This long Labor Day weekend marked the traditional end of summer fun and the recognition that fall is nigh. It meant time at the pool, enjoying the last days of outdoor swimming. It meant harvesting our basil plants from the garden, but still getting to have our traditional Sunday summer supper of caprese sandwiches and corn on the cob. It meant spending the evening at the park, but being home by 8 because you can no longer read outside. It meant buying tomatoes at the farmers market, but also leeks because the idea of hot soup no longer requires taking a nap.

But it also meant the 17th annual National Book Festival, hosted by the Library of Congress, one of my favorite events of the year.

I am not a morning person, so while every year I plan the authors I’d like to see from the first time slot to the final one, I’m not sure I’ve yet managed to arrive early enough to catch the first act. This year was no different, and I didn’t walk into the convention center until noon, shortly before the first panel I’d declared “must see” in my head.

On the YA stage were Melissa de la Cruz (who’s got a Christmas-themed romance coming out this fall, as a follow-up to her Hamilton-themed YA novel), Nicola Yoon (whose The Sun Is Also a Star is the reason I was there), and Sandhya Menon (I read When Dimple Met Rishi earlier this summer — it’s cute) to have a panel discussion about falling in love. While I tend to prefer a single author reading & talking about her/his experiences to conversation-style presentations, this one seemed to work well. All three had interesting things to say not only about love (“You all really love our husbands,” since that’s who the male leads are at least partly modeled on), but also about immigration and diversity.

I tracked down a copy of the festival poster (my collection will someday be framed and will festoon the walls of my home library) and proceeded down to the basement, where the kids’ stages were set up. Amy Sarig (A.S.) King was sharing her new middle-grade novel, Me and Marvin Gardens, about a boy in a town where housing developments had taken over the areas that had once been farm fields and the plastic-eating monster he finds. She used to live on a farm and shared how she raised chickens and would have to plan 20 weeks ahead of when she wanted to send out manuscripts because she’d need to sell enough to cover the cost of postage. She was also really funny with the kids: After she spoke admiringly of Where the Wild Things Are and the librarian who introduced her to it, a kid asked if she’d written it. After clarifying the point, the kid asked if they were friends. “No! I wish!” she said to them, adding to the adult audience members, “That’ll have to wait for later.”

Back upstairs I went to hear Kathleen Glasgow talk about her YA novel, Girl in Pieces, about a girl who lives through terrible things and survives them in part by engaging in self-harm. She says she gets a lot of criticism from parents, who feel her work is too dark, and therefore inappropriate, for teens to read. But those are the very stories we need to tell, she explained, so that teens living those dark stories have a place to process them. She also said that it was particularly important for YA novels to offer a glimmer of hope in them (and even better if the protagonist is responsible for creating that hope themselves), because teens without any needed to be able to see that things can get better.

At this point, it was necessary to pause for lunch and to sit quietly by myself for a bit. I find this helps me deal with the crowds, which are much more oppressive inside than they were when the festival was down on the Mall.

Afterwards, I returned to the children’s stage, where Kelly Barnhill was talking about her lovely fantasy novel, The Girl Who Drank the Moon, who had a really engaging way of interacting with the kids in the audience. After being joined by Rudi, who hadn’t been able to get in the room where Michael Lewis was speaking, we raced back up to YA to catch my other must-see author, Angie Thomas, who wrote The Hate U Give.

Angie’s session was an interview between her and a reporter from the Washington Post, and I don’t think it worked as well as it could have if Angie had just gotten up and spoken. The interviewer asked her about how the main character uses two ways of speaking — one at her predominantly white school and one at home in her primarily Black community — and asked how she’d done that and if she’d thought of Starr as two separate characters. I literally groaned aloud and whispered angrily to Rudi that only a white interviewer would ask such a stupid question. Angie answered more gracefully, explaining the term is called code switching and that she was doing it right then and that it’s a skill many people of color use to navigate in social settings. She spoke about how she found adult books boring, how “reluctant readers” often aren’t so much reluctant to read as reluctant to read what people give them to read, about the upcoming film adaptation, about her second book, about how white feminists are often slow to see their own privilege, and about how you can write outside of your lived experiences, but if you get things wrong, you should expect to be called out on that and to be graceful about it.

Finally, Rudi and I went down to the graphic novels stage for the final authors of the night. Gene Luen Yang shared that the superpower he’d like most is the ability to multiply time so he could make his deadlines, two editorial cartoonists spoke about how they developed their personal styles and about creating political commentary in this era. We also got to see Lincoln Pierce, whose “Big Nate” strips are among my favorites in the Sunday comics. But the highlight of the stage was definitely Roz Chast, whose exhaustion at the end of the day made her very giggly and slightly confused about the prompting messages being held up for the moderator. She shared that living in the suburbs made her far more nervous than living in the city, although she punctuated this by telling the story of a man who had a sink hole open up beneath him as he walked, swallowing one of his legs.

All in all, another good festival, and I’m looking forward to next year’s.

It’s once again time for Bout of Books:

The Bout of Books read-a-thon is organized by Amanda Shofner and Kelly @ Reading the Paranormal. It is a week long read-a-thon that begins 12:01 a.m. Monday, August 21st, and runs through Sunday, August 27th, in whatever time zone you are in. Bout of Books is low-pressure. There are challenges, giveaways, and a grand prize, but all of these are completely optional. For all Bout of Books 20 information and updates, be sure to visit the Bout of Books blog. – From the Bout of Books team

My goal is a low, but excellent, bar: read a little every day.

Yesterday, I took part in the Bout of Books opening day Twitter chat, and read from three books. I finished the illustrated version of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (book bingo challenge: re-read), read some of Bronze & Sunflower (book bingo challenge: by an author from a country I’ve never visited), and started listening to The Scam, the fourth book in the Fox and O’Hare heist series (no challenge; just wanted something light to listen to while washing dishes).

What are you reading this week?

Wednesdays during the spring and summer are home to Rudi’s evening bike ride and happy hour, which means I can take myself out someplace and do what I like, which in this week’s case means knitting and reading.

The sock is the second in a pair, which I hope to have done early this weekend, so there can still be time to finish another in-progress pair before month’s end. I have at least one more that’s languishing on the second sock. I hate the yarn, which explains why they sat so long. It simultaneously feels cheap and insubstantial (in that it requires me to go down to 0s on the foot to get a fabric I feel will hold up to wear), which I hope means it’ll last forever. Whichever pair I pick up next will definitely be one that’s more pleasing to the touch.

The book, Murder on the Ballarat Train, is one I picked up at the library Monday, having remembered last week when I moaned about needing a book that had been turned into a tv series that I was not restricted to American broadcasts. If you enjoy the show, I highly recommend these quick novellas by Kerry Greenwood. You’ll find all your favorite characters from the small screen, as well as a Mrs. Butler to provide delectable meals. If you’ve neither seen the show nor read the books, what are you waiting for? They’re set in 1920s Melbourne and feature a well-off flapper detective and the misfits she befriends (lesbian doctor, Communist cab drivers, savvy police detective). Lots of fun!

I finished Roxane Gay’s Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body on audiobook earlier this week and haven’t yet figured out my next listen. It may be Shadowshaper, which was this week’s YA AudioSYNC download, or maybe something will come off my holds list on Overdrive.

Elsewhere, I’m reading A Tyranny of Petticoats (a collection of multicultural short historical stories), Bronze & Sunflower (a middle-grade novel translated from Chinese), Sleeping Giants (epistolary sci fi), and the illustrated version of Harry Potter & the Sorcerer’s Stone.

Check out Kat’s blog for links to what other folks are reading and knitting.

I haven’t been good about posting my Book Bingo progress, so I thought I’d give you a sense of where I am right now:

My apologies that some of those lower titles are hard to read. I’ll try to fix that in the next version. In the meantime, know that for “Set in a place you’d like to vacation,” it’s Piecing Me Together for Portland, Ore., where I’ve visited before, but not in a long time (and it doesn’t say it has to be a new-to-me place, after all). For “More than 500 pages,” we have The Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue (which obliged me by being 513 pages); for “Audiobook narrated by the author,” we have The Princess Diarist, read by Carrie Fisher; and for “Person on the cover,” I’ve put in Amina’s Voice.

I’m trying to decide if Roxane Gay’s Hunger is enough about food for that to qualify for that square, but I’m thinking not. I’ve got two cookbooks out of the library, which I may include instead. I’ve started Tyranny in Petticoats for an author/editor from D.C. I have a copy of Al Franken’s new book, but I’ll have to steal it from Rudi. I took a book by a Chinese author and another set in Kenya & the Congo out of the library and have one published in the 1800s on my bookshelf. I’m thinking I’d like to sit down with the first book of the Harry Potter illustrated editions, so that’ll likely be my re-read.

I think that leaves the month/day of the week and the tv series categories unfulfilled. I have ideas, but welcome any suggestions.

I may or may not read all these categories by summer’s end, and my filled squares certainly don’t represent all the books I’ve read so far this summer. But by and large, I’ve made a good number fit without having to strain anything, which is nice.

Joining Kat’s Unraveled Wednesdays:

I’ll be finishing both these books in the next couple of days. In A Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue, I’ve got 100 pages left, which means the stupid thing they’re about to do is likely the climax moment, so I will need to finish it all in one chunk of time. In The Book Jumpers, the monster is getting closer to being revealed, which means it’s become more stressful to read that, as well. After this, I’m reading a stress-free book about kittens. Or maybe just petting my kittens.

On Sunday night, I wrapped up the knitting on my fourth finished object of the year. This is the Points of Light Baby Blanket, by Jean Clement (it’s just a smidge bigger than my mom’s sweater drying rack, which is why it looks a little weird in this picture):

I bought the cotton-acrylic blend yarn, Plymouth Yarn’s Jeannee, ages ago, at a yarn shop that no longer exists in Hyattsville one afternoon with Sarah. I bought it as an option for a gift for a baby-to-be who is now 8, but almost immediately ran into trouble with the pattern. I put it down, knit something else, and didn’t give it another thought until my friend Amani informed me she was pregnant last winter. Then I dug it out, picked up where I’d left off, and knit a couple repeats on it.

Something was wrong. My tension had changed over the years. But maybe it was only obvious to me. Enter Rudi, who knows enough to be useful in these situations. Could he see where things went awry. When he pointed to the eight-year gap, I knew it was necessary to rip.

The project re-commenced in May. I used nearly all of both skeins of the turquoise yarn (33), a good chunk (somewhere between half and two-thirds) of the second ball of the mint (the edging color) (28), and only a few dozen yards of the second balls of the yellow (17), spring green (16), and powder blue (21).

Some additional thoughts, were I to knit this again:

1. I made this using the pattern as it was originally written, but would probably have caught on faster to the pattern if I’d looked at the updated version before I began. As it was, I needed to draw myself a chart and color it in to help it stick.
2. I carried the yarn up the side and would do it again. By and large, I was happy with how that turned out, and would know for next time that the side border and edging will help even out any inconsistencies in the tension that results from doing so. Loosening those first few stitches as much as I did every other row definitely slowed me down.
3. The border is written for log cabin style, so each one is done separately. This resulted in way more ends than I would have believed possible for the project (and hours of weaving them in). Were I to make it again, I’d at least look into what’s involved with just knitting the border in the round. I assume the concern is having square corners… But I’d be okay with some rounding if it reduced the ends by 3/4.
4. The single reverse crochet stitch edging is nice, but I’m not a crochet person, so it took a ton of time while I tried to figure out how to do a yarn over on a crochet hook and watched various videos of how to execute the stitch properly. I’m not sure the end result is so much more spectacular than a straight single crochet stitch edging would’ve been that it made it worth that effort and the hours of work that ensued, although, again, maybe the corner thing comes into play.

Overall, I’m pleased with the blanket, as were Amani and Marcus when I presented it to them on Monday. I hope Ayinde, who’s now a month old, sleeps well beneath it.

March was a slow reading month, with only three books finished, so I thought I’d get the books reviewed before any more time had elapsed:

The Harlem Charade, by Natasha Tarpley

As Jin is trying to figure out an aspect of the Harlem Renaissance to cover for her Harlem-themed class project, a local kid digs up a painting believed to be by an artist of that time period in a community garden and then an old man is attacked in the same vicinity. Teaming up with her philanthropic, but mysterious, classmate Alex and Elvin, who’s been living on the streets for a few days since his grandfather was attacked (and with help from BFF fashionista Rose), Jin feels she must unravel a mystery that seems to be at the heart of her neighborhood, even as her community is threatened by gentrification in the form of a developer who wants to build a Harlem World theme park in the very blocks where Jin’s grandparents’ bodega now sits.

This had the same feel as Chris Grabenstein’s Mr. Lemoncello’s Library, Jennifer Chambliss Bertman’s The Book Scavenger, and Trenton Lee Stewart’s The Mysterious Benedict Society, as well as older books like The Westing Game and The Egypt Game, but with a historical twist to the urban mystery and considering bigger questions about gentrification, voice, art, and community. If your middle-grade reader enjoys mysteries, I definitely recommend this one.

Pages: 320. Library copy.

The Job, by Janet Evanovich and Lee Goldberg

After master thief Nicolas Fox is framed for some art thefts, his partner and FBI handler Kate O’Hare must help figure out who’s behind them, which leads to the need to take down the world’s biggest drug kingpin. The only problem? No one knows what he looks like after he had major plastic surgery. But Nick knows his favorite brand of rare chocolates, so it’s just a matter of following the trail back to a mystery man and his murderous henchwoman. Oh, and then taking them down, which involves getting the gang of Kate’s retired black-ops dad, actor Boyd, and driver Willie (among others) back together to procure a boat and mock up a sunken treasure. Ridiculous? Certainly! A fun romp? Most definitely!

Pages: 289. Library audiobook copy, borrowed via Overdrive.

Lowriders to the Center of the Earth, by Cathy Camper, with artwork by Raúl Gonzalez III

Lupe Impala (a wolf), Elirio Malaria (a mosquito), and El Chavo Octopus (obviously) must leave their garage in search of their cat, Genie, being held in the center of the earth by the Aztec god Mictlantecuhtli himself. There’s a tricked out ride, a luchador match, a whole lot of animated skeletons, and a run-in with La Llorona, a Latinx ghost mother, who mistakes El Chavo for one of her drowned children. This Cybils-winning graphic novel for middle-graders sprinkles Spanish generously throughout, as well as providing information on folklore, and a little bit of geology for good measure. I could see it being an excellent fit with upper elementary and middle school reluctant readers, the sort of kids at whom the Wimpy Kid books are aimed at. It offers a lot of action and humor, but has some substance to back it up.

Pages: 128. Library copy.

Book stats:
3 books
737 pages
2 print, 1 audiobook
3 library copies, 1 owned
All fiction
Diverse main character(s): 2
Audience: 1 adult, 2 MG

Author stats:
3 women, 1 man (+1 male artist)
Own voices: 2 (including the artist of the graphic novel)
Country of residence: All American