I like to listen to knitting podcasts while I knit, especially when it’s something that needs attention and TV will only distract me. But recently I’ve become tired of the podcasts I used to listen to, and wanted something else.
So looking through the audiobooks on iTunes, I found that The History of Hand Knitting was only £3.95 and decided it was well worth buying as it’s considerably more on CD (the book itself is currently out of print).
I listened to about an hour of it last night. The reader, Melissa Hughes, has a nice soothing voice, although she does have a habit of putting on a gruff voice when quoting sources written by a man which seemed a tad unnecessary and made her sound like Sir John Middleton in Sense and Sensibility (1995 film version, to be precise!).
The problem is that I kept stopping what I was doing to pay closer attention to the book. There’s a lot of information and it all seems to come very fast. I’m also not sure I like Richard Rutt’s style. Without the book to see where he has found certain information, he comes across very single mined, as if there is no possible way he could be wrong in his assertions. Unless he actually has a time machine, in which case I apologise. 
So what with questioning what I was hearing, it wasn’t really a successful alternative to listening to knitting podcasts. Maybe I should stick to music instead. 
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oh that’s a shame. I was all for buying it until I read your whole review. Maybe not. I know what you mean about podcasts. I break them up with audiobooks. Have you tried audible.com? You can ever get the Yarn harlot’s books there if you’re so inclined but there are about 40,000 other titles. I’m an addict now, even with the bad exchange rate.
I was planning on buying that one – thank you for the review! And what a shame, because I really would enjoy a well-written/narrated history of hand knitting.
last time I saw him, Father Richard did not mention a time machine (and he would probably have considered it very handy). He also told me he was a bit disappointed that nobody has taken up research on handknitting history and published after he wrote his book, and he really did not think it was the be all and end all of knitting history books. In fact, he’d encourage anybody to start publishing and refine his very basic findings, as that was the whole idea behind the book!