Witty Little Knitter

I admit, when I pulled this book out from my TBR-pile I wondered 'Now why exactly did I buy this?'. Not that I don't like Jeremy Hardy, but he's not on the list of people I find so amazing that I think I need to own/read/listen to everything by them and I also was never that interested genealogy. Still, I decided that now that I have it I could as well read it and I did not regret it.It is true that it is somewhat hard to get terribly exited about somebody else finding a birth-certificate of their great-great-aunt or similar things, and overall Hardy does not present the sections dealing directly with geneology in the best way. Often he throws just a lot of names at the reader and I rarely remembered who exactly these people were (there is a family-tree at the beginning of the book, but a) I hate it when I have to look up names all the time and b) it's just a family tree of his direct ancestors, i.e. his parents, their parents and so on, no aunts, uncles, cousins etc. and quite often in his research he also searches for them). Then you can't help but feel that towards the end he got a bit tired of searching himself. In the last few chapters there seems to be just a repeat of him going to place X where one of his ancestors might have lived but not bothering with prepearing anything in advance, so he's just standing there pretty helpless and ends up getting no/little information because he couldn't be bothered to check a map of phone people in advance.Despite this I did enjoy that book very much and that's because of all the parts that don't deal directly with his family-history (or not at all, as he goes off-tamgent quite frequently). He talks about himself occasionally and these parts are (and yes I guess you are alowed to hit me for using a phrase that's terribly overused when it comes to describing memoirs) painfully honest. He doesn't try to sugarcoat his actions. So he talks about his campaining in Northern Ireland and that he stopped after one of his friends was killed because it was easy for him as he wasn't Irish himself or lived in Ireland. There's no 'I go distracted by other things' or anything like that, just 'I couldn't do it anymore'. I have read some memoirs by comedians and I can't remember that amount of honesty anywhere else.Not everything is personal, some things are just observations, I very much agreed with. (Other people might not) And overall it was a really interessting read, though it probably isn't a book for everyone.