Look how cheerful my new sock is! I haven’t had enough time to sit with it to make a ton of progress, but I’m carrying it around with me and knitting on it a few minutes at a time and that’s enough right now.

On the reading front, I am listening to Katherine Arden’s The Bear and the Nightingale, which folks in my book group compared to Uprooted, which I loved. It’s unclear thus far whether that’s just because it’s set in Eastern Europe and fantastical or if there are more meaningful comparisons that will become obvious later on.

I am nearly done with Morgan Parker’s poetry collection, There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé. It’s full of sex and the music and the Black female experience, both positive and negative, and I recommend reading it.

I have started Down and Across by Arvin Ahmadi, but ran straight into the problem that a lot of books that are set in a place you know really well experience and that’s the incongruenties with your lived reality. The book references early on row houses on M Street. M Street in the section of D.C. where the story is taking places, is exclusively a retail section. And I know this is a minor detail and that I’ll get past it, but it just grated and something else came along in the meantime that I’m enjoying too much for me to go back to.

That something is A Dash of Trouble, the first in a planned series called Love Sugar Magic, a middle grade story of brujas who run a bakery and the youngest sister who stumbles onto the family secret a little earlier than she’s supposed to. This was also recommended to me from my book club (and apparently I have a fondness for magic bakery stories), and so, when I found it during Independent Bookstore Day blurbed by my favorite D.C. bookseller as being her favorite new series since Harry Potter, I bought myself a copy.

Next up (as soon as I remember to retrieve it from the bedroom when Rudi’s not sleeping in there) will be fellow Conn alum David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, which has won many accolades and which I hear is the sort of narrative nonfiction I particularly like. It’s a little more grisly than my normal reading, but is in keeping with the sort of books I read in college and grad school (when a lot of my studies focused on marginalized American cultures), so I’m hoping I can handle it.

As usual, head over to As Kat Knits for more of what folks are reading and crafting.

Today I took part in Dewey’s 24-Hour Readathon. Because it was also Independent Bookstore Day and Watch the New Avengers Movie Day, I did not spend as much of the day reading as I might otherwise have liked, but I did finish Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward, begin Anna Meriano’s Love Sugar Magic, and read a few poems from Morgan Parker’s There Are More Beautiful Things than Beyoncé. I read a little more than 200 pages over the course of five or so hours.

But now it’s time to go to bed and get a few hours of sleep. There are things to do tomorrow, too, after all.

Sometimes when I find myself getting stuck in a reading rut, I opt to return to an old favorite. When I was young, it was Little Women or, less often, Anne of Green Gables. These days it’s the Harry Potter series. Because it is familiar in a comforting way, but no matter how many times I read it, I find something new in it, whether it’s because different details pop out at me or because I’m a slightly different person than I was the last time I read it.

As I said yesterday, I’m feeling stuck with my knitting. And, to be honest, none of what I’m currently reading has grabbed my soul either. So while yes, I do want to finish all the things I’m knitting and some of the things I’m reading (and need to do so soon in some cases), a change was in order.

I could head back to Harry, but the version I want to read now is the illustrated one, which does not lend itself to Metro reading. So I’ve picked up Down and Across, a book Jenn recommended last year and which I bought months ago after hearing the author read from it and which takes place partly in my neighborhood. I’ve completely abandoned Amelia Peabody (the thing I liked best about the book was the narrator; otherwise the story reminded me of an overly long Scooby Doo episode with about the same level of sophistication). Instead I’ve started Katherine Arden’s The Bear and the Nightingale, which folks in my book group have compared to Uprooted, which I loved, and which I’ve enjoyed the first two chapters of tonight while washing dishes and doing some other nighttime chores.

The Harry Potter equivalent in my knitting world is stripey socks. And, yes, you would be right that the Posey socks are also stripey, but they are tinged with sadness, I think, and while I will definitely return to them — and not too far in the future — I needed something that made my heart sing with joy and that tonight was Knitterly Things’ Vesper Sock in In The Wild Wood, with stripes of verdant green, calming brown, and brilliant fuchsia. They are the colors of the azaleas that are coming into season right now and I think they’ll be just what I need to spring clean my soul and give it some space to return to other projects.

Sometimes it’s necessary to power through a problem, but sometimes it’s good to remind yourself that it might not really be a problem unless you make it one yourself.

Onward!

I finished Strange the Dreamer over the weekend, so I’ve returned to Sing, Unburied, Sing as my main book, since it needs to get back to the library this week in order to avoid a fine. Happily, it finally seems to have picked up its pace, so I think I should be able to read more than 10 pages at a time. I’m once again listening to Crocodile on the Riverbank, but am seriously considering abandoning it. If you like the Amelia Peabody books, please tell me why, because it feels like between the racism and the obvious bad guys that this book should fade into oblivion. And I read pieces of short stories from Kidnapped! Abductions in Time, Space, and Fantasy when I feel like sitting at my laptop for an additional ten minutes at a time.

You’ll notice no knitting in this photo. I’ve got nothing new to show. I’m stuck. Nothing interests me, except for the hat, for which I need to acquire the beads I want (rather than what the bead store has) in order to move forward. I know once I get past the heel with the Posey socks those should get me unstuck, but I admit that I’m contemplating just casting on a new pair of socks in the meantime. I know I’m feeling grumpy toward my knitting right now because my knitting is feeling grumpy toward me. Time will fix it all, I’m sure. If not, there’s no shortage of yarn in this apartment to try something new with.

Head over to As Kat Knits to see what else folks are working on.

PBS is launching a show next month about books, The Great American Read. I don’t get PBS over the air and don’t particularly care for the show’s host, Meredith Viera, but I do like to read books and to talk about books, so I suppose it’s possible.

But in the meantime, let’s look at the list. PBS says they did a phone poll asking people what their favorite novel was and that list was then narrowed down by an advisory panel. They condensed series to a single entry and limited authors to only one title. So take the list as what you will, but in the meantime, let’s look at what we’ve read from it and what we’re excited to read:

[I have bolded the titles I’ve read. I’ve used *** to mark titles I own but have not read and † to mark other titles already on my TBR list.)

I’m bolding titles I’ve read.

1. 1984 by George Orwell

2. A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole***

3. A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving†

4. A Separate Peace by John Knowles

5. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith

6. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain

7. The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

8. Alex Cross Mysteries (series) by James Patterson

9. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll†

10. Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie†

11. And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie

12. Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery

13. Another Country by James Baldwin

14. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

15. Beloved by Toni Morrison

16. Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo Anaya

17. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

18. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz†

19. The Call of the Wild by Jack London

20. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

21. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

22. Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White

23. The Chronicles of Narnia (series) by C.S. Lewis

24. The Clan of the Cave Bear by Jean M. Auel

25. The Coldest Winter Ever by Sister Souljah

26. The Color Purple by Alice Walker

27. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas†

28. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky†

29. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon

30. The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown

31. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes†

32. Doña Bárbara by Rómulo Gallegos

33. Dune by Frank Herbert

34. Fifty Shades of Grey (series) by E.L. James

35. Flowers in the Attic by V.C. Andrews

36. Foundation (series) by Isaac Asimov

37. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

38. Games of Thrones (series) by George R.R. Martin

39. Ghost by Jason Reynolds

40. Gilead by Marilynne Robinson***

41. The Giver by Lois Lowry

42. The Godfather by Mario Puzo

43. Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

44. Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell

45. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

46. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

47. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

48. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift†

49. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

50. Harry Potter (series) by J.K. Rowling

51. Hatchet (series) by Gary Paulsen

52. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

53. The Help by Kathryn Stockett

54. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

55. The Hunger Games (series) by Suzanne Collins†

56. The Hunt for Red October by Tom Clancy

57. The Intuitionist by Colson Whitehead

58. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison†

59. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

60. The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan

61. Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton

62. Left Behind (series) by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins

63. The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

64. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

65. Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry

66. Looking for Alaska by John Green†

67. The Lord of the Rings (series) by J.R.R. Tolkien

68. The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold

69. The Martian by Andy Weir

70. Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden***

71. Mind Invaders by Dave Hunt

72. Moby Dick by Herman Melville†

73. The Notebook by Nicholas Sparks

74. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez†

75. Outlander (series) by Diana Gabaldon

76. The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton

77. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

78. The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan

79. The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett

80. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

81. Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

82. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

83. The Shack by William P. Young

84. Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse

85. The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut

86. The Stand by Stephen King

87. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway†

88. Swan Song by Robert McCammon

89. Tales of the City (series) by Armistead Maupin†

90. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

91. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe†

92. This Present Darkness by Frank E. Peretti

93. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

94. Twilight Saga (series) by Stephenie Meyer

95. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy†

96. The Watchers by Dean Koontz

97. The Wheel of Time (series) by Robert Jordan†

98. Where the Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls

99. White Teeth by Zadie Smith***

100. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

I think that’s 39 read and another 25 on my TBR list in one form or another. Are there any I didn’t highlight you think I should?

I am stalled on several knitting projects, having not yet bought the beads I need to move on with the hat and having found a fatal flaw in the green stripey socks that will require ripping back to before the heel flap. So here I show you the knitting project I’ve already done the ripping on that’s ready to move forward. I bought some grey yarn to make heels from, so now I can get knitting on my Posey socks once more.

I spent the weekend reading Obsidio, so that’s one 600+-page book down and now I can finish Strange the Dreamer, which will let me check off the second one on my list. Both Sing, Unburied, Sing and We Were Eight Years in Power are both overdue, so I need to wrap them both up and get them back to the library. I’ve enjoyed listening to Norse Mythology, but it’s going to expire from my Overdrive app before I finish it, so I’ll need to wait to conclude my audiobook experience, but Crocodile on the Sandbank, Flat Broke with Two Goats, and The Bear and the Nightingale are all checked out to me for faunal listening. Finally, I’m reading my friend’s book, Kidnapped! Abductions in Space, Time, and Fantasy by Danny Atwood et al, on my laptop because that’s what you do when loved ones publish ebooks. I don’t particularly love short story collections and find they work best for me if I space the stories out with a couple days in between them, so that’s what I’m doing. So far, I’m liking it and recommend it if you do like short stories, particularly in the fantasy/sci fi vein.

Head over to As Kat Knits to read what else people are reading and knitting.