Today’s Top Ten Tuesday topic at That Artsy Reader Girl asks for ten of our favorite childhood books, which I took to mean books I read up through elementary school:

1. Horton Hears a Who by Dr. Seuss (While I love the message of this book and credit it for being a cornerstone of my beliefs in empathy and using your voice and collective action, I also acknowledge that Seuss has a problematic relationship with race in some of his books.)
2. Be Nice to Spiders by Margaret Bloy Graham (My approach to insects indoors dates to this book. I can vaguely recall a time where I’d screech for my parents to come kill any spider I came across as a little kid, so I’m guessing that may be where this book’s arrival in my life came from. Since reading it, though, I tolerate many types of insects living in the corners of my apartment — there’s a spider in the bathroom as we speak — although I admit it’s an unequal system that’s biased against mosquitoes, wool moths, ants, flies, and cockroaches, in part because of their ability to wreak havoc and in part because of their tendency to show up in spring-break in Florida quantities if allowed to stay.)
3. Richard Scarry’s Please and Thank You Book (Honestly, I have no idea why. I have never given this book as a baby shower gift, although it is still in print.)
4. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis (I have mentioned before that when my town was building a new, modern library, they sent a librarian around to my school to encourage us to get a library card when they opened. She came a couple of times, reading us a chapter of this book at a time. It worked. I got a library card — and copies of the first three books in the series for Christmas.)
5. Amelia Bedelia by Peggy Parrish (Yet another book I was introduced to in school, this time by our second-grade teachers who would pull both classes into one room — this literally meant sharing desk chairs — and read one of the books in this series aloud to us periodically. If you don’t know it, it features a very literal-minded housekeeper and her upper-crust employers who are prone to ask her to draw the drapes or dress the chicken while they’re out only to return to artwork or their dinner still raw but suited up. This is a silly children’s series for people who love the power of words.)
6. The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett (My maternal grandmother took this out of the library to preview whether it was suitable for me and I found it and started reading it. She quickly returned it to the library, so she could buy me a copy for my birthday, and took out A Little Princess instead in an attempt to derail my interest, but I was hooked and grabbed my library’s copy to finish it. Not to worry, I’ve read this copy many times since then.
7. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (Also, Eight Cousins. I read both dozens of times. None of the other four books in the Alcott collection I have (one of my favorite gifts ever from my paternal grandparents) come anywhere close. Maybe it’s time for a reread.)
8. Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery (This is the book that made me a book buyer. I received this copy as a gift for Christmas. (We got book plates that same year and I clearly recognized how nice a book this was, because I convinced my brother to trade me one of his color bookplates for one of my black-and-sepia ones just to use in it.) But I bought the rest of the series, and some of her other titles one at a time at Walden Books in the mall.)
9. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle (I loved Meg and Calvin and Charles Wallace and Mrs Who, Mrs Which, and Mrs Whatsit. And then I loved Vicky and Poly and Canon Tallis.)
10. Nancy Drew and the Secret of the Old Clock by Carolyn Keene (This is the first of the Nancy Drew books and while it’s probably not my favorite (I preferred the George and Bess books, rather than the Helen ones), it’s the one that made me a mystery reader. I think my mother gave me the first five books for Christmas one year (the 1960s edits, rather than the 1930s originals) and then I took off from there. I read them quickly and then tore through every copy I could get my hands on from our library. I even read some of contemporary The Nancy Drew Files series that came out when I was in middle school.)
11. Trixie Belden and the Secret of the Mansion by Julie Campbell (I’m guessing this was another gift from my folks, because I owned a bunch of them, and I don’t know that I would have bought any of them myself without having read the first one, and this wasn’t a series my library carried. While I liked Nancy Drew, I related to Trixie, who had siblings, chores, and a more realistic life.)

Oops. I ended up with 11, but with a lifetime of book love, that seems a reasonable number

I ripped back my Lightning Shawl to try to fix that bad color shift when I switched yarns. This might be better — or it might be equally as bad. I think I’ll have to knit another couple inches away from it in order to really tell. I’m just so ready to be done with this project. Probably I should have just stopped after the end of the last strip, but I really wanted the shawl to be a little deeper than it was…

Below is the pre-ripping. Essentially, I pulled it back to before that solid golden splotch in the middle and am trying to make the gradient before and the gradient after play nicely. I have some long ends, so I’m wondering if I use it to sort of duplicate stitch over some of the other pre-merge point to help create a better semblance of matching.

Reading-wise, I started Elizabeth Acevedo’s new novel, With the Fire on High, tonight. So far, I’m really enjoying it. (Bridget, it’s set in Philly!) It’s about a senior in high school who lives with her abuela and her two-year-old daughter, Emma, and who loves to experiment in the kitchen.

The audio copy of Jenny Han’s P.S. I Still Love You came back off the holds list for me, so that’s what I’m listening to on my phone. I need to start listening to Daisy Jones and the Six this weekend, though, in order to give the cds back to the library.

Want to see what other folks are reading and crafting? Head to As Kat Knits for the round-up.

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic at That Artsy Reader Girl is one of my favorites: our quarterly reading plan.

So what are ten of the books I’m most looking forward to reading this summer? For the sake of tidiness, I’m only including books I haven’t yet started:

1. Elizabeth Acevedo’s With the Fire on High (It’s overdue, but I will get to it this week…)
2. Daisy Jones and the Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid (I have it out on cd, because that’s considered old-school media and had no waitlist)
3. Red, White, and Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston (First Son and Crown Prince in a romance!)
4. Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking back the English Language by Amanda Montell (I mean, duh…)
5. Jasmine Guillory’s The Proposal (baseball and romance!)
6. Nnedi Okorafor’s Shuri (A graphic novel about my favorite on-screen scientist? And done by a skillful SFF writer? Yes, please!)
7. Hope Rides Again by Andrew Shaffer (This is really the only way I want to experience Joe Biden in contemporary pop culture.)
8. The Bermudez Triangle by Marueen Johnson (Summertime teen romances, picked up yesterday from my local Little Free Library)
9. Amy Stewart’s Girl Waits with Gun (I picked up and then put down the first of the Kopp Sisters novels back the same year it was published, but always meant to circle back to it. It was also in the Little Free Library yesterday, so now the circle requires fewer steps.)
10. Jake and Lily by Jerry Spinelli (About the summer twins turn 11 from the author of Stargirl and Maniac Magee)

How about you? What’s on your summer TBR list?

I am in a knitting funk. I don’t want to finish up old projects, so I thought maybe I’d try carrying around the equipment for something new. But the both skeins of stripey sock yarn remains untouched and the needle remains stitch-free.

I would like to get the lightning shawl finished before this year’s Tour de France, though, so that gives me just over two weeks.

I started reading Sonali Dev’s Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors today while on the metro to the station nearest my library book club. I stopped at the cafe for lunch and some outdoor reading time on my bike ride home and can now say the start is rather slow. Also, Dev notes in her acknowledgements that this is an inspired by, rather than derived from, kind of story. The main characters are Indian-American Tricia, a neurosurgeon, and European-Indian caterer D.J. The start is a little slow, but I’VE heard it gets better, so I shall stick with it.

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

I read five books back in April. Let’s get to them:

A Dangerous Collaboration, by Deanna Raybourn

The fourth book in the Veronica Speedwell series was the weakest so far in my mind. While the Victorian setting was fascinating — a castle on a remote island off the coast of Cornwall with a poison garden on the estate — it felt like scientist and detective Veronica seemed a little off her game. Asked by her partner Stoker’s older brother, Tiberius, to accompany him to the island to collect some rare butterflies for her museum (and under the pretense of his fiancee), Veronica finds herself tasked with solving the mystery of what happened to the bride of the manor who disappeared three years earlier on her wedding day — and who now seems to be haunting the castle. The problem? Everyone present seems to have had a reason to wish her ill — including Tiberius. Will Veronica be able to solve the mystery before she (and Stoker, who follows his brother and the woman we all know he loves) suffers a similar fate?

Of all the gender-bending Sherlock variations I read, Veronica and Stoker come closest to being a true partnership of equal skill and intellect. That aside, though, the reason I read them is because the woman takes the backseat to no one. Does Sherlock need Watson? Absolutely! Is Watson more capable than Sherlock at solving a mystery? Absolutely not! So it rankled a bit that in this mystery the advantage at solving the mystery seemed to favor Stoker. And I get that that may be necessary for overall character development for Stoker to get to take the lead in order for Veronica to truly see him as her equal (and therefore someone she should be willing to enter into a romantic partnership with), but it was irritating that in order for Stoker to get to take the lead in this, Veronica had to be willing to consider the fact that the castle was truly being haunted by a spirit. The author may have cloaked it as scientific open-mindedness, but it felt decidedly out of character for Veronica and led to a disappointing three-star review. Raybourn has announced that the Veronica contract has been extended to include at least another two books, so I’m hopeful they will right the ship. (The next one should focus on Jack the Ripper, since his murder spree was alluded to in this book.)

Pages: 323. Library copy. (more…)

Today’s Top Ten Tuesday topic at That Artsy Reader Girl is one of my semi-annual favorites: looking forward to the books to be published over the next six months. Specifically, what are our most anticipated titles?

1. The Starless Sea by Erin Morganstern: November (I loved The Night Circus (like wrote a fan email the minute I closed the book kind of love) and have been waiting for Morganstern to publish literally anything else since then.
2. Rainbow Rowell’s Pumpkinheads: August (A YA graphic novel set in a pumpkin patch in October. I have been looking forward to this since the day years ago that she announced she and Faith Erin Hicks would be collaborating on it.)
3. The Art of Theft by Sherry Thomas: October (The latest in the Lady Sherlock series, which is one of my all-time favorites.)
4. Wayward Son by Rainbow Rowell: September (A surprise sequel to Carry On, which I should re-read before this comes out.)
5. The Magnolia Sword: A Ballad of Mulan by Sherry Thomas: September (The author of my favorite mystery series takes on the teenaged Woman Warrior of ancient China.)
6. Jasmine Guillory’s The Wedding Party: July (I haven’t read any of her other books yet, but I’m on the waitlist for the audiobook.)
7. Mackenzi Lee’s Loki: Where Mischief Lies: September (Teenage troublemaker? Yes, please!)
8. Summerlings by Lisa Howorth: August (Set in Washington, D.C., in 1959)
9. Hope Rides Again by Andrew Shaffer: July (The second in the Obama-Biden crime-fighting bromance series)
10. The Tea Dragon Festival by Katie O’Neill: September (A prequel to the adorable Tea Dragon Society)

How about you? What new releases are you looking forward to coming out in the latter half of 2019?