I did a little shopping today.

The yarn was a splurge when I decided that since the bank has closed earlier than I’d expected it to (and I couldn’t get a roll of quarters to do laundry), I could stop by the yarn shop across the street. They’d recently gotten in a nice assortment of self-striping Havirland Pax Sock. The colorway is The Final Girls (all the Halloween-themed colors seemed to be named after horror films).

The books and cd are all second-hand via the used book sale from my local branch’s Friends of the Library. As a bonus, some of the books were free because I joined the Friends. Most of them I wouldn’t necessarily have bought if they’d been new, but I’ve been on the holds list for The Wedding Date and would have borrowed Christmas Bells toward the holiday. And if I don’t like them, I can donate them back to the library and some other schmuck can buy them next time.

Happy Saturday to me!

Today’s Top Ten Tuesday topic from That Artsy Reader Girl invites us to consider the snacks we like to consume while reading.

Mine include:

1. Peanut butter or plain M&Ms
2. Oreos
3. Ritz with peanut butter or cream cheese (the latter I spread with a knife, while the former tends to be just dipped in the jar)
4. Granola (eaten out of the bag)
5. Blueberries
6. Apples
7. Tortilla chips
8. Chocolate chips
9. Triscuits
10. Honey Bunches of Oats (usually eaten out of the box)

How about you? Do you tend to munch on anything particular while reading?

It was a lovely afternoon yesterday and so Rudi and I spent the latter portion of it outside, hanging out at the popsicle shop. I’m at the final couple rows of my shawl, so I was able to knit and read at the same time.

Today’s Top Ten Tuesday topic at That Artsy Reader Girl invites us to share ten books on our TBR lists/piles we’re avoiding reading and why:

I finished Early Riser last week, six months after starting it, so that is NOT a book I’m avoiding. However, there are plenty more:

1. There There by Tommy Orange: I started it. It’s about mass shootings. It was too much. Yes, I feel guilty, so I haven’t returned it yet. But I will.
2. Pumpkinheads by Rainbow Rowell and Faith Erin Hicks: It’s about fall and I want to wait until the season kicks in.
3. Hope Rides Again by Andrew Shaffer: Biden is running for president now and his real-life presence in my life disallows my feeling nostalgia for him. That got in the way of my caring enough to keep reading so I could determine if the author was trying too hard and had turned a fun romp into a pulp potboiler. I did return this one to the library.
4. The Body Papers by Grace Talusan: Written by the sister of someone I went to college with, I felt like I should read this memoir, but it’s about incest and again, I just didn’t feel up to it. I feel horrible about it and will likely give it another go.
5. My Twenty-Five Years in Provence by Peter Mayle: He’s dead and there will be no more books by my favorite Provençal transplant.
6. Daughter of the Siren Queen by Tricia Levenseller: I just finished another book about the daughter of a pirate king and it felt too soon to read another.
7. The Summer before the War by Helen Simonson: There’s a war coming at the end of the book.
8. Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman: Karen read it and suggested the recent adaptation is too close to the text to read it so soon after watching the series.
9. Me Before You by Jojo Moyes: I know how it ends.
10. Casual Vacancy by J.K. Rowling: I love everything of hers I’ve read, but I’ve heard this books is a downer. I don’t want to not love it.

How about you? Are there books you want to read, but just not right now?

I’m narrowing in on the end of the shawl. I have four more rows of mosaic work and eight rows of garter stitch before the bind-off. There are four rows of the purple — two colorwork and two plain — and while I think it may be tight, I’m hoping it’ll be okay. I have more of the pink (although how much of it has been munched on by moths and needs to be spit-spliced remains to be seen. Either way, I think that my fallback goal of having it off the needles by the start of next week is doable, although I may not have it blocked until the following weekend.

My reading currently centers around mid-1980s library fires, although wholly unintentionally. The Library Book is a nonfiction recounting of the fire that destroyed the Los Angeles Public Library’s main branch. Orlean has a very lyrical way of storytelling, so so far I’m enjoying the book. (If you didn’t know there was a massive fire at a major city library in the U.S. 30 years ago, that’s because it was the same day as the Chernobyl disaster.)

A Covert Affair is a contemporary romantic espionage novel about a librarian-cum-spy who gets involved when an ambassador and some priceless books go missing from the Library of Congress. The kidnappers make demands that relate to Operation Blue Star in India. I was woefully uninformed about this real-life event, in which a radical Sikh started espousing separatist views, the Indian government retaliated by attacking the most holy Sikh site where he was holed up, and in the aftermath the Sikh Reference Library was set ablaze. The only question that remains (in real life and in the novel) is whether the holy texts contained therein were incinerated or whether agents of the Indian government removed them first. Should you also not be familiar with Operation Blue Star, you most certainly heard of the action that resulted from it — the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.

Head to As Kat Knits for the roundup of who’s knitting and reading what.

Today’s Top Ten Tuesday topic from That Artsy Reader Girl asks us to share books we loved that were outside our comfort zone:

1. The Book of Unknown Americans by Cristina Henríquez: I mostly don’t love multi-POV novels, so it was a huge surprise that this ended up being the best book I read in 2014.
2. Maus 1: A Survivor’s Tale by Art Spiegelman: This was the first graphic novel I ever read, back in college when Spiegelman was coming to speak. I don’t love WWII stories and I hadn’t read a book where pictures were equally important to the story in ages.
3. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald: Spoiler alert: I don’t love tragic novels. But this one was so well-crafted that I couldn’t help but be impressed when I read it in grad school.
4. All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr: Sometimes I get swayed by all the positive reviews I see of a book, but when it isn’t for me, I quit reading. Again, WWII and multiple POVs, but in this case the short chapters and change in narrators gave me places to breathe and put the book down when things got too intense to keep reading.
5. Exit West by Mohsin Hamid: More war. But the lyrical prose and the distance between the reader and the main characters combined with the magical realism of doors that transcend space made this a must-read story about refugees.
6. The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender: When I first reviewed this book, I stated quite plainly that while I could see its appeal, I didn’t like it because I don’t like books that end in a depressing way. But when it came time to round up the best books I read in 2010, I found that it had stuck with me in a visceral way that other books hadn’t.
7. The entire Cormoran Strike series by Robert Galbraith: I like mysteries and detective novels, but only when they aren’t especially dark and tense. However, I also don’t like them when they’re stupid and obvious, and there’s a narrow path to walk between those two things. The more literary novels tend toward thrillers and the less uncomfortable ones tend to give the story away in the first chapter. When I’m trying to give people examples of where the line is I point them to the Cormoran Strike novels, which fall at the very extreme end of how dark a novel I can get through.
8. A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness: I’m pretty sure I just bawled through this entire novel, which is not how I like to enjoy my reading.
9. What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours by Helen Oyeyemi: I do not like short stories, but these were so well-executed and mostly much less dreary than most collections.
10. The Book Thief by Marcus Zuzak: While waiting unsuccessfully in line for the last panel of the day at Book Fest on Saturday, I struck up a conversation with a young woman holding a copy of this novel. I shared that I’d been put off by Death as a narrator so much that it took me forever to read it. (I took it out of the library back when it came out and then racked up library fines for six months before returning it and a large donation to the library and buying my own copy. This underlines why I appreciate D.C.’s altering their fine system because this is not the only book where this has occurred.)

How about you? Have you loved certain books in spite of their not being your usual reading fare?