'd certainly like this.  There's a lot of gallows humour and rounding-up-the-usual-suspects, but there's also a lot of dedication and determination for justice to be done, and an awful lot of slightly scary details on how politics affects policing.

One day in September: the full story of the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre and the Israeli revenge operation "Wrath of God", by Simon Reeve. Kindle edition.

This seems to have been written in around 2002, with various updates, and is the book-of-the-documentary, but stands well on its own.  The first third or so of the book is the factual account of what happened when 9 Israeli athletes were taken hostage by Palestinian terrorists in the Olympic village.  There follows an account of how this changed Israeli policy on pursuing terrorist suspects, and the hunting down and killing of various members of the PLO over subsequent years, including two of the three surviving hostage-takers.  I think what shocked me most was the disclosure of a cover-up by the German authorities of major incompetence by their police and armed forces; almost three decades after the massacre, the families were finally allowed to view the files they'd been told repeatedly didn't exist.  Extremely good and very moving book, anyway.

The good soldier, by Ford Madox Ford. London: Penguin, 2002.

I really loved this when I first read it, almost exactly 20 years ago; this time round, I wondered why on earth I'd kept it fondly in mind.  Stylistically, it's still very beautiful, but this time I found the characters shallow, the setting vacuous, and the ignorance of the narrator of the principal events of the novel unconvincing.  My irritation with it wasn't helped by the preponderance of notes in this edition - I started up looking the annotations up in the back, but they seem to have been prepared for people unfamiliar with both the UK and the US, and indeed the finer points of the English language.  It was a disappointment that a novel I'd held in my mind didn't stand a second reading - but it also showed me that I'm a different person to the one who originally read this book, and that's probably not a bad thing; it would be odder if we never moved on in our analysis of things!

Bad luck and trouble, by Lee Child [audiobook]. Read by Jeff Harding. Whitley Bay, Tyne and Wear: Soundings, 2007.

No time for psychological exploration with this one - Child doesn't do that sort of thing.  Jack Reacher's band of Special Investigators from the forces needs to get together, but five of the eight seem to be missing, and one has turned up dead.  Reacher is summoned to the California desert to find out why someone is torturing his buddies and dropping them from helicopters into the wilderness.  It's the usual all-action high-voltage stuff we expect from Reacher, and extremely good listening.

Sworn to silence, by Linda Castillo.  London: Pan, 2009.

A new-to-me author - but I already have the next one on hold.  Kate Burkholder is the chief of police in Painters Mill, in Amish country.  She's unusual not only for being a relatively young woman in the post, but for being born into an Amish family but having left the faith at the age of eighteen.  A series of brutal murders brings back horrific memories for Kate and the community; someone is using slaughterhouse techniques on young women and carving numbers into them, repeating a series of killings 16 years before.  Kate has more difficulty believing this than other members of the community, though - she knows she killed the perpetrator when she was 14.  This is an excellent book; atmospheric, with characters you care about, and some really tight plotting.

2012 books, #16-20

Gosh, I'm a long way behind with these.  To the extent that the next book up is last month's book club book, and the next discussion happened last night...

The help, by Kathryn Stockett.  New York: Berkley, 2009.

This was quite astonishingly good.  The comparison with To Kill a Mockingbird on the cover raised my hackles (any comparison to my favourite novel, in the world, ever, tends to do that); but really, putting that aside, you could see why the analogy was made.  I know I'm very late to the party with this one, and everyone in the world has probably read it; but for anyone who hasn't....  The main voices belong to Aibileen and Minny, two black maids, and Miss Skeeter, a white woman just out of college in 1962, with the urge to become a journalist and no real idea of what she wants to write about.  After one of her contemporaries starts a crusade to segregate bathrooms in people's private houses so they no longer have to use the same loo as their maids, Skeeter decides that real-life accounts of the lives of maids would be an interesting subject for literature.  In this, she entirely fails to understand the danger involved in the enterprise; for her, any suggestion that she sympathises with the civil rights movement leads to social ostracism; for the maids, the danger is much more real and present - Aibileen lives two streets away from Medgar Evers and his family, and Evers' murder features in the story.

I started off with this one with a small measure of dread - Aibileen's account is written in a dialect, which often spells death to my urge to read a book; but it's written well enough that you get caught in very early on and it's just a signal of who's speaking.  Aibileen is the real voice of the novel - compassionate, fierce and courageous.  None of the characters are caricatures, not even the really rather dreadful Hilly who dominates the Women's League, or Mother, who when she believes she is dying keeps a notebook of Fashion Faux Pas to pass on to Skeeter for Future Reference.  There has been some controversy over a white woman writing in a black woman's voice; and maybe my point of view on this shows my ignorance; but what happens if nobody can speak in a voice other than their own?  What would a world without Othello, or Fahrenheit 451, or Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, be like?  A much longer review than usual, but I laughed out loud and cried tears over this book, sometimes simultaneously; and it'll teach me that just because something's incredibly popular, that doesn't mean I won't enjoy it!

Theodore Boone, kid lawyer by John Grisham.  London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2010.

The fact that one copy of this book in the library was in the thriller section and the other in Young Adults is probably just about right.  Theodore Boone is thirteen, and spends more time in the local courthouse than most lawyers.  His parents are lawyers (and liberals; one of Theo's evenings each week is spent at the local soup kitchen).  Most of their friends are lawyers.  (Even the family dog is called Judge.)  Theo wants to be a lawyer one day, and is already dispensing free legal advice to his classmates.  The case of the moment is a spectacular murder, very unusual for the Boones' small town, and Theo finds himself with vital information he doesn't know how to handle, but which proves the accused's guilt much better than the prosecution case can.  This is a lovely, engaging book; I think it's Grisham's first foray into YA fiction but I hope not the last.  I read it in an afternoon while knitting the stocking-stitch body of a sweater and it's a delightful read.

The American future: a history, by Simon Schama [audiobook]. Read by Peter Marinker.  Whitley Bay: Chivers, 2008.

I gather this is a book-of-the-series sort of thing - but as I never saw the series, it stands up very well as an audiobook.  Marinker's reading is excellent, as he switches between US and British English pretty seamlessly. The framing device is the 2008 Presidential election campaign, and particularly the Democratic caucuses where there is a genuine choice between a female candidate and a black candidate for the first time.  As ever in American history, the future is found to have its roots in colonialism and civil war; and some of the individual stories are fascinating.  I think the one I found most interesting was that of the Meigs family, who were around in the colonial era and at the founding of West Point, and who fought in the Civil War, both World Wars, Korea and Vietnam.  There's an interview with the current Montgomery C. Meigs (IV? I'd lost track), who's a professor of military history; for a relatively new country, that's a heck of a dynasty.  I found this moving, funny and profoundly interesting.  I imagine all I'll retain is some flypaper details, as ever, but I'm sure some facts have gone in somewhere!

The retribution, by Val McDermid [audiobook].  Read by Saul Reichlin.  Rearsby, Leics: WF Howes, 2011.

This was a characteristically creepy Tony Hill/Carol Jordan book; Jacko Vance, a serial killer Hill and Jordan managed to arrest in their first case together, has escaped from prison and is determined to exact revenge.  Vance is an ex-Olympic athlete who turned radio presenter after he lost an arm; and it's a testament to McDermid's skill that you don't just stop reading after that description...  Vance is seriously scary and will stop at nothing; and given that we know McDermid doesn't let the fact that a character is well-liked and fairly vital to the plot stop her offing said character if the plot demands it, one or two of the features of this particular book shouldn't surprise or shock; but they do.  Reichlin's another narrator I watch out for - his reading of Steig Larsson's Millennium trilogy added a lot to my enjoyment of them, and he does another excellent job here.

Free fire, by C J Box. Kindle edition.

Joe Pickett again!  This time, he's called in to a very strange series of events at Yellowstone National Park, after a letter was sent to the state governor alleging unspecified crimes were taking place.  In the same area, a lawyer has been acquitted of three murders on the technicality that a local jury couldn't be empanelled due to there being no local residents in the park.  Joe is far from home (although the home he currently has is far from satisfactory) and his family, and the eerie goings on don't help much, either.  For some reason, I didn't enjoy this as much as I did previous books; maybe it's the far-from-home thing...

Scarily correct

A colleague, fellow team member and knitting friend spent part of her birthday at the David Shrigley exhibition at the Hayward yesterday, and brought this back for me.  It's a badge I can attach to my work lanyard.  It has amused the friends and colleagues I've shown it to so far; and it's so entirely accurate.

Thankyou, Anya.

2012 books, #11-15

Catching up with some more of these.  For some reason, it's really difficult to remember to review books read on the Kindle!

Angle of investigation: three Harry Bosch stories, by Michael Connelly. Kindle edition. 2011.

Another set of promotional stories for The Drop put out for 99p by Connelly, and definitely worth the money!  Stories from different points in Bosch's career.  The first story features repeat robberies in a pawnshop; Bosch and Jerry Edgar find the robber dead, apparently electrocuted, in mysterious circumstances. In the second story, a father is distraught at the death of his disabled son, left in an overheated car in his work parking lot - Bosch's partner Ignacio is convinced there's more to it than the man says. The final, title, story takes place over a long period - Bosch, working open-unsolved cases, comes across the case of the first dead body he saw on the job, that of a woman drowned in a bath with her dog.  Coming back to it with both the experience and modern forensics, he uncovers the almost unthinkable.

In plain sight, by C. J. Box. Kindle edition.

Another Joe Pickett story.  Ranch owner Opal Scarlett disappears - the only people who miss her are her sons Arlen, Hank and Wyatt, who settle their problems by trying to beat each other to death with shovels. Joe's daughter Sheridan is friends with Julie, Opal's grand-daughter, and becomes involved accidentally in the feud.  Meanwhile, a relative of Joe's former foster daughter April is out to track Joe down.  Joe's family, job and life are threatened, and his relationship with Randy Pope, the head of the Wyoming Fish and Game service, seems to be going downhill still further.  Another excellently plotted story which also maintains a lot of the existing relationships and characters.

The hard way, by Lee Child [audiobook]. Read by Jeff Harding. Whitley Bay: Soundings, 2006.

While there's often some humour in the Jack Reacher books, Lee Child excels himself here by transforming the latter half of the action in this book to the UK, and specifically to rural Norfolk.  There's a lot of knowingness here from ex-pat British author Child; scenes where six-and-a-half foot Reacher tries to blend into the landscape in a country pub, or has to drive a Mini Cooper around Hyde Park Corner, are extremely funny while the pressure on the plot is fully maintained.  Excellent novel, and very well read by Jeff Harding, himself an ex-pat American living in the UK for the last couple of decades.

Gamble: a Dick Francis novel, by Felix Francis. London: Michael Joseph, 2011.

The existence of this book is pleasing enough - the previous 4 collaborations between Felix and Dick Francis were right back to the standard of the early Francis novels, and this one is also extremely fine.  It covers well-trodden paths, although this time round the protagonist is an ex-jockey who has gone into a firm of independent financial advisors; but honestly, just saying it's a really good Dick Francis novel is probably enough for aficionados.

Lazybones, by Mark Billingham [audiobook]. Read by Steve Perrin. Rearsby, Leics.: Clipper, 2004.

Someone is killing convicted rapists on their release from prison; and one of the difficulties for the police is actually caring about the victims.  Tom Thorne struggles with this as much as his officers do, until he finds a genuine victim in the case.  This really does go for the hairpin bends at the end of the book and the ending is definitely pretty surprising!

Looming back into view

Hello!  This, unbelievably, is the first non-book-review post of the year.

Mostly, this has been due to the usual time-of-year-kicking-me-in-the-head thing; I've also ended up doing some work at home and some earlier mornings/longer days at work; and transport has been a bit terrible too.
I think the low point this year came on the week beginning February 6, when I spent 25 hours just getting to work and back  (normally my week is extreme by some people's reckoning at around 17.5 hours just travelling) and then, as the kicker on the Saturday, failing completely to get to Kew Gardens for a wander about and Cake Crawl with some lovely knitters.  Standing on a station for 45 mins in -13C (Ely; frozen points) has given me a greater appreciation of Arctic/Antarctic explorers; in terms of confirming my belief in their total insanity.

So, anyway; I've been maundering away feeling knackered thinking "nobody's going to be interested in my boring life; I've done nothing..."   And that might be true; but this evening I, and the rest of the carriage, spent 45 minutes being treated to a woman directing her husband around Iceland.  Enthusiastically; and extraordinarily loudly.  Which would have been really interesting if she were talking about the country, rather than the frozen food shop.  Unfortunately, it turns out Mum couldn't get to Iceland so she was going to send Dad round on a string. "Well, yes, chili chicken bits, but ARE THEY BREADED, TONY?  ARE THEY BREADED?"

This set me a somewhat lower bar.

So; I got a loom for Christmas! A 24" Ashford rigid heddle loom, to be specific. It's a lovely beast. I loved it first because it involved the application of wax, a lot of self-assembly, and a wonderfully-constructed set of parts packed by someone from a company which feels confident enough in its workers and training that it gives each packer a business card with "Proudly packed by" on it. I've assembled an Ashford wheel, done bits for an Ashford carder, and now the loom - everything works wonderfully.

While I was waiting for the wax to dry on December 28, I opened my Christmas presents from friends (hadn't had time before I set off to my parents') and had two lovely skeins of sari silk from my friend Chai in Toronto; looking at the colours and the sheen, I wondered about weaving it...

So, this is what I got for my first project;



Warp was a purple bamboo yarn I'd bought to make a hat without realising that actually bamboo + hat probably means cold head. The weft was partly the sari silk and partly remnants of some lovely charcoal grey Jaeger Extra Fine Merino in charcoal. Here's the thing on the table. It's shorter than I was hoping, but taught me a valuable lesson about how much yarn you waste in the weaving process. And it still looks nice on the table...



With Chai (and her February birthday) still in mind, I decided to make a houndstooth check scarf from slightly thicker yarn in two different textures, and that worked out pretty well, too - this is the detail view on the loom



and this is what it looked like after washing



Warping with a yarn with so much angora was probably silly; it took ages; but I did love the final fabric...

And to come full circle; I warped up again the day I couldn't get to Kew. I'm sure Tina is responsible for the amount of red in this project, but it also reflects the amount of red/orange sock leftovers I had kicking about.



I'm still weaving this one, and enjoying it, although finding it more difficult to get the edges straight with the finer yarn...

2012 books, #6-10

Snuff, by Terry Pratchett.  London: Doubleday, 2011.

Terry Pratchett is a man with a lot to be angry about, these days, and in this book he finds his perfect vehicle in Sam Vimes.  Vimes has been forced to go on holiday to his (actually his wife's) country estate; and as the bookcover blurb says "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a policeman taking a holiay will barely have had time to open his suitcase before he finds his first corpse."  As ever with the Vimes books, this is darker in quality than some of the others.  There's a lot of justice and injustice in this book, and a lot of righteous anger; the title does refer to tobacco in part, but also to what happens when one group of people declare another group of people not to be people at all, but commodities to be exploited.  This is a Pratchett tour de force and every now and then you're just stunned by the quality of the argument.  Although he's an atheist, he's never afraid to corral religious language when no other will do; at the end of one long ramble by his trainee copper, "the voice of Vimes, and this time sounding rather far away, said, 'Do you know what that little speech you made was called, Mister Feeney?' 'Don't know sir, it's just what I think.' 'It was called redemption, Mister Feeney. Hold on to it.' "  My only reservation with this one is the transformation of Willikins from the perfect gentleman's gentleman to something far more elemental and dangerous; but it does work.  And of course, it's also hilarious; there's the 12-year-old's humour, but also something much more knowing and subversive of literary genres too, and he blends all the strands in wonderfully.


Just my type: a book about fonts, by Simon Garfield. London: Profile, 2011.


This was a Christmas present - thanks, Sue!  I'd heard one of the episodes when this was book of the week on Radio 4 and I was working from home, but had promptly forgotten all the details of the book.  If I'd realised it was the guy responsible for the equally fascinating Mauve, about the history of the chemical dye, I'd have remembered it better!  This is a fascinating roller-coaster ride through the intricacies of font history and design; and I've spent the last week or so looking at packaging and signposting with new eyes.  From Gutenberg to the guy who designed the Rolling Stone masthead and the man responsible for Comic Sans, Garfield explores the history and aesthetics of font design while never losing a sense of humour.  And at the end, his 8 Worst Fonts of All Time are hilarious.


The coldest blood, by Jim Kelly [audiobook]. Read by Ray Sawyer. Oxford, Isis, 2007.


Two men die in the Fens around Ely - both frozen to death in different ways.  Philip Dryden, a former Fleet Street journalist demoted to chief reporter for the Ely Crow, realises there's a link both between the two men and with his own childhood.  He investigates with his unlikely sidekick Humph, and finds himself digging into his own past.  The plot is fascinating and twists and turns nicely, and the geography is spot on; I wasn't sure about Jim Kelly from the previous book of his I read, but will definitely give him another go now.


Hostile witness, by Rebecca Forster. Kindle edition.

Sixteen-year-old Hannah Sheraton is remanded for the murder of her step-grandfather, a retired judge.  Hannah's mother Lynda hires an old college roommate, Josie Baylor-Bates, to represent Hannah who suffers from obsessive compulsive disorder.  Hannah is not a likeable character - spoilt, unaware of the magnitude of her situation and occasionally violent - but as Josie investigates further to find the tangled disfunctional family's secrets, she becomes aware that each time she excavates a layer, the picture becomes completely different.  Excellently plotted with a number of surprises.

Broadmoor revealed: Victorian crime and the lunatic asylum, by Mark Stevens. Kindle edition. 2011.

Mark Stevens is the archivist at the Berkshire records office which holds the records of the Broadmoor Hospital for the Clinically Insane, and has extracted some of the more interesting stories from the archives to give both a profile of the general population of the hospital in the Victorian era, and the stories of some of the more high-profile inmates (Richard Dadd, Edward Oxford, William Chester Minor) and some less-known but typical in some way.  He also explores the Victorian attitude to crime and to mental illness, and does it all tremendously entertainingly.

2012 books, #1-5

So much for my new year plans to blog more!  However, here are some books.  I hope to have some knitting to show later!


False charity, by Veronica Heley [audiobook]. Read by Patience Tomlinson.  Whitley Bay: Soundings, 2007.

Bea Abbott returns from New Zealand newly widowed and has to decide what to do with The Abbott Agency, a business dealing with domestic crises.  Her son, an MP, thinks she should sell the house to him and move to the seaside, but Bea isn't keen.  While she's been away, her son has hired a secretary, Maggie, who turns out to be great at housekeeping but a dead loss in the office; Maggie in turn has brought in Oliver, an 18-year-old computer whizz who's estranged from his family.  In addition, Bea's late husband has also enlisted her ex-husband, Piers, to look after her.  When Coral, an old friend and long-term client, reports losses due to fraud from a party-organising company working for tsunami charities, the unlikely household investigates.  Very entertainingly written and well-plotted.

The house at Sea's End, by Elly Griffiths. London: Quercus, 2011.

Ruth Galloway's baby, Kate, has now been born, and Ruth is returning to work after maternity leave.  The first case she is called out on is the discovery of six bodies in a grave on the sea-coast, in an area affected by severe coastal erosion.  The bodies are tied together in pairs and seem to have been executed sometime in the middle of the 20th century.  What should be an archaeological puzzle suddenly becomes an active police investigation when a contemporary body washes ashore - someone is killing the witnesses to the event and those investigating.  As well as an excellent plot, the relationship between Ruth, Nelson and their baby is also intriguing, and Griffiths also explores the guilt a single, working mother feels around childcare and trying to juggle two full-time jobs.

Play to kill, by P J Tracy. London: Penguin, 2010.

Another extremely good Gino and Magozzi thriller which discusses wider issues.  This time, what starts off as the mildly bizarre murder of a transvestite in a wedding dress leads to a more serious problem - someone is killing people and posting the videos to YouTube.  Are the murders linked, or is there some sort of group forming which is performing these killings?  As with anything (knitting, for instance), there's strength in numbers out on the Web, and people encourage each other along, in this case to carry out more and more extreme killings.  As ever, the Monkeewrench geeks are also involved.  The characterisation and tight plotting is great, and the relationships between the various characters are lovely.  A slightly odd ending to this one - I'll be intrigued as to what happens next.

Pirate king, by Laurie R King. London: Allison and Busby, 2011.

The latest of the Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes mysteries.  The plot setup for this one is really bizarre - Russell is despatched to investigate a film company which is making a film about people making a film of The pirates of Penzance.  To add further complication to the story, once the crew reaches Portugal they recruit pirates to play actors playing English gentlemen disguised as pirates.  The absurdity of the situation isn't lost on Russell and King really does run amusingly with it, possibly at the expense of a comprehensible plot and some of Russell's usual common sense.  There isn't as much interaction between Holmes and Russell as usual - Holmes only appears at least halfway through the book - but it's an enjoyable read.

Moon over Soho, by Ben Aaronovitch [audiobook]. Read by Kobna Holbrook-Smith. Oxford: Isis, 2011.

Sequel to Rivers of London; I'd been warned it wasn't as good as the first book, and it couldn't really be, because the entire setup was surprising the first time round and the author is sort of riffing on the atmosphere he's created.  Which is appropriate, as someone seems to be killing jazzmen in Soho clubs.  The sense of humour and absurdity in the style is carried on into this second novel, and the plot barrels along nicely.  The geographic accuracy carries on, too, which is always fun - you can really follow them around the streets...  One of the best elements, though, is that actions and damage are shown to have real consequences.  So many times in novels, our heroes are shot, beaten up, tortured, etc., etc., and bounce back to appear in the next book with only the odd twinge to remind them.  One of the main characters in the previous novel still isn't back at work, or anywhere near it, at the end of this novel, and there's a very moving final scene in this book.

2011 books, #126-130

Blood ties, by Lori G Armstrong. Kindle edition.

Julie Collins is a sheriff's secretary with a huge chip on her shoulder and the unsolved murder of her half-Native American half-brother hanging around her neck.  Then a girl's body is found in a river, and an investigation is launched.  Shortly afterwards, Julie's best high-school friend Kevin, a private investigator Julie helps out on occasion, tells her that the dead girl's family had hired him to find her.  The plot twists and turns nicely and stays pretty gripping from start to finish.  Julie is a bit irritating, and her choice in men is absolutely terrible, but her relationship with Kevin is interesting and makes the book more likeable than it would otherwise be.  One criticism - did it have to be set in a county called Bear Butte when no other humour is derived from this??

A cold day for murder, by Dana Stabenow. Kindle edition.

Former detective Kate Shugak is a hermit of sorts, after the end of an investigation left her with a ruined voice and a huge scar on her throat - she has retired from Anchorage to her homestead a long way outside Niniltna, Alaska.  However, a game warden has gone missing, and the investigator sent out from Anchorage has vanished too; the investigator was a friend and former colleague of Kate's and she reluctantly agrees to pursue the case.  The cast of characters here is interesting, and the Alaskan scenery is fascinating (and very, very, very cold...)  I'm hoping there are more of these.

A land of ash, by David Dalglish et al.  Kindle edition.

Five authors imagine a catastrophic volcanic eruption in the Yellowstone National Park, with an eastward drift of an enormous ash cloud.  A dozen or so short stories tell stories of the event, the deaths, the immediate aftermath and the struggle for survival as the ash hardens and begins to destroy buildings.  There are one or two stories which make very little sense, but most of them are fascinating in the John Wyndham tradition, and show the best and worst of humanity in the face of an apocalyptic event.

The water room, by Christopher Fowler [audiobook]. Read by Tim Goodman.  Rearsby, Leics.: W F Howes, 2004.

A Bryant and May mystery, and oddly the one I listened to after Rivers of London - there are many of the same elements here, with a supernatural component to the underground historical rivers of London, and a number of deaths in inexplicable circumstances.  The Peculiar Crimes Squad with octogenarian detectives John May and Arthur Bryant investigate.  The plot is maybe a little over-complicated in places but the relationships between Bryant and May and the other characters are beautifully written.

Flash and bones, by Kathy Reichs. London: Heinemann, 2011.

Tempe Brennan investigates a body found embedded in asphalt in a metal drum in a landfill site near a NASCAR race-track.  This leads in turn to the cold missing-persons case of a young couple who were seen leaving a nearby site almost 20 years before.  One of the investigators of that case is working as head of security for NASCAR, having been discredited as a policeman.  It's a good Tempe case, spoiled only by some really unconvincing scenes between Tempe, her ex-husband Pete and Pete's airhead fiancée Summer, and the lack of Andrew Ryan; but if you like the plot bits of Reichs's story but get fed up with the female members of her family, this is a good one.