I’m going to rip out a few dozen rows on my shawl, I’ve decided. It’s been sitting in time-out while I considered my options, wondering if I was being too picky. Eventually I decided to consult Rudi. If he noticed, without much prompting, what the problem was, then back I should go.

And he did.

The problem is right there at the center “v” of the shawl, where it briefly, but rather abruptly, switches to orange. When I was lining up my leftovers, it didn’t seem like such a sharp changeover, but it is in real life. And if I’m going to have spent six years knitting a shawl, I should probably not include the bit I’m unhappy with at its most visible spot, right?

Luckily, I think that if I just rip back and excerpt that little bit of orange that it will fade much more in concert with the rest of the shawl. And hopefully it won’t cause me to run short of yarn. Keep your fingers crossed…

On the reading front, I’m reading Sandhya Menon’s From Twinkle, with Love, a YA romance featuring an Indian-American teen who wants to be a director. The novel is written in journal format, but as letters to famous female directors that Twinkle admires. In audio, I’m listening to one of this spring’s Audiobook Sync titles, Swing, by Kwame Alexander. So far, I’m finding it far more similar to his sports titles, which I loved, than his previous music-related book, Solo. Although to be fair, Swing combines a focus on music with a focus on baseball, so maybe this is the culmination of both. I’m also reading Grace Talusan’s The Body Papers, a memoir about immigration, abuse, and cancer, because I went to school with one of her siblings. I’m early in right now, but appreciate how hard it must have been for her to share her story with the world.

Want to hear more about what people are crafting and reading? Head to As Kat Knits for the roundup.

Today’s Top Ten Tuesday topic at That Artsy Reader Girl asks us to reflect on a decade’s worth of releases and to give our favorite book for each of the past ten years.

I should note that I started out considering the best book from each year, but then I realized it wasn’t the question and had to go back to my first couple to consider whether it was, in fact, my favorite. Here’s where I ended up:

2009: Rebecca Stead’s When You Reach Me
2010: Dash & Lily’s Book of Dares by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan
2011: Erin Morganstern’s The Night Circus
2012: A Man Called Ove by Frederik Backman
2013: Just One Day by Gayle Forman
2014: Landline by Rainbow Rowell
2015: Illuminae by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff
2016: Sherry Thomas’ A Study in Scarlet Women
2017: Word by Word by Kory Stamper
2018: Julie Murphy’s Puddin’
Bonus: 2019: So far I’ve only read two of this year’s publications. The moment’s winner is Jeff Zentner’s Rayne and Delilah’s Midnite Matinee.

It does not escape me that my list is very white, with Sherry Thomas being the only author of color, I believe. As I mentioned, these are merely the books I enjoyed most, not necessarily the books I thought were most important or best written, which would mostly have resulted in vastly different lists that included books by Jason Reynolds, Angie Thomas, Kwame Alexander, Nicola Yoon, Jacqueline Woodson, Grace Lin, and Cristina Henríquez.

Rudi and I stopped by the local library branch yesterday, where I had a few holds waiting for me. It seems like all my red-spined requests came in at once…

We watched Ant-Man this evening. It was cute. I’ve started The Body Papers by Grace Talusan, a memoir written by the sister of someone I knew from college, and am trying to decide which fictional work to begin next. I’m thinking possibly one of the other books that would qualify for Asian-American Pacific Islander Heritage Month, which would be Emergency Contact; From Twinkle, With Love; and Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors.

What have you picked up from the library recently?

I should probably have paid attention when Flickr announced they were going to be down for maintenance, because it didn’t occur to me that they meant for 12 hours. And I just don’t have it in me to upload the photo another way right now, so until Flickr comes back online, assume that this paragraph is a shot consisting of a pot of tea, a biscuit, a half skein of yarn that had not yet been cast on for a second sock, and a book on a table outside. It looked not dissimilar from last week’s shot.

The second of my Smock Madness pair was cast on this evening. It’s nice to think that pair could be finished in a couple weeks.

I had Murder in G Major with me again today, so that’s the book that was included in the picture. Gethsemane has survived a poisoning, performed some tunes in the local bar, and convinced a ghost to write her a concerto, so life is looking up a bit for her. Elsewhere, I’m listening to The Adventures of a Girl Called Bicycle by Christina Uss, which starts off at the newly constructed outpost of the Nearly Silent Monastery (they have a vocabulary of eight words and practice listening) here in Washington, D.C., where a small girl has wandered in with no information about where she came from. And I also started Death Prefers Blondes, a y.a. novel about a rich girl who runs a crew of teen drag queens in performing elaborate heists around the L.A. area.

Want to hear about what other folks are reading and crafting (many of them have photos!)? Head over to As Kat Knits to catch the roundup.

A stab toward getting back on track. Here are the three books I finished back in March:

Geekerella, by Ashley Poston

A retelling of Cinderella, this novel is set in modern South Carolina and features geek girl Elle, a hard-working orphan who blogs lovingly about a cheesy sci-fi tv show from the 1980s (the first to feature a lead by an Asian-American actor), and teen soap heartthrob Darien, who’s just been hired to play the hero in a modern reboot movie. As chapters alternate between the two, we learn that Elle, whose parents met at a Starfield signing line and who went on to found a convention in its honor, is spending the summer working in a vegan food truck called the Magic Pumpkin, much to the shame of her stepmother and two stepsisters. Darien, on the other hand, has just discovered that his manager (also his father, but he’s not allowed to call him Dad) has signed him up to appear at a fan convention after shooting wraps at the end of the summer. He has a hard and fast rule about not appearing at Cons, since his ex-friend betrayed him publicly at one several years ago. Hoping to take his destiny back into his own hands, he finds the Con’s website and texts a phone number he finds associated with it. Guess who’s at the other end of that number… (more…)

We had sun and warmth for the first time in ages this afternoon, so I stopped by Big Bear Cafe on my way back from my library book group to sit and read the book I picked up afterwards.

The book, Alexia Gordon’s Murder in G Major, was recommended to me on Monday when I remarked to the Bout of Books Twitter chat that I was really hankering after cozies with non-white main characters. While I’m grateful that this mystery features a Black woman conductor and musician as its lead, and I like an Irish cottage as a setting, I’m not loving the book so far. I’m hoping it gets more comfortable with itself once it’s not introducing characters anymore.

I’m still listening to P.S. I Still Love You and also have picked Kelly Yang’s middle-grade novel Front Desk, about family of Chinese immigrants who run a hotel run by a not-such-a-nice guy.

I didn’t knit on my Smock Madness socks at all last week, so these look exactly like they did then. I found the pattern and I resumed my toe decreases while at the cafe this afternoon. However, I didn’t have a chibi with me, so the second sock had to wait for another day.

Head over to As Kat Knits if you want to read more posts about books and crafting.