What we have here are two things at opposite ends: Just before its beginning: the Violet Waffles hat. Just after its conclusion: the middle-grade novel Furthermore, a delightful story about a girl from a magical land who goes on a quest to help find her missing father.

Also being read and knit: Swing Time (still), Grief Is the Thing with Feathers (still), The Boy from Abaton (on audio, still), The Sellout, and the Partridgefield Cowl (still).

Work on my cowl is slow, in part because I haven’t felt like knitting a ton, what with the world ending and all… But I’ve joined a new knitting group, so at the very least, I knit there every week while we listen to chapters or stories from audiobooks.

My print reading is all yellow (which maybe makes me want to cast on something yellow to coordinate…) and widely acclaimed: Max Porter’s Grief Is the Thing with Feathers, a verse novel which embodies the titular emotion as a huge, hulking crow, and Zadie Smith’s Swing Time. My friend Sam gave me White Teeth the year it came out and it’s one of those books that haunts me, as I’ve tried reading it a couple times without success. It’s been years (as in, since before I moved to D.C.) since I picked it up, but if it’s similar to her latest novel, I have a sense of why I kept giving up on it. This novel, or at least the early part in which I currently find myself wading, is written at a distance — of both time and emotion — and doesn’t easily lend itself to my preferred immersive reading experience.

I think this month I’m going to try alternating some of my want-to reads with some of my should-reads, so the sci-fi YA novel I’ve been looking forward to for months, Gemina, will likely be next. (Also planned for this month are Isla and the Happily Ever After and The Sellout.)

P.S. Make sure you stop back tomorrow (later today) for my part in the annual Silent Poetry Reading.

Yarning along with Ginny at Small Things.

Okay, so I admit my plan to be more proactive in sharing my reading is not going so well this month. But let’s see what we can do to get back on track…

During the second week of January, I finished one book:

What Light, by Jay Asher

Just before Thanksgiving every year, Sierra and her family pack up their lives in Oregon, where they own a tree farm, and travel south to her mother’s hometown in California to sell Christmas trees from a lot. She and her parents have worked hard to make sure this transition is as easy as possible — they have dear friends in California with whom they share Thanksgiving; they exchange small gifts in California, but big presents in Oregon; and Sierra keeps up with schoolwork through the internet (and a weekly Skype chat this year with her French teacher) now that she’s a junior.

But this year is different: Sierra has overheard her parents discussing the finances of their retail operation, and they are seriously debating if this should be their last year personally coming to sell trees. Their sales this year will give them the definitive answer.

In part because this might be their last Christmas season together, Sierra and her best California friend decide she should be open to dating someone while she’s there. After all, how long do high school romances last, anyway?

Enter Caleb. He’s cute. He keeps showing up to buy more Christmas trees. He seems funny. But, her friend warns, there’s a lot of gossip about an incident in his past…

Ah, this book… I really wanted to love it; I mean it’s a teen Christmas romance! Right in my wheelhouse. And I like stories about people who grow up in unusual situations — and a tree-farming family that spends five or six weeks a year in a trailer in another state is pretty unusual. But this book just ends up being kind of boring. There’s never really any dramatic tension that pushes the action one way or another. Sierra drives the narrative, but like it’s a mini-van in a suburban neighborhood, never really facing any huge setbacks or challenges: “Nice Girl Living Nice Life Faces Change, but Not Serious Change, and Deals with It.” I’m not saying not to bother reading the book; it’s fine. I’m just maybe saying don’t go into it with any expectations except to pass a few hours (spread out, in my case, over a month) in a not unpleasant way.

Pages: 251. Library copy.

I started my new Partridgefield Cowl this week in preparation for joining a new knitting/bookish group. I haven’t gotten very far, but the yarn, Valley Yarns Peru, is soft, being 84% baby alpaca. As one of my fellow knitters mentioned to me, I have a lot of stitch markers in there right now — every 20 stitches — but since I needed 300 stitches, I thought that prudent. I’ll likely pull at least some of those out as I progress.

Not Your Sidekick, which I started this fall, went back into my bag this week. It’s dystopian fantasy YA, focusing on Jess Tran, the daughter of two superheroes in the area of the North American Collective that used to be Nevada. Finding she doesn’t seem to have superpowers of her own, she takes an internship at a tech company, where, it turns out, her parents’ arch-nemeses, who are missing, have been employed. I’m enjoying it so far, even if it’s started a bit slower than I’d have liked.

Next, I should be reading Zadie Smith’s Swing Time or Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, which are now both overdue, but instead I want to read Gemina, the sequel to 2015’s Illuminae, which I loved. We’ll see how responsible I’m feeling this weekend…

Yarning along with Ginny at Small Things.

Two years ago, I said I was going to do Book Riot’sRead Harderchallenge, which is designed to make you read more broadly. I failed. Last year, I looked at the list, saw a lot of things I didn’t feel like reading, and declared I wasn’t going to bother. This year, though, I’m feeling optimistic — well, at least about completing a large reading challenge.

It helps that a book can count for multiple categories.

Here goes:

1. Read a book about sports.
2. Read a debut novel.
3. Read a book about books.
4. Read a book set in Central or South America, written by a Central or South American author.
5. Read a book by an immigrant or with a central immigration narrative. DONE! The Sun Is Also a Star by Nicola Yoon focuses on a young woman trying to avoid deportation.
6. Read an all-ages comic.
7. Read a book published between 1900 and 1950.
8. Read a travel memoir.
9. Read a book you’ve read before.
10. Read a book that is set within 100 miles of your location. DONE! A Seaside Christmas is set along the banks of the Chesapeake. The town is fictitious, but the area is nearby.
11. Read a book that is set more than 5000 miles from your location.
12. Read a fantasy novel. DONE! The Girl Who Drank the Moon was a delightful middle-grade fantasy story.
13. Read a nonfiction book about technology. (If anyone has any suggestions for this one, I’d appreciate it.)
14. Read a book about war.
15. Read a YA or middle grade novel by an author who identifies as LGBTQ+.
16. Read a book that has been banned or frequently challenged in your country.
17. Read a classic by an author of color.
18. Read a superhero comic with a female lead.
19. Read a book in which a character of color goes on a spiritual journey
20. Read an LGBTQ+ romance novel
21. Read a book published by a micropress.
22. Read a collection of stories by a woman.
23. Read a collection of poetry in translation on a theme other than love.
24. Read a book wherein all point-of-view characters are people of color. DONE! Black Panther, Vol. 1: A Nation under Our Feet is set in a fictional African nation, and all the characters are Black.

If you have any books you’ve loved that fit into these categories, I’m open to tracking them down at the library!

Reading and knitting continues apace. Dear Data is one of the print books I’m reading. It’s thematic postcard-based data visualization — two women agreed on weekly themes of things in their lives to count (beauty projects, compliments, times they looked at their phones) for seven days and then come up with their own unique way to represent that information visually, which they drew on postcards and sent to each other (and then compiled in a book). It’s interesting, but very dense, and I have a hard time focusing on it if I read more than a few weeks’ info in one sitting. I find it a lot like visiting a museum: I read every word until I discover I’m not reading any of them.

I’m currently listening (as in, I put it on pause to write this post) to Tell Me Three Things by Julie Buxbaum, a YA novel I saw on a lot of best-of lists. A teen girl’s widowed father gets remarried to a stranger, moves her across the country, and enrolls her at a new school with her step-brother, who’s also a junior. She starts getting anonymous emails from a guy at school offering to help her navigate the new scene and decides it can’t hurt to accept the offer. I’m only five chapters in, but am thoroughly enjoying it so far. It feels not dissimilar to To All the Boys I Loved Before, if you liked Jenny Han’s book.

I’m hoping to finish a few knitting projects in the upcoming days (I’ve got two three-day weekends coming up), so I’m showing you some of the new yarn my folks gave me for Christmas. It’s going to start becoming the Partridgefield Cowl just as soon as I get a couple things done this weekend. (Sorry for the dark exposure. Cats were occupying my two good photo shot spots and my phone was on low-battery mode, which meant I couldn’t use a flash.) There are five skeins of plum yarn and one red. Mum tells me the pattern looks like it’ll make good tv knitting, which I appreciate, particularly since I’m looking at trying a new knitting group next week.

Yarning along with Ginny at Small Things.