** local find alert: analog books **

Kapow! How cool is that?

So cool I just had to jump back on and tell you all about it.

This is a journal made out of a recycled book, as you've probably seen in your favorite local indie bookseller's, but look at that silkscreen! Did they read my mind? That I have been wanting a better knitting notebook to replace the eeeny weenie perforated-sheet pad with the cheesy Cezanne sticker on it?

Wow. Ask the universe and ye shall receive! A totally punk rock $12 recycled knitting journal, that is.

So let me tell you where I found this. It was staring me in the face when I walked into my neighborhood indie bookstore, Analog Books, on Euclid Ave right by the North Gate of UC Berkeley.

(That's my 'hood! I live in a den of millions of fresh-faced students and feel quietly old.)

You can also visit the creators online.

Secondly, let me say right now (up front, so we have no confusion) that while I believe that the Amazon.com's and Barnes and Noble's of the world have their place, particularly when it comes to ordering specific titles or browsing the Craft sections for bargains, I am a 100% staunch supporter of the LOCAL MOM AND POP BOOKSTORE. Or, in my case, the "local sweetly-geek-chic guy with horn-rimmed glasses" bookstore.

Love 'em! Support 'em! Buy whatever you can from them so they stay afloat and keep bringing amazing titles you'd never have seen otherwise and COOL KNITTING NOTEBOOKS and obscure works on current events not covered by CNN or Oprah!

Here's another book I bought at Analog today. This will be a familiar "face" to probably all Bay Area-ites, at least, for our resident genious Dave Eggers, but I only got a chance to pick What is the What up today and realize it's a book about Sudanese refugees in Africa and the states. And since all topics Africa are near and dear to my heart, and my husband and I sort-of vaguely collect first editions of important African (or Africana-related) fiction & non-fiction, AND it has the most beautifully done cover, I had to have it.

Why do we collect Africana. Well for those of you who don't know me, my husband James is South African, and I spent two-and-a-half of the last four years living there. We bought a house in a beach town near Cape Town, and one day we'll be leaving these shores to move back to Africa.

It's not just that though. There is something about the stories, both modern and ancient, which come out of that place. It's like the life-sterilization-board missed the entire bloody continent. Life is raw, unpredictable, joyous, tragic, and, well, alive. Not a facimile of life, as I sometimes experience it here.

And while we are on the subject of literature about Africa, here's one more title for you: A Bend in the River, by V.S. Naipaul, about life in a small town on the Congo river, which (so far) seems to oscillate between ruin and prosperity, stillness and bloody war, like so many places in Africa.

I'm in the middle of it now, and man does Naipaul have a way of capturing the paradoxes of living as a non-African in the heart of Africa.

Ok that's my little Reading Rainbow segment for you!

(And all you knitters, if I have not lost you yet, did you know that you actually CAN read AND knit at the same time? The solution: a $4 cook-book stand. Prop your current novel up on the table in front of you and knit away… go on, excercize both halves of your brain at the same time!)