Every year the Tour de France comes along and the knitalong I do pops up and I’m torn between finishing something previously started and starting something new. I’ve competed in the former category the past few years, and so this year decided to give something new a shot. (Yes, I do recognize my Hitchhiker was going really well and that this may not have been the smartest plan. The heart wants what the heart wants.)

A yellow jersey project requires a certain amount of fortitude (and stitches), and while I yearned to cast on something gorgeous and delicate, like Rock Island, I decided to listen to Rudi’s advice of not making it so complicated I had to become a hermit. While flipping through the stash on the hunt for a different yarn, I turned up three skeins I’d bought years ago to make Andrea’s Shawl. Since that pattern was also already paid for and in my possession, I decided to do a little stash-busting.

This shawl is knit from its widest point to its narrower end after you knit the entire border. It’s an easily memorized four-row repeat, so I’ve been working on it while watching racing coverage and also while listening to an audiobook, Trouble Is a Friend of Mine by Stephanie Tromly. The story and the characters are fun (Girl moves to new town, where an abduction has recently taken place; a boy loops her into an investigation of the case, which resembles a similar abduction from eight years earlier. He’s quirky; she’s angry. Hijinks ensue.), but listening to it highlights that it needed additional editing that may not as been as obvious when reading it on the page. There are whole sections of dialogue that run like this:

“Simple sentence,” she said.
“A different simple sentence,” he said.
“More simple, more said,” she said.
“Getting the picture?” he said.

An editor should have pared down all of those extraneous “he/she saids,” particularly when it’s just two characters in the scene. As underscored when reading Mansfield Park earlier this year, not having enough attribution in dialogue can be confusing, but it doesn’t need to be every single line. If I weren’t enjoying it otherwise, I’d throw in the towel just for that reason (or switch to print, where, as I said, I might not have noticed it as much), because it keeps making me grit my teeth. But I am, so I’ll finish it off this week.

I’m only a few more pages into Modern Lovers than I was last week (having finished and started two different books in the meantime).