Yarnalong: Asagi and The Shepherd’s Life (again!)

A week’s past, and not much has changed!

Knitting: Asagi, by Bristol Ivy.  I didn’t finish in time for the end of the Ravellenic games, but the end is in sight!  I’m on the body ribbing, then just have to do the finishing ribbing on the neckline and the sleeves.  I always feel like the little bits of finishing take so long! I’m excited to get this done and give it a good bath — the miles of stockinette look a little bit wonky at the moment!

Reading: I’m still chugging along on James Rebanks’s The Shepherd’s Life.  For the most part, I’m enjoying it.  To me, the book is at its best when Rebanks’s is recounting personal stories of his family and life on the farm.  His writing is direct and  evocative.  While I’m still enjoying his desire to historicize what he and his family does and his musings on the tension between a landscape as a place of work and landscape as place of tourism/pleasure, I’ve found some of it just a tad repetitive.  Sometimes to the point of the same sentence appearing in almost exactly the same form (see, for instance, p. 51: “It has long been a trading economy: a thousand years ago we were part of a Viking trading world that stretched north around the Atlantic coasts” and, just 11 pages later, p. 62: “It has long been a trading economy; a thousand years ago we were part of a Viking trading world that stretch across the North Atlantic.”).  But this is a pretty minor complaint.  And the upside of this sort of repetition is that the short chapters can function as standalone pieces.  You could dip in and out of this book as the mood took you.  Despite my small quibble, I’ve really been enjoying reading this and am excited to see what the second half of the book holds!

As always, you can head over to the original Yarnalong post to see what people all over the world are making and reading this week!  And I’d love to hear what you’re reading and/or knitting on this week in the comments!