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Today’s segments include: drafting, lit review, not quite five favorite things, and noteworthy.
Drafting:
Spice Man socks by Yarnissima in Desert Vista Dyeworks Viso Summer Harvest.
Gyokuro socks by Cookie A in Hazel knits artisan sock colorway Atmosphere.
No spinning this week
Lit Review
World War Z by Max Brooks
I loved this book. It was the first book I borrowed from the library, and I read it on my iPad kindle app. This made it easy to read and knit at the same time. The book is an oral history of the zombie war, a not-so-distant future post-apocalyptic disease scenario. The book would be a lot of fun to teach in my medicine in pop culture class.
As an oral history, the story is told through interviews with different people across the world who participated in different aspects of the war. At first, the interviews are with doctors who were treating this as a disease, but the interviews shift to soldiers who are trying to kill all the zombies to make the world safe again. What I really liked about the book is that it’s not just about killing zombies in dramatic ways; instead, it’s about how humans deal with extreme situations where the rules are different. What do you do when you can’t treat disease in the same way, and you can’t kill your enemy in the same way? These are the questions addressed in this book.
This book gets 5 stars from me!
It’s Complicated by danah boyd
This nonfiction book was Juniata College’s summer reading. I required my students in Writing Across Media to read it, and we discussed the book in the first week of class in preparation for danah boyd’s visit to the college on Tuesday. The book is addressed to parents and teachers primarily, and is about the various practices of teenagers using social media. boyd addresses topics such as privacy, danger, and bullying, and the inaccurate representations of social media that news sources promote. I really liked the topics in the book because I think they have the faculty and students thinking about the importance of thinking critically about our technology rather than embracing or rejecting technology outright because of fear. I also like the way she situated how being a teenager has changed, at least since I was a teenager, and how teens use social media to connect with their friends because they have less unstructured time to just hang out than I did when I was a teenager.
I think it’s a 4 star book, less for the writing but more for the conversations it promotes. I also really enjoyed danah boyd’s visit to the college–getting to meet her and discuss her view of the new directions of technology studies.
Five Favorite Things:
1. Hazel knits artisan sock Haze
2. Hazel knits artisan sock Song Sparrow
3. What we see when we read by Peter Mendelsund
4. Soak bucket
5. knitting in public
Noteworthy:
Events: Huntingdon FiberArts Fest and Knitter’s Day Out are next weekend!
Rhinebeck