June 22, 2024: Dishcloths and a Lot of Nonfiction

I'm in a bit of a knitting slump. 

Sort of.  I'm making things, but it's mostly just dishcloths.  Other projects have stalled because I'm bored with them. I want to knit something new, but nothing is catching my attention.

Here are the dishcloths.

I did take a break from the world's most boring white scarf (not pictured) and the stashbusting dishcloths to make hats for my dad and my daughter for Father's Day.  I made up the pattern and used stash that would be enough for 2 hats.  I wasn't sure if the color would work for either person, but I thought the yarn was soft and I thought the matching element would be enough to make my dad happy.  I made matching hats for him and my daughter around 10 years ago and while his hat might still exist,  hers is far too small for any of the grandkids.

I was a little nervous that she'd be opposed to such a silly gift (I made them while she was away from home on a church trip) and resent my goofiness, or dismiss it as "cringe" or "mid."  

So many things are mid that I'm not sure the word holds any meaning at this point. 

Or at least it can't for me as a parent. If I'm going to be phased every time a teenager is unimpressed by my ideas, crafts, cooking, or general personhood, I'd probably have to live on the fainting couch. I made the hats and planned to tell her to be polite and just let her grandad enjoy the new hats and keep both at his house.  

But she saw them blocking and when I told her that I'd knitted matching hats for her and her grandad, she exclaimed "Matching, you say?!" like a delighted character in an old movie who found out a friend is rounding up the old gang to put on one last show.

The hats grew a bit in blocking--I remembered that the yarn was a wool blend.  But I forgot that the other fiber was silk.  

They were both happy with the hats.

I'm reading a lot of nonfiction at the moment.  

I recently finished Cheap Land Colorado: Off-Gridders at America's Edge by Ted Conover and Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century by Jessica Bruder.  Saying I enjoyed either book might be a stretch, but I was engrossed and impressed with the warmth and understanding both writers showed to their subjects--several of whom they really seemed to consider friends after spending so long with them--alongside their journalistic style of writing that was sometimes a little removed and objective.  I'd recommend either to anyone who wants to read about people living on the fringes of society, both economically and socially.

In the same vein, I'm reading Dispatches from Pluto: Lost and Found in the Mississippi Delta by Richard Grant.  It's a thoughtful look at a sometimes desolate region, but there are lively descriptions of the place and people and it seems really clear that Grant is excited by the sheer 'story' of the whole experience even when he hates the heat and the fire ants.  At least that's what I've got so far.  I'm only 3 or 4 chapters in.  I think I will be able to say I enjoyed reading it.

And I'm reading On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King.  I don't always enjoy Stephen King's fiction, but I think it's neat when people talk about their craft.  He's a huge reader, and I always enjoy his essays.  I had to read a ton of his fiction and nonfiction for a college course a million years ago (fall semester 2003) and I read an essay of his that expounded on the way he would approach an idea for a story based around the image of a pond and how it was different from how a writer like Louis L'Amour would craft a novel around the same image. At least I think it was Louis L'Amour. I've lived a few different lifetimes since I was 20 and in the world of 2 decades ago.   Enough about the essay stuck with me that I was excited when I found this for $5 in a used bookstore and I've been enjoying reading a whole book about this workmanlike approach to writing and to advising writers.  

The other books were library books.  Lastly, I'm currently super engrossed by The Innocent Man: Murder and Injustice in a Small Town by John Grisham.  I actually borrowed that from one of the churches where I work.  I'm not sure why they have it, but you can't go into too many buildings with bookshelves without finding something by Grisham.  I'm not a true crime person but it's still infuriatingly familiar to anyone who's ever read or watched anything about a crime. But it's also incredibly well-researched and the people involved in any aspect of the tragedy are realistically and respectfully rendered--especially the ones who were no longer alive to speak for themselves.  It was also jarring to see the names of towns I've passed on the way to visit family in Oklahoma and to read about them as settings for violent crimes and stark suffering.  I'll probably finish it this weekend because it's too hot to do much or go anywhere.  It might even be too hot to read about the Delta.

Other notes: 

In my last post, I had a picture of several library books I had checked out.

Those Who Wish Me Dead by Michael Koryta was engrossing but a little goofy in the way that superhuman action movie heroes are.  Lots of coincidences. People getting third degree burns and then taking off into the forest on horseback for a search mission 24 hours later. Some dumb twists that I honestly didn't see coming and super loved, honestly.

I still read The Prophet, by the same author.  It was really touching, harrowing, and just so solidly well-written in that way makes you read a tightly crafted paragraph in a crime thriller and think "Wow, that was really well-written."

Only Good Indians was way too violent for me to say I enjoy it, but it was viscerally well done.  You could feel the violence for better or for worse.  It was like an old fashioned fairy tale or legend in the way that you knew certain characters were certainly doomed, but with a hopeful ending that I really did not expect after all that suffering.

My Sister, the Serial Killer lived up to the hype, but I'm not sure why it was on the shelf for our library's monthly reading challenge (April was for comedy???).

I finally read Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler.  Blew me away.

I saw the movie The Dry.  It was really faithful to the novel by Jane Harper even though Eric Bana doesn't look much like the character Aaron Falk as he was described.  It was still great, and now I want to re-read all of her novels with Aaron Falk.

I haven't touched the books about North Little Rock and moss gardening.  Both of them seemed delightful and I should dive into them before a library hunts me down or, worse, looks at me with disapproval while checking me out with other books the next time I go to the library.