A curious compulsion of mine

I was just longingly making goo-goo eyes at the Amazon Top 100 crochet bestsellers (something I do at least three times a week) and once again found myself lusting after all the stitch guides.

Secretly I am convinced that each new stitch guide I see contains special, super-secret stitches that cannot be found anywhere else and will revolutionize my crochet once I find them. The fact that I haven't really found any of these new special stitches in any of the last five stitch guides I've bought does not dissuade me. It just makes it statistically more likely that they'll be in the next stitch guide I buy, right? And so the cycle continues.

And I don't even really want to buy all these stitch guides! I'd rather save my book money for books with actual patterns to make cute clothes and adorable little amigurumi! Probably the only two of my stitch guides I use on a regular basis are The Crochet Stitch Bible and Donna Kooler's Encyclopedia of Crochet. And yet I keep looking at every new stitch guide I see and half the time I order them anyway.

I think the saddest part of all this might be that I've even read the part of Crocheting in Plain English where Maggie Righetti explains how she fell prey to thinking a stitch guide would solve all her problems and then when she got it it was all just variations on filet crochet and I still fall for it.