I have reached the first mosaic portion of my Tour de France shawl! I’m really happy that I didn’t end up settling for a different contrast yarn, holding out for finding something in my stash that really popped. It is remarkably unlikely that I’ll be done knitting by the time the cyclists are circling the Arc de Triomphe on Sunday afternoon, but I could be through this first mosaic section and maybe even through the first solid pink section, provided I’m a little more careful with not having to rip back the pattern stitch that populates the solids.

On the reading front, what you see here are the three books I picked up at the library this evening. I’m glad I brought a plastic bag with me, because I was heading to my volleyball game afterwards and a rogue rainstorm drizzled on us for over an hour. I’ve only read the first few pages of Wordslut so far, definitely not enough to form any reasonable opinion about the work.

I need to finish reading Red, White, and Royal Blue and There There, both of which are overdue to the library with long holds lists. I should be able to cross both off my list and return them this coming week.

I have a handful of chapters left of Peter Mayle’s The Vintage Caper to listen to. It’s been a light, pleasant, French-centered accompaniment to my Tour de France watching and knitting, but I am not so caught up in it that I’ll be sorry to reach its finale. That feeling is probably increased by the fact that a bunch of audiobooks have come off hold for me recently, and I have Jenny Colgan’s The Bookshop on the Shore, Janet and Peter Evanovich’s The Big Kahuna, and Tricia Levenseller’s Daughter of the Siren Queen waiting impatiently in the wings.

Want to see what other people are reading and crafting? Head over to As Kat Knits for the roundup.

Perpetually behind in my reviews, but always aspiring to catch up…

I finished four books in May:

Rayne and Delilah’s Midnite Matinee, by Jeff Zentner

Delia and Josie are best friends about to graduate from high school, who co-host a weekly horror creature-feature on their local cable access channel while dressed as the vampires Delilah and Rayne. Think Elvira meets Mystery Science Theatre 3000. Delia, who thought up the show because she and her absentee dad used to watch cheesy horror films together when she was little, is heading to community college and looking to expand the show beyond its small syndication to a national audience. She plans to stay on her meds, which help with her depression, and hopes she can help her mom, who struggles with her own depression and, thus, with finances. Josie, who aspires to a job in mainstream media, was supposed to go to a college nearby and keep hosting the show with Delia, but also has gotten into a bigger, more illustrious program out of the area that her upper middle-class parents are pressuring her to pursue. How does she pick? And how does her feelings about Lawson, an über-sweet, teenaged MMA fighter, who is an impromptu guest on their show one night, play into her decision?

When an opportunity to meet the most famous has-been producer in cheesy horror arises, bargains are made and compromises hang in the balance. Will Josie and Delia’s friendship survive a trip into that creepy basement? What will emerge from the mysterious lagoon of their future?

This book was a lot funnier than I expected it to be (the meet cute hinges on some dim acquaintances who think that a beagle eventually grows up into a basset hound) and a lot sweeter:

But the thing with a best friend is that you’re never talking about nothing. Even when you’re talking about nothing, it’s something. The times when you think you’re talking about nothing, you’re actually talking about how you have someone with whom you can talk about nothing, and it’s fine.

Neither of Zentner’s other novel premises have particularly appealed to me, but I really liked this story and will reconsider his earlier work based on this. Recommended to those who pursue their dreams and who still sometimes miss out on them, but also those with best friends they can’t imagine their lives without.

Pages: 400. Library copy.

Delilah Dirk and the Turkish Lieutenant, by Tony Cliff

Delilah (how often will you read two Delilahs in a single month?) Dirk is a biracial treasure-hunter with a flying ship, who has come to Turkey to rob a sultan and who surprises a gentle palace guard, Selim, who would rather make tea than bash heads, when he finds that he is inexplicably drawn to her and her tales of adventures. In the first of a graphic novel series, the two of them flee Constantinople (not Istanbul), crash her ship (helium-filled transportation is not a good place to make a pot of tea), and then escape across the countryside, swords blazing. As with Selim, Delilah has gotten in my head, and I look forward greatly to many more misadventures with her in the future.

If you like Indiana Jones, swashbucklers, and kick-ass feminist fantasy heroes on the page or screen, you should definitely check out this super-fun series. (I admit that I was worried about how race and gender would be covered since it’s written and drawn by a Western white guy and focuses on two people of color in the Middle East, but I was pleasantly surprised. I did a little googling to make sure my own white privilege wasn’t blinding me to what might glaringly concern others, but I have not come across any thus far.)

Pages: 176. Library copy.

For Every One, by Jason Reynolds

While I love Jason Reynolds, book-length, self-helpish poems aren’t really my scene and I probably would have skipped out on reading this if it hadn’t been for a tornado warning. I was biking home one afternoon when a severe thunderstorm popped up and I decided it was unsafe to try to race it the dozen remaining blocks home. I took shelter in a library along the route, all our phones suddenly sounded alarms, and I found myself a seat and some reading material that looked like it might be done around the same time as the warning.

It was really good. Like pick this up for every person you know who is doubting themselves and their dreams, which is probably like 98% of us. I mean, while Jason says he wrote this before any of his success found him, acclaim has certainly moved into his house since then, and no one would have blamed him if he chose to burn this or read it only in dark of night when his edits aren’t going well. He didn’t have to share it. But he did because he knows how much it sucks when you’ve got a burning desire to do something, be something, and then that thing doesn’t happen on the timetable you expected. He knows how it feels when everyone, including your rational self, tells you to give up, move on, pick something safer, be more realistic. He wants you to know that he sees you and he believes in you and that you should believe in you, too, because it’s never too late and it’s never too early and it’s never on time.

Highly recommended. Plus, it’ll only take you the length of a tornado warning to read if you want to sample it from your local library or while you’re browsing at the bookstore.

Pages: 112. Library copy.

Caraval, by Stephanie Garber

Scarlett and her younger sister, Tella, have grown up on a remote island under the tyranny of her father, the governor, but she is nearly ready to escape into an arranged marriage with a wealthy older man she has never met, but one who will let her rescue her sister. She also is nearly ready to give up on her dream of experiencing the Caraval, a magical annual performance in which some audience members take part, that her grandmother related stories of at bedtime years ago. After all, her secret letters to its magician host have gone unanswered all these years. Yet now that her letter informs him that this will be her final correspondence, he replies and sends invitations for her, Tella, and her fiance to join him in this year’s festivities, should they be able to travel to his location in time.

Scarlett does not want to jeopardize her sister’s safety, so is willing to miss the performance after all, but Tella does not want to see her sister settle, particularly when neither of them is positive what lies at the other end of their escape. So she pays a young sailor to kidnap them and transport them across the sea in time to reach Caraval before it commences.

But their safety is still not assured. The sisters are separated and then it is announced that the game participants must find Tella, who has been whisked away, with her life as penalty if they do not. Scarlett is frantic and does not know whom to trust. Can she trust the young man who colluded with Tella to kidnap her? What about the strange people she meets as she follows clues about her sister’s whereabouts? And, most dangerous of all, can she trust her own heart and mind, when the stakes are at their highest?

I’d heard many accolades from members of my book club about this engrossing introduction to a fantasy trilogy, but kept forgetting to pick it up. With the third book in the series out earlier this year, I finally got around to starting it. I’m excited to still have two more books to see how this story plays out and what the future holds. Recommended if you enjoy role-playing, literary sisters, or heroic fantasy.

Pages: 407. Library copy.

May stats:

Total number of books read: 4.
Total pages read: 1,095.
Intended audience: All young adult.
Source: All from the library.
Format: All in paper.
Classification: 2 fiction; 1 book-length poem; 1 graphic novel.
Diversity of authors: 3 Americans, 1 Canadian. 1 author of color (Black). One woman.

Today’s Top Ten Tuesday from That Artsy Reader Girl asks us to share ten settings we’d like to see more of in our reading. Mine are a little bit all over the place, incorporating both time and place, general and specific:

1. New England (Home!)
2. Washington, D.C. (Don’t we all want to read more books set where we live? But do it well or I’ll call you out!)
3. The beach (I’d like more of the beach in every aspect of my life.)
4. Christmas (I’m a sucker for books set at the winter holidays.)
5. Wales (A country within a country, and a beautiful one at that.)
6. The South of France (Cute villages, sunflowers, cycling, film festivals…)
7. PEI (A third of why we love Anne is the setting, right?)
8. Campgrounds (I feel like I should think about writing a mystery series set in campgrounds, but would someone keep camping after their second murder? Other than the Scooby-Doo gang, of course.)
9. Libraries/bookstores (Obviously.)
10. Valentine’s Day (Why aren’t there more romances set at this holiday? Or maybe there are and I just haven’t found them…)

How about you? Do you have settings that you prefer in your reading?

I was hoping Corey would stay asleep on the chair so I could demonstrate that I’d legitimately made progress on my shawl, but my counting woke him up. But this week’s book is the same size as last week’s books, so hopefully you can tell I’ve been working hard even without a 20-pound cat as a constant.

The knitting itself is not difficult, which, of course, means I’ve messed it up a bunch of times. Somehow alternating just two stitches on half the rows is harder than my brain can handle. Also, next time remind me not to wind my single ply yarn into a center-pull ball because holy hell, the knots and yarn barf I’ve had to put up with!

The advantage of actually knitting means I’m also doing a lot of reading. Sometimes it’s listening to an audiobook, which has the advantage of not needing to turn pages, but because of the aforementioned fuck-ups, I sometimes need to chant the stitches when I’m having difficulty paying attention, which then means I need to pause the book because I can’t pay attention to someone reading to me while talking aloud to my brain. Otherwise, I can read a print book, paying attention to the pattern on the right-side rows and reading a couple pages while knitting back on the wrong sides. It’s slow going, but not horrible.

On my phone, I have finished my cycling book, The Adventures of a Girl Called Bicycle, and downloaded the first of Peter Mayle’s Sam Levitt heist series, Vintage Caper, which is about to move from Los Angeles to France. It seems appropriate for Tour de France knitting, although I’m also pretty sure I figured out who perpetrated the crime in the scene in which that character was introduced, so it’s good that I’m looking for setting in this book, rather than solid crime writing.

In print, I’ve started Jasmine Guillory’s The Proposal, a modern Los Angeles romance, in which the meet-cute happens because a writer’s boyfriend proposed to her at a Dodgers game (spelling her name wrong on the Jumbotron) and then, after she turns him down, a doctor and his sister help her escape from the media who want to interview her about it. You know, as it happens all the time. It’s light and frothy and innocuous, which is probably about right, given I can’t reliably wrap my head around two stitches.

I have Tommy Orange’s There There out from the library, so I should probably turn to that next, since there’s bound to be a long holds list for it. But if it doesn’t grab me right away, I might just return it again and resume reading my wintry books, Early Riser and Naughty on Ice, to combat our heat.

Want to see what other folks are reading and crafting? Head over to As Kat Knits for the roundup.

Today’s Top Ten Tuesday topic from That Artsy Reader Girl is “auto-buy authors.” I’m positive I don’t have ten (although I’ll note below which they are), but I certainly have ten whose works must immediately be put on hold at the library:

1. Jasper Fforde (must buy)
2. Rainbow Rowell (must buy)
3. Barbara Kingsolver
4. J.K. Rowling/Robert Galbraith
5. Sherry Thomas (I need to track down her backlist)
6. Brian Selznick (must buy his later works; still have to finish going through his backlist)
7. Toni Morrison
8. Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff (only applies to their works together, since I haven’t read either of their solo catalogues)
9. Becky Albertalli
10. Nicola Yoon

Erin Morganstern has only published The Night Circus, but if her sophomore effort, due out this fall, is anywhere near as good, I’ll be adding her to my must-buy list, too.

Yes, Corey is awake in this picture, although he’d been sleeping shortly before. No, he didn’t go after the yarn. Yes, he is a good kitten and I told him so.

I have made it through the first section of my Tour de France knitalong shawl, which I have nicknamed Forever in Bike Shorts.

There has been some tinking, when I screwed up the pattern stitch and couldn’t figure out how to fix a knit-1-below stitch I’d dropped down to repair. But it was relatively straightforward getting it back on the needles, although I definitely would prefer not to repeat that once there are several hundred stitches on my needles, rather than just several dozen. I should definitely not attempt to knit on this while sleeping.

I did not end up picking either of the yarns I showed you on Sunday, nor the next one I tried the following day. But then, while hunting for something else, I came across this baggie of yarn I had unraveled from a sock-in-progress that had been attacked by a moth several years back. It’s Neighborhood Fibers in Dupont Circle and works really well with the Iris. (It has some purple variegation over the pink, so even when the MadTosh bleeds — the strong smell of vinegar suggests it will — it shouldn’t be a problem.) I’m excited to get to the mosaic section, although I admit that the skein now being in 12 balls ranging from a few yards to 200-300 yards is probably not quite ideal. But I will make it work because I am going to love the hell out of this thing when it’s done.

Much of my knitting thus far has been done not to bike racing on tv, but to the audiobook of Christina Uss’ The Adventures of a Girl Called Bicycle, a middle-grade novel I started listening to in May, then had it expire on me as I was about halfway through. Bicycle grew up in a Nearly Silent Monastery in D.C. and instead of getting on a bus to go to a Friendship Factory the way her guardian intended (because she had a poor record of making friends herself), she took herself off on a cross-country bike ride to meet her cycling hero in San Francisco.

When my hands aren’t occupied, I’m still reading Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors and Red, White, and Royal Blue. I’m about halfway through both. I need to finish the former by this weekend, because otherwise I’ll have to pay the library for returning it so late.

Want to see what other folks are reading and crafting? Head to As Kat Knits to check out her round-up!