15-15-15 Book and Blogging Challenge Day 1

For the 15-15-15 challenge I am focusing on starting and finishing books I accepted review copies of and also finishing those I have glanced at or am one or a few chapters into but put down for various reasons (the book not holding my interest being the main issue as to why I'd procrastinated reading it).

Here goes for my report for day 1.

On Friday April 16, I finished reading "Sweater Quest: My Year of Knitting Dangerously" which was a light fast nonfiction read about knitting which I learned of last year via the Cast-On knitting podcast and wanted to read when it was published this year. It was offered to me as a review copy for Amazon Vine. I was thrilled to get pre-publication access to the book and free too boot. It felt great to finish a book as I have so many books in progress right now.



This book is about a woman's year long project to knit a difficult fair isle sweater with something like different colored yarns. The sweater pattern book is out of print so just getting your hands on a copy is a daunting and expensive task. The designer of the sweater is Alice Starmore and without getting too much into it, there is a lot to talk about and consider about why the books and the yarns she created and sold with her name as the brand name are no longer available.

The book is light easy reading, it's a fast read. Knitters are the target audience for this book.

I thought the book would be more about the process of knitting it, funny stories or struggles to get the technique down, like a knitting memoir of sorts. Instead the book wound up being hardly anything about her knitting and more about related nonfiction topics. She tells about the history of fair isle knitting and about meeting various current popular knitters in the knitting blogosphere or published hot knitting book authors.

I was let down in the end by this book as I hoped for more. If you read books by the Yarn Harlot this doesn't measure up to that. Still it was light easy reading perfect for before bed reading. It reminds me of the type of writing I can and do read for free on knitting blogs or posts on Ravelry.com crossed with magazine articles on nonfiction topics (it has a bit more of an air of the writing of a freelance reporter but not so deep or serious as an investigative journalist).

Disclosure: I received a review copy of this book from Amazon Vine. I was not paid to mention this book or to blog about it. For my blog's full disclosure statement see the link at the top of my blog's sidebar.