All Wound Up by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee

U.S.: $16.99 Canada: $18.99
ISBN: 9780740797576
Format: Hardcover
On Sale: October 18, 2011 — Coming soon! 

Inside All Wound Up, New York Times best-selling author and self-proclaimed Yarn Harlot Stephanie Pearl-McPhee spins her third yarn on knitting for the 60 million knitters in North America who collectively spend $45 billion a year on knitting-related merchandise.

In her trademark style, McPhee talks about knitting, parenting, friendship, and—gasp!—even crocheting in essays that are at times touching, often hilarious, and always entertaining. Fans of her popular blog at www.yarnharlot.ca/blog/ will adore this all-new collection of tales of the woolen and silky skein, which follow the Yarn Harlot's previous exploits chronicled inside Yarn Harlot and Free-Range Knitter.

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Well.  What can I say about Stephanie Pearl- McPhee's latest book?  I want to tell you how I had to stop reading this book in public less I look like a loon.  Ms. McPhee's sense of humor and witty use of language had me laughing uncontrollably.  Giggles would erupt unexpectedly as I would suddenly remember a passage from the book.  Her relationship with her craft is genuine and her connection to the reader is so very...real.  This is an honest woman being honestly funny telling the truth the best way she knows how.  And she shines.  Buy it and love it but be prepared to read it alone.

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Stephanie Pearl-McPhee

Stephanie Pearl-McPhee is the author of Yarn Harlot, At Knit's End, Knitting Rules!, and Casts Off. She maintains a popular blog at www.yarnharlot.ca/blog/. She lives with her family in an untidy, wool-filled house in Toronto, where she avoids doing the laundry and knits whenever she gets a minute. This biography was provided by the author or their representative.

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

This is easily one of the funniest books I have ever read. And to think it almost wasn't even published.  

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A green hunting cap squeezed the top of the fleshy balloon of a head. The green earflaps, full of large ears and uncut hair and the fine bristles that grew in the ears themselves, stuck out on either side like turn signals indicating two directions at once. Full, pursed lips protruded beneath the bushy black moustache and, at their corners, sank into little folds filled with disapproval and potato chip crumbs. In the shadow under the green visor of the cap Ignatius J. Reilly's supercilious blue and yellow eyes looked down upon the other people waiting under the clock at the D.H. Holmes department store, studying the crowd of people for signs of bad taste in dress. Several of the outfits, Ignatius noticed, were new enough and expensive enough to be properly considered offenses against taste and decency. Possession of anything new or expensive only reflected a person's lack of theology and geometry; it could even cast doubts upon one's soul.
--from A Confederacy of Dunces

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Walker Percy's Foreword to A Confederacy of Dunces

Perhaps the best way to introduce this novel -- which on my third reading of it astounds me even more than the first -- is to tell of my first encounter with it. While I was teaching at Loyola in 1976 I began to get telephone calls from a lady unknown from me. What she proposed was preposterous. It was not that she had written a couple of chapters of a novel and wanted to get into my class. It was that her son, who was dead, had written an entire novel during the early sixties, a big novel, and she wanted me to read it. Why would I want to do that? I asked her. Because it is a great novel, she said.
Over the years I have become very good at getting out of things I don't want to do. And if ever there was something I didn't want to do, this was surely it: to deal with the mother of a dead novelist and, worst of all, to have to read a manuscript that she said was great, and that, as it turned out, was a badly smeared, scarcely readable carbon.
But the lady was persistent, and it somehow came to pass that she stood in my office handing me the hefty manuscript. There was no getting out of it; only one hope remained -- that I could read a few pages and that they would be bad enough for me, in good conscience, to read no farther. Usually I can do just that. Indeed the first paragraph often suffices. My only fear was that this one might not be bad enough, or might be just good enough, so that I would have to keep reading.
In this case I read on. And on. First with the sinking feeling that it was not bad enough to quit, then with a prickle of interest, then a growing excitement, and finally an incredulity: surely it was not possible that it was so good. I shall resist the temptation to say what first made me gape, grin, laugh out loud, shake my head in wonderment...Read the rest here.