Ravelry shrinks the world

This morning I received invites to join a Portuguese language Ravelry group (muito legal) and promptly sent an invite to my friend Ceci, who also speaks Portuguese. The moderator, Acucena, has a gorgeous blog, and lives in Portugal, in Sintra (I have two silkscreens of Sintra castle hanging in my dining room). And I was also invited to be friends with Guaria, who I think is Monica, but she disguises herself in her blog :) anyway Guaria mentions trying to blog in both English and Spanish, but she got lazy. Wow, I understand cuz it all comes down to time to knit, crochet, etc.
That's Sintra castle on the left. I am also on an Irish group. I love it. We have come a long way from penpals (I had an Irish one when I was in high school).

Read or knit???

Tonight at SSK, I brought up the topic of books. You see, I am an avid reader, movie buff, and knitter. I read at stop lights (I used to knit at red lights, when I lived in Boston, but here it doesn't work for me). So recently, I have come across, and sought out books - novels- that have knitting in them.

A couple of us - Martha, and Amy - threw out names of books we'd recently read that had some relationship with knitting.

We all panned The Friday Night Knitting Club - it's soooo smaltzy, and unreal (could anyone actually survive in NYC as the main character did as a single mom, with a great apartment, etc.). I picked it up in England in November. I couldn't see recommending it to anyone, so I sold it on Amazon.


Martha and I liked The Knitting Circle (at least I think she said she'd read it), but didn't recommend it to Amy as the story centers around the death of a child. I found it hard to put down, although it was a little contrived. Still it was so much better than The Friday Night Knitting Circle.



Coincidentally, Martha and I have both recently read A Three Dog Life. Martha said that she was surprised there was so much knitting in it. One of the reasons I bought the book is because the back cover mentioned knitting, and it looked like a good read. I whipped through it in a couple of days.

There are two more knitting/sheep related books that I bought on Alibris.
The first is titled Three Bags Full. It's in my "to read" pile.
A witty philosophical murder mystery with a charming twist: the crack detectives are sheep determined to discover who killed their beloved shepherd, in this internationally bestselling tale.


The other is Trafficking in Sheep: A Memoir: From Off-Broadway, New York, to Blue Island, Nova Scotia. It is described as " A poignant story of one woman's determination to start a life anew in idyllic Nova Scotia, far away from her jetsetting-New Yorker roots.
A working actress and divorced mother of two young boys takes off for the summer to the coast of Nova Scotia. She falls in love with the place; buys a house; ultimately buys an island because it is the view from her house and because she wants to save it from development. "