I’ll have a couple FOs to show you as soon as the sun comes back out. In the meantime, here’s the next sock pair I’ll be working on, which you may remember from March when I knit them in Sock Madness. I just need to finish that toe and I’ll be able to move on to sock #2.

On the reading front, I also finished several things last week, which means I have new things to show you this week. Delilah Dirk and the Turkish Lieutenant by Tony Cliff is a graphic novel set in 1807 in the Middle East and focuses on a swashbuckling adventurer with a flying boat and a former palace guard who brews an excellent pot of tea. I think it will be part Tintin, part Indiana Jones, and part Black Widow.

Girl Squads by Sam Maggs is a nonfiction collection of essays about female friendship around the world and through history. I’ve only read the first essay thus far, which focuses on a society of free divers on an island off the coast of South Korea. So far, it’s fascinating, but I’m not loving the author’s tone, which is a little breezier than I’d prefer.

Jenny Han’s P.S., I Still Love You is the sequel to To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, and like the first book in the y.a. romance trilogy, I’m listening to it. I wanted to check it off before the movie adaptation hits Netflix (although I don’t know when that’ll be). It’s cute.

I’ve got several other books sort of in progress, but those are the three I’m actively reading today.

Want to learn more about what folks are reading and knitting? Head to As Kat Knits.

I’ve returned to my Lightning Shawl for a final strip, although probably not soon enough to finish and block it in time to wear it to Sheep & Wool on Sunday. But either way, it should be done soon and that will be good enough.

On the reading front, on Sunday, I picked up Jeff Zentner’s latest, Rayne and Delilah’s Midnite Matinee, about two high school senior friends from Tennessee who host a public access program where they show old monster movies and do campy interstitials, à la Elvira or Svengoolie. It is good so far, but I can see where trouble lies ahead for the characters, which stresses me out. On a less stressful note, I’m listening to Jenny Han’s P.S., I Still Love You, the second in her romantic trilogy about the fallout a girl experiences after letters she wrote, but never intended to send, to her previous crushes get mailed. The first book was made into a Netflix movie, which I thought stayed true enough to the book (although with way fewer baking sessions than I thought should have been included) and the second one has been greenlit, so this seemed like a good time to listen to it.

Check out what others are reading and crafting at As Kat Knits.

Saturday was Independent Bookstore Day, the annual biblio-holiday celebrating the small, community-based bookstores around the country. D.C. booksellers put together a crawl that included discounts, and if you visited 10 of them, you’d get a tote bag commemorating the event.

I did not make it to all ten, having not finished my job application early enough to leave me time to accomplish the task before our movie showtime. Getting around town by bikeshare just takes the amount of time it takes — you cannot make bikes magically appear at deserted docks and I am a slow cyclist — and I would have needed another hour to check off the two other neighborhoods I didn’t make it to.

However, I made it to five shops and came home with a modest, budget-friendly haul — three books, a magnet, a sticker, and some birthday cards (not shown).

First the books:

• The Girl Who Drank the Moon is a special signed copy available for Independent Bookstore Day. I read it a couple years ago and loved it, and owning a copy seemed like a nice idea so that I could reread it periodically at my pleasure.
• archy and mehitabel is a 1927 collection of poems from a column at The Evening Sun purportedly written by a cockroach (archy) about his early 20th-century adventures with a his alley-cat pal, mehitabel. I mean, of course that had to come home with me!
• And, finally, Paroles is a collection of poems that came out just after the end of World War II about the French youth experience of growing up under German occupation. Because I’ve been working on my French comprehension, it seemed like a good fit for me. It was translated by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and the French and English poems sit opposite each other on the page, so I can make sure my understanding is accurate.

And, finally, the ephemera. The magnet reads, “Tea fixes everything,” which if not true, is at least the closest to true as one can get around here. And the sticker is a Langston Hughes quote: “Well, I like to eat, sleep, drink and be in love. I like to work, read, learn and understand life.” Seems about right.

I wish you all three.

I am one toe away from a finished pair of stripey socks. FO pictures later this week.

The book is Nevermoor: The Trials of Morrigan Crow by Jessican Townsend. It’s the first in a sweet middle-grade fantasy series in which the main character is a “cursed chld,” born on the wrong day and considered by everyone to be a bad omen. She is offered a reprieve on her death day by a man driving a mechanical spider.

Want to see what others are reading and knitting? Head over to As Kat Knits to see.

Today’s Ten on Tuesday topic at That Artsy Reader Girl invites us to highlight our first ten book reviews. My reviewing habits tend to shy away from single reviews, rather than groups of them, so I had to customize the topic slightly to fit my M.O.

Here then are the first ten posts I published reviewing books on the blog:

1. Summerland by Michael Chabon: March 24, 2005 (This was just my sixth blog post, a week into its existence. Clearly writing about books was important to me — and remains so, since I had to trawl through 103 pages in the book category to get back to it.)
2. The Best Reads of 2005: Jan. 2, 2006 (Per my habit, I am terrible at continuing to write reviews through the year, but I do try to get the best-of list up at some point. In my first year blogging, I managed it only two days into the new year. The list includes the aforementioned Summerland, as well as books by J.K. Rowling, Diana Abu-Jaber, Garrison Keillor, Jhumpa Lahiri, Bill Bryson, and Susanna Clark)
3. February 2006 Reads: March 1, 2006 (It includes rereads of several classics, as well as a glowing review of a Julian Barnes book that I remembered reading, but not loving.)
4. March 2006 Reads: April 1, 2006 (I was so prompt back in the day… It includes a Jasper Fforde title, which I sped through much faster than his most recent.)
5. April 2006 Reads: May 3, 2006 (April was clearly a lackluster reading month that year. M.C. Beaton stands the test of time.)
6. May 2006 Reads: June 2, 2006 (Peter Mayle and witchy frenemies)
7. June 2006 Reads (Part 1): June 18, 2006 (Carl Hiassen, more C.S. Lewis, and some guy named Will Shakespeare)
8. June 2006 Reads (Part 2): July 1, 2006 (This post included my huge success of airport bookstore buying, A History of Love. Also, Kate DiCamillo and Frances Hardinge.)
9. July 2006 Reads: July 31, 2006 (A reread of James Thurber is the highlight this month.)
10. August 2006 Reads: Sept. 5, 2006 (Bill Bryson and Dave Barry)