Happy Sunday night, everyone! I hope you had a nice weekend. Mine included the usual — reading, knitting, going to the farmers market, playing volleyball, swimming, cycling, gardening, and attending an outdoor concert.

I also did something impulsive. After seeing Laura Lippman’s tweet Saturday morning, I signed up for #1000wordsofsummer, a daily writing accountability project. One Thousand Words of Summer is a bit of a misnomer, because technically it only goes for two weeks. But, it’s meant to act as a structure to get you moving for the summer on some type of writing project, 1000 words at a time.

Because I am on a summer sabbatical before looking for a new job and because my volunteer gig has gone on hiatus until next month, I feel a bit like a dandelion pappus — prone to being blown along by the winds of the day. I need a few must-do’s to anchor the day better, and I’m hoping a return to writing will be one of them.

For the first few days, I’m just journaling, trying to get my writing sea legs back under me. If, by the end of the two weeks, I can zero in on some larger writing goal — a series of articles or essays or a creative writing project, for instance — I’d be very happy, but I’m not inclined to make that a mandate of the project. Most of the writing I’ve done in the last year has been either grant applications or blog entries, and my writing muscles are feeling weak and whiny. So, I will ask them to get the reps in for the next two weeks, but I won’t critique form. However sloppy the work — tangents, unfinished thoughts, overuse of adjectives and conjunctions — it’ll count toward the finish line.

And even if nothing else comes of it, at least I’ll have shown up.

Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. English peas eaten straight from the garden

2. Cygnets and ducklings at Constitution Garden

3. Refrigerator jam

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

On my list of projects I’d like to get off my needles is my mother’s Christmas shawl, which will likely arrive to her with fall’s first frost. My progress is infinitesimal at this time, but I’m down to four more rows (or, roughly 1200 stitches) of that patterned section before I move on to knitting that lends itself to doing other things at the same time, like listening to an audiobook. (I tried to jump the gun on multitasking and ended up with an extra stitch a couple rows back. I’m hoping I corrected it properly after some time out to consider what it had done, but, Mum, if I didn’t, we may have to consider it a design feature.)

On the reading front, I started two new books this week. The first is Great or Nothing, a Little Women retelling set during World War II authored by Joy McCullough, Carline Tung Richmond, Tess Sharpe, and D.C. novelist and librarian Jessica Spotswood, each of whom voices a sister.

The second is The Bromance Book Club by Lyssa Kay Adams, which I’m listening to on my phone. I’d picked up the second one a couple years back and hated the “voice” of the main guy character, so had put it back down. In this one, the first book of the series, that guy is a secondary character and talks less. So while I still don’t love him, his obnoxious tone is less grating. But I borrowed the audio because a D.C. librarian recommended it as humorous. Once I remembered I could adjust the speed of the reader (we’re up to 1.4 times the normal speed), I found myself better able to relax into the story, which focuses on a major league ballplayer whose wife has just asked him for a divorce. His buddies (including the irritating guy) and some other high-powered Nashville men come to his rescue by inviting him to join their bookclub, which reads only romance novels in an effort to better understand the women in their lives.

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

Hi there!

I’m coming off a pretty nice weekend, so I hope you had one too.

On Saturday, I played pick-up volleyball for three hours, scarfed down a popsicle, and then headed to the park with Rudi to listen to the Rock Creek Kings perform. Their permit ends at 9, so we were home in plenty of time for me to finish two books and a shawl.

On Sunday, while I just missed getting to the library, I did make it to the pool. I also had a trip to the farmers market and some time in the garden — I love pea season! We watched the original Top Gun movie and drank our first strawberry daiquiris of the season. I also snuck in a load of laundry, just in case you thought it was only fun and games at the Burrow this weekend.

Monday rolled around, and the fun kept coming. Rudi and I made strawberry refrigerator jam and then joined friends for supper. We had the jam this morning on our English muffins, and it was so good!

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic from That Artsy Reader Girl invites us to share comfort reads — either titles if you have specific books you return to week after week or the qualities that you look for when the world is hard.

Here are ten things I’m considering when I need a book not to be one of my 99 problems:

1. A reread of a book I’ve loved. These are all over the place in terms of audience and genre, but they were all five-star reads.
2. A happy ending. I don’t want ambivalent and I don’t want tears.
3. Cozy mysteries are often good for the previous item.
4. As are romance novels.
5. Retellings of traditional tales — such as Jane Austen’s works, Little Women, and the Sherlock Holmes series — are often solid contenders. Much like the previous two items, retellings have a generally reliable structure.
6. 350 pages or fewer. This is not the time for a sweeping saga.
7. Likable main characters. Overall, I prefer this anyway, but an unlikable main character is immediately getting that book put down when I’m in a mood.
8. Sometimes combining words with pictures — like in a collection of comics or a graphic novel — is called for. But that one can be tricky, and it only works singly. I never binge read more than one.
9. A new book in a favorite series or by a favorite author can help a grumpy mood.
10. When all else fails, I turn to middle grade fiction.

How about you? What do you look for in a comfort read? And do you have particular ones you turn to in times of trouble?

Back in February, I joined Marg’s Historical Fiction Reading Challenge, and that was the last we spoke of it publicly here on the blog. However, it’s not the last I thought of it, and I’ve been diligently reading historical fiction ever since. These are the six titles I finished between February and May.

Fortune Favors the Dead by Stephen Spotswood

Set primarily in New York City in 1945, this is the first of a fun detective series, Pentecost and Parker, about two female PI’s. Lillian Pentecost is on a case that’s very personal to her when her M.S. acts up on a job and a young circus performer, “Will” Parker, saves her life. Impressed by the girl’s wherewithal — and subsequent tight lips when interviewed by the police — Lillian offers her a job as her secretary and apprentice. As this case begins, Will’s been with Lillian for three years and has become more of a junior partner and surrogate daughter. A wealthy woman died in a locked room. A spiritualist Lillian’s been keeping an eye on over the years had been telling fortunes immediately before, which means Pentecost and Parker are on the case. Plus, it doesn’t hurt that the dead woman’s grown daughter has caught Will’s eye.

If you’re a fan of Sherlock Holmes retellings or reinterpretations, this is a fun series by a D.C. author and a good listen if you’re on the hunt for an audiobook. It’s not a direct retelling, but Holmes and Watson (and Moriarty) are definitely relatives.

Audio. Library. 321 pages

A Rogue of One’s Own by Evie Dunmore

The second in the League of Extraordinary Women romance series set in Oxford during the British suffragist movement, this novel focuses on Lucie, who is heading a group of women attempting to buy a publishing house with the secret goal of printing a treatise about women and voting. When they finally get the paperwork, though, they discover a hiccup: Lucie’s longtime nemesis, Lord Tristan Ballantine, has also purchased the publishing house, and he and Lucie will have to sign off on all decisions. Can Lucie bring noted lothario Tristan around to their feminist cause? It’s going to be a tough sell, because Tristan’s abusive father has threatened to send his mentally unwell mother to an asylum if he doesn’t shape up publicly — and fast.

While I didn’t find this installment of the interconnected novels to be as enjoyable as the first, there is still plenty to charm and inform in this book. Dunmore includes an author’s note at the end to share where her fiction has diverged from history.

Paper. Library. 448 pages

A Marvellous Light by Freya Marske

Set in Edwardian England, genial Robin is a muggle, if you will, unaware that magic exists — until he accidentally gets placed in a minor governmental position that has him reporting instances of magical goings-on to the Prime Minister. Prickly Edward is his magical counterpart, but he’s barely able to perform spells and only if he has a physical aid to help him focus his magic. When Robin is cursed by a stranger on the street who seems to think he knows something about the disappearance of his predecessor, Edward must take Robin home to his family estate’s library to help remove it. While there, the two men find they have more in common than they’d originally thought — and that the fate of magic itself may rest in their hands.

I really enjoyed this first book in a new fantasy-romance series and highly recommend it. I will note that, as with some of the hetero romances I read, this would decidedly fall into an “R” rating, and you might not want to, say, pick this as an audiobook to listen to with your parents on a road trip.

Audio. Library. 377 pages

The Daughter of Sherlock Holmes by Leonard Goldberg

In the first book of this series, it is 1914, Sherlock Holmes is dead, and Dr. Watson an old man. But he is well loved by his son, John Jr., a doctor who visits him frequently. When the elder Watson is asked to consult on an apparent suicide by the dead man’s sister, they are introduced to quick-witted Joanna Blalock, whose young son witnessed the defenestration. As you might guess from the title, we learn that she’s not just an above-average widow, but is also the late detective’s illegitimate daughter, placed with an adoptive family by Dr. Watson so many years ago.

This was a pleasant enough spin-off of the original Arthur Conan Doyle series, but isn’t my favorite Holmesian work. However, you can absolutely listen to this with your parents.

Paper. Library. 305 pages

Gods of Jade and Shadow by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

In this retelling of Mexican folklore, Casiopea is a Cinderella-like young woman stuck in a small town, forced to wait on her tyrannical grandfather and cousin because her mother married below her class and her father then had the nerve to die. One day when the rest of the family is away, Casiopea opens a wooden box and accidentally releases Hun-Kamé, the Mayan god of death, who’d been imprisoned there by her grandfather in service to the other twin god of death, Vucub-Kamé. She is then forced to accompany him on a sweeping trip across Jazz Age Mexico in an effort to collect his other missing bones and to return him to his otherwordly throne. But his brother didn’t dethrone his brother just to give up without a fight.

While it took me two years to finish this book, that’s only because it lived in my beach bag and I only read it by the ocean — and we just didn’t make it to the shore quite often enough. This is a very well crafted story of the intersections of religions, familial rivalries, and believing in yourself, and I highly recommend it to everyone.

Paper. Personal copy. 338 pages

An Impossible Impostor by Deanna Raybourn

In the latest Victorian-era Veronica Speedwell detective novel, the head of the Special Branch, Sir Hugo Montgomerie, asks Veronica and Stoker to investigate whether a man who has shown up at his goddaughter’s estate home claiming to be her long-lost brother is legitimate or if he’s a phony. Veronica may be the only person in the world who can verify his identity, since she traveled with him as a very young woman and last saw him as he headed off toward Krakatoa on an ill-fated exploration. When the man and family jewels disappear the same night, the family makes assumptions, but Veronica may know more than she’s letting on.

A solid contribution to a reliable series. If you haven’t read any of them, start at the beginning, as there is continuity that will be disrupted by reading ahead, although Raybourn does reference with footnotes which books key events happen in should you be jumping into the middle of the story.

Paper. Library. 325 pages