Mystery Thursday

It's a good thing I accomplished a lot this weekend, because I haven't accomplished much since. Tuesday was a zoo at work because of the holiday on Monday. It's almost not worth getting the holiday off when we have to work so hard the following day! So I was too tired to craft Tuesday night. I was all set to work on something last night when I got home, but then the cat decided to mess with the glassware on the top of my hutch and the only way to distract him was to cuddle with him on my lap most of the evening.

So what's a librarian to do when she has no fiber news to talk about? Why, talk about books, of course! Especially when I actually had some time to read last weekend along with everything else. I finished up The Hound of the Baskervilles on Sunday and then plunged right in to Needled to Death, Maggie Sefton's second book in her Kelly Flynn series. I am a little out of sync with these books, because Needled to Death is the October book on Whoduknit and The Hound of the Baskervilles is the November book. However, out in the real world, my library is doing a book discussion series on Sherlock Holmes this fall, and Hound is our October book. (We're also reading The Italian Secretary by Caleb Carr in November and The Beekeeper's Apprentice in December, in case you are looking for a few good books on Sherlock Holmes!) I'm not a huge Sherlock Holmes fan, but I did enjoy reading Hound. And I highly recommend Maggie Sefton. Her characters and descriptions are extremely enjoyable.

I had just finished reading Maggie Sefton's first book in the series, Knit One, Kill Two on vacation in September, and I have to say that it has been a study in contrasts reading Sefton and Doyle consecutively. Sefton's series is set in and around a yarn shop called House of Lambspun in Colorado (yes, another fiction book set in a real yarn shop), and her descriptions of the yarns in the shop are enough to make a knitter's head spin! Consequently, her books are full of color and texture. Doyle, on the other hand, at least in Hound, creates a monochromatic landscape with his words. In part this is because the book is mostly set on a moor (once the action leaves London), and in part because the story itself is fairly somber. So while it is very easy to come up with knitting projects out of Sefton's books, it is really going to be a challenge to come up with something from Hound. I have an idea that I am working on, but it's a good thing I have until December 15th to get it done! And I can definitely say that whatever it is, it will be made with black or grey yarn. I just can't imagine using color to represent anything in the book.