This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic at That Artsy Reader Girl is a spring cleaning freebie, so I took the opportunity to finish off this draft that’s been sitting around for months.

I think I mentioned that for the first time in several years I didn’t hit my book-a-week target in 2020. However, I did finish 40, nearly all of which were new to me.

Here are my favorites from that group:

1. The House in the Cerulean Sea by T.J. Klune: A lonely, middle-aged, good-hearted social worker specializing in children with magical abilities is asked by the heads of his governmental bureau to check out a care facility and evaluate its caretaker. There is shadiness involved (the case files are provided in a very James Bondian way), and when Linus reaches the end of the train line, he discovers the care facility is located on an island in the ocean (which he’s long hoped to see), the six children in question include a wyvern, a were-Pomeranian, and the son of Satan (who, it turns out, shares a love of vintage vinyl with Lionel), and the caretaker is a most charming man. This is a story about acceptance and trust and found families and doing what needs doing, no matter how scary or hard that is. Recommended for everyone, even those who don’t traditionally read fantasy.
2. Tuesday Mooney Talks to Ghosts by Kate Racculia: In this Westing Game-like book for adults, Tuesday and her wacky companions race to solve a game set forth as the final wish of an eccentric local millionaire. See my review here.
3. The Art of Theft by Sherry Thomas: In the latest (at the time) story of Lady Sherlock, Charlotte, Livia, Mrs. Watson, Lord Ingram, and Stephen Marbleton must team up for an art heist in France. See my review here.
4. Meg and Jo by Virginia Kantra: This is a modern interpretation of a favorite story, focused on the two oldest adult March sisters. Meg is a stay-at-home mom of young twins who is trying to help her mom keep their North Carolina family farm afloat. Jo works in a NYC restaurant by day and as a food blogger on the down low by night. When their mom gets sick, they’ll struggle find how to remain true to themselves, but never with how to be true to each other. (Amy and Beth comes out this spring.)
5. New Kid by Jerry Craft: In this award-winning graphic novel, Craft tells the tale of Jordan, whose parents have decided he should leave the NYC neighborhood middle school he’s attended up until now and start attending a prep school across town where he’s one of a handful of kids of color. (He was okay with going to a new school, but he’d really hoped for art school.) The book covers the trials and tribulations of his 7th-grade year, from the microaggressions he deals with from teachers and students, the friends he makes (and the ones from the neighborhood he struggles to keep), and interactions with his parents and his beloved grandfather. See my review here.
6. The Flat Share by Beth O’Leary: After breaking up with her boyfriend, Tiffy is desperate to find an affordable apartment fast. Enter Leon, who works nights and who is equally desperate to raise some fast cash to pay the lawyer handling his brother’s appeal. He offers a unique arrangement — they become roommates, but don’t meet. He’ll get the apartment during the day and she’ll get it at night and on weekends. They communicate via sticky notes to sort out the usual roommate questions, and start to get to know one another. A really great read for the start of the pandemic, when we were all struggling with how to connect with people we couldn’t see IRL and a surprisingly deep read, as it deals with abusive relationships, lost loves, and racist aspects of the criminal justice system.
7. How Rory Thorne Destroyed the Multiverse by K. Eason: Sleeping Beauty meets Star Wars. The princess of a planet, anointed at birth with a variety of gifts by fairies, is sent to marry the prince of another planet in an agreement to end a war. However, she has thoughts about this (particularly after she discovers a plot against her betrothed’s life). Fun feminist sci fi, at its best.
8. I’m Not Dying with You Tonight by Kimberly Jones and Gilly Segal: Told from alternating perspectives, Lena has spent her entire life in this Atlanta neighborhood, while Campbell is a recent transplant, come to live with her dad, a struggling hardware store owner, after her mom is forced to take a job abroad. One fateful night, shots are fired at a football game and these two teenagers, one Black, the other White, flee together with a single working cell phone between them, must navigate getting home safely when chaos and violence erupt on their streets. I read this at the start of the summer as people took to the streets around the country, demanding an end to racist policing and policies.
9. Girl with a Gun by Amy Stewart: Historical fiction focusing on the eldest of three Kopp sisters, who would go on to become the first female deputy sheriff in America. See my review here.
10. Words in Deep Blue by Cath Crowley: A young man discovers his parents are considering selling the beloved family bookstore and a young woman returns to her roots in an effort to move on in the wake of a terrible accident. See my review here.

Honorable mentions go to Mira Jacobs’ Good Talk, Dan Gemeinhart’s The Remarkable Journey of Coyote Sunrise, Red Letter Days by Sarah-Jane Stratford, and Yes, No, Maybe So by Becky Albertalli and Aisha Saeed.

(Confidential to IRL loved ones: If I also owe you a Christmas gift from this year, please don’t suddenly start reading off this list, because those gifts are all sitting around my living room and it’s too late to return them.)

Random stats for the year:

Nonfiction: 3
Graphic novels: 7
Books from a series: 17 (includes two series where I read two books)
Books in a translation: 2
Authors of color: 11
Authors’ nationality: American, Canadian, British, Australian, German, Norwegian
Books I borrowed from the library: 33
Books written by men: 8
Books written for adults: 25
For YA: 5
For kids: 10

Today (Sunday) would have been Gramma’s 100th birthday. It’s been nearly six years since she’s been gone. I wrote this when she died.

This year, Mum and Dad celebrated with Italian cake and Rudi and I with cannoli. Gramma did love her Italian pastries

I hadn’t expected a wave of tears to smack me upside the head while I was writing this, but it did. Gramma’s death was the first time I learned you could cry in your sleep, but it’s been a long while since she died. And mostly I’m at the point where I think about her fondly or use her still as an impetus to get though a tedious chore.

But this week also marks a one-year anniversary of a different type of loss, and I assume I’ve conflated the two, reimbuing my mourning for my grandmother with the weight of all I and my family have missed since last March.

Be kind to yourselves this week and kind to others. And, for goodness’ sake, have a cookie and a cup of tea. It helps.

I spent a portion of today, poking through my yarn stash and looking for a skein for the first pattern of Sock Madness. I thought I was hunting for a solid yarn, since between the twisted stitches and the smocking, there’s a lot going on. But then I came across a skein of purple, pink, grey, and white yarn (the one in the middle below) in a colorway called “Crossword” and there could be no other choice. Sometimes the universe speaks to you and it’s up to you to be listening.

I suppose it may turn out that the yarn is still wrong for the pattern, or, rather, that the pattern is wrong for the yarn. Because short of a yarn called “Muriel” suddenly appearing in my stash, this is what I’m meant to be knitting with today.

(If I need to find a new skein, I also kept out a couple skeins in pink/red that work for a pattern that means roughly “a thousand cherry trees” and that can be cast back on on Monday.)

Sunday would have marked my maternal grandmother’s 100th birthday, so I’m planning a celebratory weekend.

I have already put in a bunch of extra hours doing work, because she definitely valued hard work and meeting your obligations.

My fun activity for Friday night was watching Magnum while I was eating supper. The reboot is too recent for Gramma to have watched, but she enjoyed the original and I like to think she would have appreciated this version, as well. Rudi’s coaching this weekend, so since I can’t watch new things on tv tomorrow night, maybe I’ll pull up some old Britcoms. She did enjoy Hyacinth Bucket, Father Brown, and Jean and Lionel.

As I mentioned yesterday, my tea reinforcements have arrived. I’ll be refilling all the tins that have been depleted and drinking plenty of cuppas.

It’s the quarterly member sale at one of the local bookshops, so I’ll be heading up that way to indulge (and do some gift-shopping for other upcoming birthdays). I also have plenty of books to read, including some mysteries, which were Gramma’s favorite genre.

The first round of Sock Madness opened a couple hours ago, so I’ll be spending a good chunk of time knitting. Gramma was the one who taught me to knit, but I don’t think she understood why I wanted to bother with socks.

It’s been a while since I’ve done a crossword puzzle, so maybe I’ll fill out the ones from this weekend’s newspaper in her memory.

The butter is out, so maybe I’ll bake up a batch of something from Gramma’s cookbook she made me. Lemon squares would be fast, mint sticks chocolatey, or I could try something new.

In addition to baking sweets, Gramma enjoyed eating them. I have most of a container of ice cream in the freezer, whipped cream to top my cocoa, and Mum suggested I pick up a cannoli or something with Italian pastry cream in it to mark the occasion.

Okay, off to bed, because Gramma would not approve of still being up this late!

Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. A colleague mentioned a frame shop a couple neighborhoods north of me was having a sale, so I took the bus up there last Saturday. That part wasn’t super successful, but I stopped at my favorite Italian mom and pop shop for a slice, a ball of dough, and a bag of Jordan almonds, a fun stationery shop for some stickers, and one of the city’s mini-Targets, where I bought some lotion I can’t find elsewhere and some new shirts.

2. I made my annual tea purchase last week during the NYC shop’s sale, and earlier today 13 pounds of tea (and two pounds of coffee) arrived to refill my depleted canisters.

3. I ran out in flip flops, leggings, and a tshirt at mid-afternoon on Wednesday in between meetings and it was gloriously sunny and warm.

How about you? What’s been beautiful in your world lately?

I’m not quite sure how I missed processing it was Wednesday until now. But it is. Or was. I’m glad the weekend is a day closer, but am not happy that I misplaced an evening in there, particularly one I usually enjoy.

As you can see, it’s been a productive week for knitting. I’ve been trying to knit during meetings in which I take more of a listening role than a presenting one, and that’s definitely helped. Also, the tail end of Recipe for Persuasion was great for knitting while reading, which really can’t be done when reading books with fraught conclusions. (It messes with my tension.) I’m into my last set of colors before I start the toe decreases, so there’s the possibility I’ll have a new pair of socks by the weekend.

Sock Madness begins sometime in the next two days, and I have several weekends with more me time than usual coming up because Rudi’s ski team has some end-of-season races that he needs to coach. I haven’t finished the timed round the past few years, but maybe the extra alone time will motivate me to knit faster. Or it won’t, and I’ll just move on to another project — like last year’s unfinished pair … or 2019’s.

I know I said last week that I was going to move on next to a novel set during spring training, but I wasn’t able to renew Undercover Bromance, so I decided to pick it back up and see if I liked it any more than I did the first grumpy night I tried to read it. The two main protagonists are now on each other’s radar, so I’ll give it two more chapters to get its act together, but I still may ditch it.

I’m also listening to The Midnight Library, which two local Twitter book pals loved and which Karen decidedly did not. It struggles to live up to its selling point — who amongst us wouldn’t like to try on the alternate stories of our lives if we’d made different choices? The author does too much telling and not enough showing, and the protagonist’s life spiral is rushed in an effort to get us to the most interesting part of the story quickly — and thus seems a little insulting to those of us who struggle with mental health issues. But as I wrote earlier this week, I’ve been doing a lot of self-rumination recently, so the concept is pulling me through so far.

Head over to As Kat Knits to see what others are reading and crafting.