Look! I finished my Smock Madness gusset, so now I just have to knit a foot! Simple! It’s practically a full sock! (Well, maybe not. I wear size 11 shoes, so the foot is just as long as the leg. But still! More than halfway on the second sock!)

I shared with you last night my audiobooks, so tonight I figured I’d show you what I’m reading in print: Virginia Kantra’s Meg & Jo, a modern retelling of Little Women.

In this version, Marmee runs a goat farm in North Carolina. Mr. March is a former army chaplain who now runs support groups for returning soldiers. Meg is a former bank loan manager who now stays home with her toddlers, Daisy and D.J., while her husband John works at a car dealership for the Laurences.

Jo is in New York City, where she’s anonymously writing a food blog and making ends meet with a job as a prep cook in Chef Bhaer’s restaurant after having been downsized from her newspaper job.

But when Marmee gets sick, her two eldest children are going to have to take hard looks at what’s most important to them.

I’m halfway through and really enjoying it so far. All the key scenes are there, but altered, but our heroes remain themselves even though they communicate via text instead of post box in the hedge. But as we all know, the first half of Little Women is the easy part, so I’m steeling myself for a weepy weekend ahead.

Want to see what others are reading and crafting? Head over to As Kat Knits for her weekly Unraveled roundup.

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic at That Artsy Reader Girl invites us to share the top ten book events or festivals we’d love to attend someday.

Who knew back when Jana set this topic that we’d all still be wishing to go anywhere?

Anyway, mine are all real:

1. BookExpo (I used to take part in a virtual version — Armchair BEA.)
2. Hay Festival (I have been to Hay on Wye on a normal day; I can’t begin to imagine it during a festival.)
3. Edinburgh International Book Festival (Scotland is on my list of places to visit, and this event coincides with the Edinburgh Festival and Edinburgh Fringe Festival.)
4. The Fforde Fiesta (The intermittent festival celebrating Jasper Fforde’s works held in Swindon, the real-world home of the fictitious Thursday Next.)
5. Shakespeare in the Park (this seems the easiest one to cross off my list once we’re allowed to gather in groups again)
6. YallFest/YallWest (I partook of YallStayHomeFest this spring and loved it.)
7. International Quidditch World Cup (Because don’t you just wonder…?)
8. Utah Shakespeare Festival (Oregon’s would also be great.)
9. Miami Book Fair (It’s the oldest book festival in the U.S. apparently. Who knew?)
10. The Youth Media Awards (Presented annually at the American Library Association’s Midwinter Meeting, this breakfast is where you hear who’s won the biggest and most prestigious prizes in children’s and young adult literature. I went to several Midwinter meetings, but never managed to get to the YMA breakfast.)

How about you? Are there real-world or fictitious book events you’d like to be able to visit?

The unraveling is mostly only in my reading. In Oona Out of Order by Margarita Montimore, the main character suddenly starts experiencing years of her life in non-chronological fashion. In Livingston Girls by Briana Morgan (thanks, Jenn!), Rose’s new all-girls school turns out to be a little … witchier … than she expected. In Sal and Gabi Break the Universe by Carlos Hernandez, Sal accidentally brings his dead mother back to life for a little while for a festive meal. And in Yes No Maybe So by Becky Albertalli and Aisha Saeed, Jamie and Maya are trying to figure out what their relationship is during the final, frantic days of a crucial local election.

On the sock front, I have turned a heel! Now I just need to pick up the stitches and we can start flying toe-ward! I’m looking forward to taking something off the needles finally!

Head over to As Kat Knits for more of what folks are crafting and reading.

Today’s Top Ten Tuesday topic from That Artsy Reader Girl is top ten books that make me smile:

1. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows
2. Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus
3. Landline by Rainbow Rowell
4. Dumplin’ by Julie Murphy
5. The History of Love by Nicole Krauss
6. Peter Mayle’s A Year in Provence
7. A Man Called Ove by Frederik Backman
8. Jenny Han’s To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before
9. A Snicker of Magic by Natalie Lloyd
10. Nicola Yoon’s The Sun Is Also a Star

I’m a sucker for a happy ending and these ten all deliver in one way or another.

How about you? What books make you smile?

I only finished two books in April:

Stargazing, by Jen Wang

When they hear Moon’s mom is struggling to pay her bills, Christine’s parents offer to let the two of them live in their detached in-law apartment. Moon has a reputation of being violent, so Christine is reluctant to get to know her, but once she does, she finds the girl confident, funny, and fun to be around with a with a free spirit mom unlike her own strict Chinese-American parents. And Moon also has a secret — angelic alien beings visit her sometimes to tell her she’s not really from this planet. When the cause of these visits emerge, will Christine have the strength to be the friend Moon needs her to be?

I was having a really hard time concentrating for the first few weeks of being home. I had lots of books out from the library, and would read a chapter and then put it down. Then I’d read a few pages from another book. This sweet graphic novel, inspired by some real events in the author’s childhood, is the first thing that held my attention long enough for me to actually finish it. After reading this and The Prince and the Dressmaker, I feel confident recommending Jen Wang as a graphic novelist at the top of her game.

Pages: 224. Library copy.

Size 12 Is Not Fat, by Meg Cabot

Heather Wells a former teen pop star, who was dropped after she told her record label (which happened to have been owned by her fiancé’s father) that she wanted to record songs that she wrote. And then she walked in on her fiancé and another woman (also a pop singer). Oh, and her mom ran off with her manager and all her money. So, life could be better. But she’s got a job at an NYC dorm (or, residence hall, as the college insists it be called) as assistant manager, the opportunity to start taking classes if she can hold onto said job for six months, a BFF, a dog, songs that she works on in the quiet of her apartment, and a crush on her fiancé’s brother, who offered to let her live in an apartment in his house in exchange for doing the books for his P.I. business. So things are starting to normalize. That is, until a girl in her dorm plummets to her death while elevator surfing, the current stupid dorm trend. The police suspect an accident, but Heather’s not so sure. The girls in her dorm don’t, as a rule, elevator surf. So she starts asking some questions. But asking questions may not be the safest move for Heather.

I picked the fourth book in this series off the library shelf several years back and thought I’d see how it began. It’s definitely a light mystery and you will not be kept up at night by gristly descriptions. Light was what I needed back in the early days of the pandemic, when it was just starting to get nice enough to want to spend time outside, but the parks had closed. So I’d listen to it for half an hour as I walked round and round and round the traffic circle at the end of my street. It wasn’t a compelling enough story to make me want to keep going so I could find out what happened next, but was enough of a distraction to keep me moving, which was exactly enough. I’d probably read the rest of the series, but would likely switch back to paper to move through the story faster.

Pages: 345. Library audiobook copy via Overdrive.

Monthly Stats

Books: 2
Authors: American. One Asian-American.
Pages: 569

Look! It’s most of a heel flap! I meant to finish it while I was waiting for the laundry just now, but instead I took a nap. I regret nothing.

On the book front, I took a break from Sal and Gabi Break the Universe by Carlos Hernandez last week to devour Nic Stone’s debut middle grade novel, Clean Getaway, and to put a dent into my audiobook, Becky Albertalli and Aisha Saeed’s Yes No Maybe So. But I’m back to the Miami art school and I can now see why breaking the universe is such a problem. No one wants a hole into another dimension in their neighbor’s locker, particularly a rather large one that looks directly into a chicken packing plant. A lot of nasty things can get through that…

Head over to As Kat Knits to see people who take fewer naps and get more done with their crafts and reading.