It’s time for the final Bout of Books readathon for 2021.

The Bout of Books readathon is organized by Amanda Shofner and Kelly Rubidoux Apple. It’s a weeklong readathon that begins 12:01 a.m. Monday, August 16, and runs through Sunday, August 22, in YOUR time zone. Bout of Books is low-pressure. There are reading sprints, Twitter chats, and exclusive Instagram challenges, but they’re all completely optional. For all Bout of Books 32 information and updates, be sure to visit the Bout of Books blog. – From the Bout of Books team

I’d like to finish one of the two print books I’m actively reading this week and read a majority of the days this week. But if that doesn’t happen, I know not to stress about it. There is no failing at Bout of Books, after all!

If you look closely at my knitting, you will see that the rows on the left, tucked under my book, do not match the earlier ribbing section on the right. That’s because I didn’t do it correctly, so the ripping out of a couple rows is imminent. I just need to grab a small needle to facilitate picking the stitches back up. That’s what happens when you get cocky and don’t look at your pattern quite closely enough.

I told Rudi when we got to the beach on Monday that if I didn’t finish Gods of Jade and Shadow while we were there, we’d need to come back at least once more. It has been my beach book this summer, and I don’t want to start reading it not at the beach. While I’m nearly halfway done and enjoying it, the action hasn’t gotten so intense that I feel bad leaving Casiopea and the God of Death on their own in between trips.

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

For this week’s Top Ten Tuesday, That Artsy Reader Girl asks us to share which secondary characters need their own books. Although this is a favorite topic of mine, this was harder than I thought it would be:

1. Gigi, the Brown sisters’ grandmother in the Talia Hibbert series
2. Eshna Raje, the oldest cousin in Sonali Dev’s Austen-inspired series (since I have confirmation from the author there will only be four books in the series, rather than the six I’d hoped for, I’m now hoping Eshna’s story gets a happy ending in the final book (although I expect the main character to be the youngest Raje sibling).
3. Isola Pribby from The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
4. Luigi Lemoncello of Escape from Mr. Lemoncello’s Library
5. Georgie and Clem of The Greenglass House
6. Rosa Ramona Díaz’s mother (when she was a girl) from A Properly Unhaunted Place
7. Angelica from With the Fire on High
8. June Claremont-Diaz from Red, White, and Royal Blue
9. Garrison Griswold from Book Scavenger
10. Berta Lundgren from The Discreet Retrieval Agency books

How about you? Are there favorite secondary or tertiary characters you’d like to have tell their own stories?

Contrary to what you might understandably think, this is not an identical shot to last week’s post. I have made progress on both the shawl and the book, but it’s slow-going. The shawl more so than the book at this point, in part because it requires more thought. I’ll likely be done with the book by this weekend, but the shawl will drag on. The problem is that it just doesn’t match where my head is right now. I can’t even tell you why it’s hard; really it’s just one row out of four where I need to pay attention, and then every sixth row, there’s also a make-one increase tucked in at the end just to make sure I’m not getting too comfortable.

But I do have a pair of socks that have just needed a toe for months now, so maybe I’ll take a time-out on the shawl, finish the socks, and give myself some kind of Ravellenic Games win. It feels like that might be the kindest thing I can do in the next couple days.

I finished listening to Becoming Duchess Goldblatt while walking home from Safeway tonight. I hadn’t brought headphones, so everyone along the route got a snippet of the final three chapters. The Duchess would likely approve. I have Did You Hear What Happened to Lacey? queued up, but I also checked out a couple mysteries this evening as well. One of them is a collection of Poirot stories read by Christopher Lee and the actor who played Colonel Hastings on the David Suchet series.

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

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic from That Artsy Reader Girl invites us to share ten books that we were inspired to read simply because of their title or cover. Here are ten of the books I thought had clever titles:

1. Doughnuts and Other Proclamations of Love, by Jared Reck
2. How the Penguins Saved Veronica, by Hazel Prior
3. Pride and Premeditation, by Tirzah Price
4. Incense and Sensibility, by Sonali Dev
5. The Raconteur’s Commonplace Book, by Kate Milford
6. The Nobleman’s Guide to Scandal and Shipwrecks, by Mackenzi Lee
7. Rosie’s Travelling Tea Shop, by Rebecca Raisin
8. A Cuban Girl’s Guide to Tea and Tomorrow, by Laura Taylor Namey
9. The Wax Pack: On the Open Road in Search of Baseball’s Afterlife, by Brad Balukjian
10. The List of Things That Will Not Change, by Rebecca Stead

How about you? What books have you read/do you plan to read because their titles caught your fancy?

There was some actual unraveling a few seconds ago, as I went to take a picture of my knitting and realized I’d dozed off before finishing the row. I wasn’t at the end of the row, as I’d expected, but a couple dozen stitches before it, and I lost a handful of stitches in my handling of it. But I got it all righted, so phew!

I also lost the equivalent of a few stitches in listening to the audiobook of Becoming Duchess Goldblatt. I’ll wait until tomorrow to pick up those threads and figure out where I’d stopped being awake in the telling of the tale.

I’ve started Incense and Sensibility by Sonali Dev in paper. Her Austen-inspired series always start a little slow, but getting to follow the breadcrumbs she lays down (India and China’s last name is Dashwood, for instance) is always enjoyable, although I did eventually have to give in and look up what Marianne and Elinor’s youngest sister’s name is in the original, since it was distracting me from the book (Margaret, in case it’s now bugging you, too).

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