As always, I’m behind on book reviews (although I have drafts of two more months of books in the works). I’m not going to give you the ten best titles of the first half of the year, which is this week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic. But I will share the four books I’ve particularly enjoyed thus far, in case you’re looking for reading fodder:

Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine, by Gail Honeyman, started out slowly for me and I thought about giving up due to Eleanor’s frustrating personality. I remember thinking that there had better be a good reason for her foibles … and there were. Eleanor is not, in fact, completely fine when the book begins, but by the end she is well on her way to it.

A Gentleman in Moscow, by Amor Towles, focuses on a Russian nobleman who escapes being executed or sent to the work camps because of a poem he published when he was young expressing sympathy for the plight of the worker and for the Bolshevik uprising. Instead he is sentenced to house arrest in one of Moscow’s finest hotels, but instead of continuing to occupy his luxurious suite, he is banished to the attic, à la The Little Princess. Instead of moping, though, he finds the best in the situation — and in every other ensuing slight and setback — which positions him well for some very surprising scenarios and relationships.

Obsidio, by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff, was an excellent conclusion to the Illuminae Files trilogy. Set in space in the future (I want to say the 28th century, but I might be misremembering), the book wraps up the story of teenaged hackers, pilots, drug dealers, and tacticians fighting against intergalactic corporate greed and militarized thugs, and the formerly murderous AI who is helping them (they hope). This installment added a nurse and a soldier to the mix, and as with the earlier two books involves both a pictorial element to the storytelling and a fair amount of kissing.

Killers of the Flower Moon, by David Grann, relates a forgotten piece of American history — the systematic murder of members of the Osage tribe of Native Americans who, in the first few decades of the 20th century, were some of the richest people in the nation thanks to the discovery of oil on their reservation. While the contemporaneous investigation cemented the reputation of the FBI and did put those directly responsible behind bars, it neglected to realize the extent to which the paternalistic American government bore responsibility because of its refusal to recognize the autonomy of Native Americans, instead insisting that white people be given guardianship over them and their finances.

How about you? What have you read in the first half of the year that you loved and would recommend?

My reading has been all over the place this week. A chapter here, a poem there. A different book in each bag. Plus two audiobooks, both L.A. Theatre Works productions, Dr. Cerberus and The Great Tennessee Monkey Trial, as I wash dishes and do prep work in the kitchen.

What have you been reading?

The Tour de France knitalong begins Saturday morning and I don’t yet have a pattern picked out. I would like to make a shawl and I’d like to use a couple (or maybe three) of these shawl balls from Freia fine hand paints. They’re all in the Ombré Merino line: 430 yard-long, single ply balls. The colorways are (clockwise from top left) Hard Candy, Vamp, Aloha, and Melon.

I don’t yet have a pattern picked out. Here are a few I’m considering, but if you have any suggestions, please let me know: Frozen, Sea Shanty, Royal Mile, Parallelogram Scarf, Inara Wrap, and Sea Grass.

If it’s helpful, the shawl I wear the most is my Color Affection. I don’t love knitting feather and fan, so I’d rather not make a shawl that’s entirely comprised of that stitch, but I’m not against a section or two of it. I don’t know brioche, but it’s on my list of things to learn this year, so would be fine with a shawl that included that.

Head over to As Kat Knits to see what other folks are reading and knitting.

The Relief Pitcher Throws A Sonnet
     ~E. Ethelbert Miller

You have to forget the last election.
The blown save.
What matters is now, not tomorrow, just now.
In every inning there is the possibility of something going wrong,
the way sunlight blinds or the way a ball skips towards
the wall or through and under a glove. You stand on the mound
of your imagination and imagine nothing except your own breath.
In your hands the roundness of the world.

How do you feel? Is this what you’ve always wanted?
It’s not about the score or getting out of the inning.
It’s about saving whatever needs to be saved. It can be nothing
more than one’s reputation or helping a child crave the memory
of magic and something to believe in. There is nothing more
human than baseball.

This is from Miller’s latest collection of poetry, If God Invented Baseball, which came out just as pitchers and catchers were reporting back in February. I’ve borrowed this copy from the library, but I will buy my own because it is a near perfect collection.

How can June nearly be over? Well, it is, so I guess I’d better get ready for July. The weather seems like it intends to welcome the change over with heat, although my weekend forecast now just shows upcoming temperatures in the upper 90s, rather than with a bleeding thermometer, like the long-term forecast had originally shown.

Nothing says heat of summer like some wool knitting, right? At least socks are small. I once spent an entire summer knitting a blanket with strips of Icelandic wool draped over my lap, which was not ideal.

My Posey socks are trucking along now. Amazing that sometimes all it takes is finding a way around the small problems holding you up (not being able to get the heel striping to work with the four-color sequence) to let you move ahead more quickly. (Or quicker, at least.) I am hopeful that I can get the pair finished before the Tour de France starts next weekend, when I want to start a shawl with some brightly hued gradient yarn my folks gave me last year. Photos and pattern mulling to come next week.

On the reading front, I’m still listening to Jenny Colgan’s The Bookshop on the Corner, in which only good things happen to the heroine, except for when they’re bad things that turn out to have been good things in disguise. There’s a lot of serendipity in the book and the heroine is instantly liked by everyone she meets and is good at everything she tries, seemingly without effort. Despite my seeming grumpy about the book, I am enjoying it (and the reader is excellent with all the accents!), but will require some “vegetable” books after finishing this very sweet one. I have several YA Sync downloads to listen to (maybe The Red Umbrella about the Peter Pan project that sent unaccompanied Cuban children to America in the 1960s) while I wait for books I’ve started to come back off hold. I’m #2 for American Street and it seems like a good time to dive back into a story about a young woman whose mother ended up in a detention center when they landed in the U.S.

On paper, I started Leah on the Offbeat by Becky Albertalli, her companion to Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda, this week and am about halfway through. A friend had been lukewarm about it, which probably helped to temper my expectations, so I keep being pleased with how much I like the story.

I’m a couple chapters into both Children of Blood and Bone and Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, and it’s too early to tell how I feel about them.

Rudi is away this weekend and the Fourth of July gives me a day off next week, so I’ll have plenty of reading time in between protest marches and festivals. (And if the thermometer starts bleeding, I’ll take my book to the pool.)

Head over to Kat’s to see what other folks are reading and knitting.

Today’s Top Ten Tuesday topic is series I don’t plan to finish, but I’m taking a page from organizer Jana to include series that I put down for whatever reason and that I’ve been ambivalent about picking back up:

1. The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis (Won’t read book 7 because friends have suggested it’ll ruin the series for me. Yes, I do know why.)
2. Maisie Dobbs by Jacqueline Winspear (I got annoyed with her mentor in the third book or thereabouts, and haven’t had it in me to pick it back up.)
3. Daughter of Smoke & Bone by Laini Taylor (I didn’t particularly care for the first book in this trilogy that everyone else seemed to love.)
4. His Dark Materials by Phillip Pullman (Both of the first two books took me a couple tries to get through, so it hasn’t been high on my priority list to finish the final one, although the prequel did pique my curiosity.)
5. Inkheart by Cornelia Funke (I liked the first book quite a bit, but it was a book that I would have been happier if it had been a standalone.)
6. The Dark Is Rising by Susan Cooper (I read the first three of these books and always intended to finish them, but a librarian I was chatting with a couple weeks ago kind of ruined the ending and now, like the Chronicles of Narnia, maybe I don’t need to bother.)
7. Miss Peregrine’s Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs (I’ve said it before, but it annoyed me tremendously that this book seemed to decide at the last minute that it didn’t feel like wrapping things up and instead turned out to be a series. I’ve held it against the sequels and might or might not ever get over it.)
8. Eragon by Christopher Paolin (The first one was pretty middling. I couldn’t figure out why so many people loved it.)
9. A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket (I read the first three or so before losing interest. Possibly the only series we read as adults where Rudi got further along than I did.)
10. Agatha Raisin by M.C. Beaton (I enjoy dipping in and out of the Hamish Macbeth series, but didn’t find the same joy with Beaton’s Cotswalds-residing character.)

How about you? Any series you’ve started but either gave up on or feel ambivalent about continuing?

I finished up Hello, Universe this evening, so I thought I’d show you my Posey socks with tonight’s library haul (which also included three dvds — the Studio Ghibli anime version of Tales from Earthsea, the Israeli film that inspired the Broadway musical The Band’s Visit, and Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool).

Elsa and the Night and The Room are both Scandinavian books in translation. Jeremiah Thatcher, Dragon Hatcher and The Wolves of Willoughby Chase are both off the 100 best children’s books list that I was making my way through a few years back. And Puddin’ and Leah on the Offbeat are both new YA books by authors I really like. I also have Children of Blood and Bone out, which I’m eager to start.