More Hellboy and another book

Don't ask me why, but I enjoy Hellboy comics.



For me to like a comic book, the art and the plot must be good enough. The drawings are wonderful, no question about it. The stories... well, those are quite absurd, but amusing, and I've always liked fantasy.

Talking of fantasy, here's some from Lois McMaster Bujold: Passage, which is the third book of a series called The Sharing Knife.



I believe I have read all of her books. I liked her more when she was writing militaristic science fiction, though she's also written excellent fantasy books, my favorite being The Curse of Chalion.  I don't think that The Sharing Knife is as good as other stuff she's written, but maybe it's just that her style has changed, or she may be trying to accomodate other type of readers. I do feel she is now concentrating heavily on the romance, which she was not doing before.

The idea of not doing any patterning made these socks go fast, didn't it? I do want to finish them soon, because I will be going to a wedding in Mexico and these are a gift for a friend I will be meeting there. And no, they are not a wedding gift! The couple will be getting money.  Boring, but that's what they asked for.

Two books

I might not be blogging, but I have been knitting and reading.



That is Zoe's Tale, by John Scalzi. My library owns the first three books on this series, and yet when I suggested that they buy this one, which could qualify as the fourth, I got a message stating that Scalzi was a fairly unknown author and that the library would not be getting this book. So I let it drop, hoping that the book may become available later on through interlibrary loan (oh, I am so cheap). Well, all of a sudden, I got another message from my library that the book was ready for me to pick up. Apparently, enough readers requested it that they went ahead and bought it. And the best part was, I was the first to read it.

It took me about two evenings to finish it, but that is not surprising, it happens to me with all of Scalzi's books. This is the same story of the third book, but written under a different character's point of view. Not boring at all, even when you already know what is going to happen.  I thoroughly enjoyed it.

The second book is The Nuclear Jihadist, by Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins. Now that's a depressing book. You see, A.Q. Kahn, the scientist who developed the Pakistani nuclear bomb, went on to traffic nuclear technology with countries like Lybia, North Korea and Iran, all the while under CIA surveillance. And nobody stopped him, because nobody wanted to cause any turmoil in Pakistan. Well, Pakistan is in turmoil anyway, and now the genie is out of the bottle. Depressing indeed.


So let's talk about something more cheerful, shall we? How do you like the sock striping, so far? I like how it is coming out and I am thinking of making a plain stockinette sock without any bells and whistles. Any attempt to incorporate texture would ruin the wide stripes, don't you agree?

Hellboy

This was not a recommendation from a fellow knitter, but from my husband. So I trusted him and read the comic. I confess that I enjoyed it a lot. It was a good beginning for the toes.


But now it's time to start reading some of the recommendations I got from knitters visiting this website. Luckily, my local library has them, so I will get to them eventually. Thank you so much for your suggestions!

There!

Finally, here's a finished pair of sunset socks:




To celebrate, I decided to start a new pair of socks with some Knit Picks yarn. To my dismay, the skeins were wound up from different ends. I kept unraveling while searching for the same sequence on both skeins until I discovered what was wrong. By then, it was just easier to manually wind one of the skeins backwards:



Has anyone had this problem before? For me, this was the first time ever.

Anyway, please help me celebrate the completion of my eternal socks by suggesting me a few books to read for the current pair.

Almost There

 Yes, this pair of socks is almost finished. And I also finished Valerie Plame's Book: Fair Game. It is full of "redactions".



Luckily, you can still make sense of what's going on. And the afterword, by a different author, fills up the gaps with information already available to the general public.

I feel sorry that someone who was working so hard to keep her country safe was betrayed by her own government.

Refried Book

Back in Mexico, I used to scan the section of English language books in Sanborns, searching for science fiction. While not strictly SciFi, Robin Cook's books were a neat substitute: medical thrillers. But I often felt, after reading a few pages, that I might have bought a book I already owned. Checking my shelf, I would then notice that no, I had made no mistake and this was, in fact a new book. The problem was that Robin Cook was repeating himself. So I stopped reading him.



I was browsing the new books section in my public library when this Robin Cook's book, Crisis, stirred some memories. Maybe I should give him another try, I thought. Guess what? Even after so many years, I recognized the same recipe: A few mafiosi, a good doctor, a bad doctor, and something to criticize about modern health care, in this case, concierge medicine.

The good thing is, he's still a page turner. It was over soon.

Once Upon a Quinceañera

I am still not sure why I picked this book by Julia Alvarez. I was never interested in quinceañera parties. I did not have one, and none of my close friends did. Some people I knew did, I attended as a guest, and that only made me even happier about not having had one. Back then me and my friends thought quinceañeras were a cheesy thing of the past. Who would have told me that here in the US it is such a huge deal for young latinas?



For my 15th birthday I went skiing with my family. It was an expensive trip, but considering what I just read, it was quite cheaper than the modern day quinceañera.

I wonder why is it that young girls try to integrate themselves into the American society as much as they can, but at the same time they wish to keep this expensive and primitive tradition alive. And, from what I read, it is becoming more and more expensive and complicated. Why bother with such a waste? Wouldn't it be wiser to set up a college fund for the young girl in question?

A beautiful book

The author is David Sheff and the title is Beautiful Boy, just like the John Lennon song.



I think this is the saddest real life story I have ever read. I know there are worse tragedies than addiction, but never before had I read about the horrible life of an addict and his family in such detail. It is a very depressing book, but it is lovingly written.

No time to knit...

... or to blog. But there's always time to read.


Yes, comics count as reading.

Another inch, another book

The book is Into the Wild, by John Krakauer. This is Jennifer's recommendation. Actually, she recommended the movie, but I thought the book would be more interesting, so I got it from my local library.



And interesting it was. I had not heard of Christopher McCandless, who after earning his college degree cut off all links with his family and basically became a hobo. Two years later, he died of starvation in Alaska. Knowing the outcome from the beginning of the book was no spoiler. Rather, I was amazed on how much my opinion on McCandles evolved as I kept reading. The author was very thorough in following his steps and narrating them in detail. This book would be excellent  were it not for the inclusion of other similar cases or the digression about the author's related experience. This book was supposed to be about  only one person and I wish it had remained so.