I’ll show you some photos of my time in San Francisco tomorrow, when I’m a little more awake. But tonight I thought I’d share what I splurged and brought home from the course of my vacation day, when I stopped at two indie bookshops and two local record stores:

First the music: I bought two used cds (I still prefer cds): Holly Near’s and still we sing, a two-disc set, and Woody Guthrie at 100! Live at the Kennedy Center, a cd/dvd tribute concert. It includes performances from a variety of luminaries including Jackson Browne, Rosanne Cash, Donovan, Judy Collins, and Sweet Honey in the Rock.

The books include a signed copy of Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark; a collection of poems & short prose pieces about San Francisco gentrification by Tony Robles, Cool Don’t Live Here No More; and two novels in translation, Takashi Hiraide’s The Guest Cat and Juan Villoro’s middle-grade The Wild Book, about a boy who turns out to be a magical reader (which I already started on the flight home).

Oh, and one more thing — I bought a tote bag to hold all my purchases with the cool cat as record player design.

I didn’t mean to buy quite so much, but I decided music and books were a good splurge.

The final Unraveled Wednesday of the month finds me without having made much progress since last week on my Tour de France shawl, although I think the color changes (from pink and violet to salmon and a more reddish-violet) are more obvious now. I do have a lot of airplane knitting between now and Sunday when the cyclists reach Paris, but I am also really good at airplane sleeping, which seems a likely scenario, particularly since one of those flights is a red eye.

I started Audacity Jones to the Rescue on the metro this morning. She’s a plucky orphan whose philosophy is, “Everything will turn out splendid in the end. If it’s not splendid, it’s not the end,” which seems as good a life philosophy as any to me.

Apologies for the short post, but I have a plane to catch tomorrow and haven’t started packing…

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I didn’t particularly feel like writing about this week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic, so I decided instead to tell you ten books I currently have checked out from the library and why I borrowed them. (I am a big library borrower. I have 16 print books out from the library, as well as five audio books checked out via Overdrive.)

1. Murder Games by James Patterson and Howard Roughan, because Instinct is one of the few tv shows we watch that was renewed for the coming year and I’m always interested in literary inspirations for tv adaptations.
2. The Epic Fail of Arturo Zamora by Pablo Cartaya: It was a Cybils Award finalist in the middle grade category this year, which is probably the category I like the best; a 2018 Pura Belpré Author Honor Book; and an Earphones Award winner from AudioFile.
3. Where the Mountain Meets the Moon by Grace Lin: Eight years ago a list of 100 best kids books came out from the School Library Journal and I decided to finish reading all the titles on it that I had never gotten to. Recently I realized I’d never finished that laudable goal, but that it was accomplishable over the next summer or two. This is one of the books from the list. (Plus, I loved her When the Sea Turned to Silver.)
4. The Thief by Meghan Whalen Turner: This is another one off that list.
5. The Wolves of Willoughby Chase by Joan Aiken: And another one.
6. Refugee by Alan Gratz: This was the Cybils winner in the middle grades category this year and is particularly relevant to the moment, but starting it just feels like work, which is why I haven’t started it.
7. The Room by Jonas Karlsson: I really liked his book The Invoice several years ago, so when I needed a couple books by foreign authors set in foreign places for my summer book bingo sheet, I decided to see if he’d written anything else my library had in stock.
8. The Problim Children by Natalie Lloyd: The last time I was at the bookstore, I saw Lloyd had a new book out. I loved A Snicker of Magic and liked The Key to Extraordinary, so decided to check this one out and see if it was one that I could like and move on from or if it was one I needed to own.
9. Ivy Aberdeen’s Letter to the World by Ahsley Herring Blake: Another book I saw the last time I was at the bookstore, this one had a striking cover and was on their recommended reads table.
10. The Refugees by Viet Thanh Ngyuen: This was the 2018 D.C. Reads title. I’ve had it out for months. I read the first story, it made me cry, and I was loathe to pick it back up again. Plus, it’s short stories, which I don’t especially love. I’m just having a hard time taking it back even though I don’t want to read it anymore because I think I should read it. I hate doing things I should.

How about you? What do you have checked out from the library at the moment and what made you pick it?

My Tour de France knitting continues apace. There has finally been some color shifting to salmon and a different hue of purple, which is exciting, and the shawl is now longer than my arm, which gives me hope it might someday be long enough to wear. I will need to pick up my pace, since we’re halfway through the Tour and I am not halfway through the knitting. I do have many hours of plane flight coming up next week, though, so it’s a possibility I’ll get caught up.

I’m reading and loving Julie Murphy’s Puddin’, the follow-up to her bestselling book (and soon-to-be feature film), Dumplin’, about two Texas girls who become friends. When I finish it, I’ll be heading back to Moxie, about a Texas girl who rallies other Texas girls to become feminists through her anonymous, Riot Grrrl-inspired zine. As I said to my book group today, apparently I’m all in for kick-ass Texas teen girl novels this summer.

I’ve been listening to a variety of things, but what’s stuck most is Murder Games, the book by James Patterson and Howard Roughan that inspired the tv show Instinct. I always find it interesting in tv shows/films that evolve from books what gratuitous things they choose to change. Here, for instance, one main character’s tv husband has a different name (Andy instead of Tracy) and aspiring career (bar owner instead of actor) and the other main character goes by the nickname (Lizzie) that she hates. The chapters are ridiculously short (which is probably partially what makes Patterson such a page-turner) and I remember from the tv pilot who the bad guy is going to be, even if that character has not yet been introduced in the book. (I suppose it’s a possibility that they changed that, too.) I am also listening to Being Jazz: My Life as a (Transgender) Teen by Jazz Jennings, an #ownvoices memoir which was one of the free Audiobook Sync titles from this year. It’s fine so far, but nothing especially amazing.

You can visit As Kat Knits for additional book and knitting pairings.

I read six books back in March:

A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine L’Engle

Twelve year-old Meg Murry, awkward, self-doubting, and truculent, lives with her beautiful scientist mother, her unremarkable twin brothers, and her brilliant little brother Charles Wallace, who many people make unkind assumptions about. She does not live with her scientist father, because he has disappeared off the face of the earth. Quite literally, but Meg doesn’t yet know that. It takes the intervention of three otherworldly guides, Mrs. Who, Mrs. Which, and Mrs. Whatsit, to elucidate the situation and then tesser Meg, Charles Wallace, and Meg’s schoolmate Calvin off into space for an impromptu rescue mission. But when Charles Wallace goes up against the Borg-like It and loses, it’s up to his big sister to figure out how to bring him home. (more…)

Here’s what I’ve knit so far on my Tour de France shawl. I opted for a different pattern than what I showed you last week. This is Around the Bend by Nim Teasdale.

The book is Moxie by Jennifer Mathieu. I’ve also been listening to Saving Montgomery Sole by Mariko Tamaki.

Visit As Kat Knits for more book/knitting combos.