Knit Lit?

The Friday Night Knitting Club
Kate Jacobs
Berkley

We should probably just file this book under the category "what the hell was I thinking?" and leave it at that. Unfortunately, that wouldn't make for much of an entry, so I guess I will go ahead and give you the gruesome details.

The Friday Night Knitting Club is set in a New York City wool shop where a bunch of eclectic women get together to learn stitches, trade gossip and share the narratives of their lives. The main character is Georgia -- a single mom who is in the not-so-envious position of raising a tween. She is also the shop's proprietor and part of her job is to be the (sometimes reluctant) good friend and sounding board to the women who frequent her establishment. Georgia's life is quite idyllic and it seems like she has it all. That is, of course, until she gets cancer. Georgia ends up dying before the end of the novel but not before all of the other subplots are brought to a happy conclusion. Methinks the author listened to the wrong REM song. This novel needed way more "Everybody Hurts" and way less "Shiny Happy People." One dropped stitch out of five.

Not so Beautiful Music

Music of the Primes

Marcus du Sautoy

Harper Collins

So, I think it is time for another heartfelt admission from the D-E-S. As much as it pains me to say it, I can be a terrible procrastinator. I know that some of you reading this are snorting in disbelief, but it's true. Very occasionally, I put things off until they pile up and loom over me like a darkling cloud. Lately, my procrastination has involved two things -- getting myself sorted out for my upcoming move and sitting down to write the blog entry related to Music of the Primes. My move date is, gulp, Wednesday, so I had to get my asterisk in gear today to finalize the logistics. Since I had some time to spare, I figured I should get this task over with as well. Here goes nothing ...

The Music of the Primes is a book about math. More specifically, it explores the magic of prime numbers and in particular, takes a good look at the Riemann Hypothesis -- one of mathematics most famous, and still unsolved, hypotheses. If I were to pick a single word to describe this book, however, it would be "dissonant". The parts of the work dealing specifically with prime number and number theory were, to a lay person, very engaging. The author also attempts to provide a brief overview of the history of mathematics and here is where the book, for me, starts to fall apart and loses my interest. Some of my friends absolutely raved about this text and maybe, just maybe, my expectations were just a little too high. Two whole numbers (or is that integers?) out of five.

Um, Neil Diamond?

Forever in Blue -- The Fourth Summer of the Sisterhood
Ann Brashares
Delacorte Press

So, I was sitting at my desk looking up quotes about autumn for this entry (don't ask) when it hit me. Forever in Blue. Travelling Pants. Forever in Blue Jeans. Neil Diamond. Of course! The author was making an oblique reference to the 70s song lyrics that provided her with the inspiration to come up with the Travelling Pants idea in the first place. Um ... yeah. I think I've been watching too many Gilmore Girls episodes lately. Call me Kirk.

Forever in Blue is the conclusion to the four book Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants series. The girls have made it through their first year of college and instead of spending the summer together, each of them heads off in separate directions in search of themselves. The pants (a pair of jeans that impossibly fits all four of the girls distinct figures) are a talisman of sorts that get passed from girl to girl and make good things happen. This year, the pants are stolen and the girls head to Greece in search of their magic. Well, they don't find the pants, but they do reconnect with each other in a way.

On it's own, this book wasn't very good. It was trite, predictable, and the characters, while becoming slightly more self-aware, didn't really grow. Read in conjunction with the other three novels in the series, however, Forever in Blue ties up some loose ends and satisfies my expectations in terms of where the larger narrative was going. One pair of cutoffs out of five.