We’re getting closer to being caught up on book reviews. In April I read four books:

#Notyourprincess: Voices of Native American Women, by Lisa Charleyboy

This collection of poetry, artwork, quotes, and short prose comes from women of some of the Native American tribes of Canada and the United States. It offers a broad perspective on what it means to live at the intersection of female and indigenous at this moment in time and includes pieces from students, tribal leaders, scholars, artists, and professionals, demonstrating that no single voice can speak for everyone’s lived experiences.

Pages: 109. Library copy.

Obsidio, by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff

I can’t tell you how sad I am that The Illuminae Files trilogy is done. This was the first series in a while that I’ve found so compelling, with its innovative use of text and graphics in its doorstopper-size volumes. Set in space in the future, the first book is told as a dossier assembled for a corporate executive whose company invaded a distant planet that was running an illegal mining operation and the steps they took to cover their tracks. The second and third books continue to share information through ephemera, but instead of a single file, it’s presented as evidence in a court case, sharing the back story of why the company is on trial. Obsidio builds on the two earlier books, bringing us back to the teen protagonists we’ve all come to love — teen computer genius Kady, flight commander Ezra, strategist Hanna, criminal Nik, and hacker Ella — and introducing us to new ones — nurse Asha and soldier Rhys. And AIDAN, the copy of the copy of the once murderous AI who has saved everyone time and time again, is back, too, but with new, troubling analysis of the situation on the space ship. How long will Kady be able to keep him focused on their survival? And will Beitech, the company that sparked this intergalactic escapade, ever be brought to justice?

You’ll come for the space adventure, but stay for the kissing.

Pages: 615. Library copy.

Strange the Dreamer, by Laini Taylor

Lazlo Strange is an unusual orphan turned (briefly) monk turned librarian turned (eventually) adventurer, joining an assemblage of people from across the land to reclaim a city (it used to have a name that was stolen from everyone’s memories and thenceforth became known as Weep). The town has been made to suffer since gods parked their monstrous home (a ginormous floating rock with a palace on top of it) overhead, and the residents are looking to move it by any means necessary. Unfortunately, they weren’t aware the palace was still occupied by a handful of teen demigods, one of whom in particular, who vividly remembers and is scarred by an event that happened in their childhood, is NOT excited by the prospect of being evicted. Will Lazlo be able to build a bridge between the two communities?

The first of duology, this book was a weird reading experience for me. I didn’t find it particularly compelling when I was in the process of reading it, but when I wasn’t reading it, I routinely found my thoughts straying to would happen next and how the characters were doing. I’m guessing this means I didn’t love Taylor’s writing style (I didn’t particularly like Daughter of Smoke & Bone back when I read it either), but that I did love her characterization. Despite that, I look forward to seeing how the story is resolved this fall.

Pages: 544. Library copy.

Sing, Unburied, Sing, by Jesmyn Ward

Jojo, who turns 13 in the first chapter of this book, and his little sister live with their maternal grandparents and, sometimes, their mother, Leonie, who has a drug problem. Jojo is trying to learn how to be a black man, emulating his beloved grandfather, while his white father is in jail — the same jail (Mississippi’s State Penitentiary, Parchman) where his grandfather was wrongfully imprisoned when he himself was a teenager. When they learn his father is about to be released, Leonie packs the two kids and a friend into the car and drives to pick him up, but they also pick up a ghost that’s been lingering around the prison grounds and takes him back to her parents’ house, as well.

The book starts off violently — they’re slaughtering a farm animal for food — and violence is never far away from the story, which seems to be a theme across Ward’s books. Whether it’s the tempestuous relationship between Leonie and Jojo’s father, the uncontrolled rage of a drug dealer’s son, the senseless death of Leonie’s brother back when they were young, the all-too-familiar reaction of a white police officer to a black family, his paternal grandfather’s racist reaction to their visit, or the untold ending to his maternal grandfather’s prison tenure, violence surrounds Jojo and his family. It is as inescapable as and intertwined with the ghosts that haunt them.

I wanted to like the book, which won the National Book Award last year and that seemed to draw some inspiration from Toni Morrison’s Beloved, more than I did. I hadn’t been thrilled with it all along, but the final pages felt rushed and like Ward took the let down of an easy way out that should have been better developed throughout a complex, layered novel.

Pages: 285. Library copy.

Total Pages: 1553

As you can see here, my Tour de France shawl is not done, even though the bike race is. Alas. It is now the length of the hypotenuse of this table, which is on the local coffee shop patio, where I went after volleyball this evening, because it was too nice to come inside.

I will not be knitting on this exclusively anymore, since my Augusts are supposed to be dedicated to finishing up socks that have been lingering on my needles. I have two pairs in particular that I’d like to see finished — my Azalea socks (which I think are a single toe away from being done) and my Posey socks. I think both are doable, plus possibly another pair or two. We’ll see.

My reading du jour is Andrew Shaffer’s Hope Never Dies, the Obama-Biden mystery that recently came out. Since the two of them were spotted at one of my favorite D.C. bakeries earlier this week, it seemed only fitting to start reading it immediately upon getting home from the library. It is an enjoyable potboiler, but no great work of literature. (I’m not clear on whether Shaffer himself has never met a metaphor he doesn’t want to use or whether he thinks that’s the case for Joe Biden, who narrates the story.) But unless something changes in the final hundred pages, I’d totally read a series based on these two.

I’m also still reading Audacity Jones to the Rescue, which is now taking place in D.C. in 1910 and making good use of local landmarks of the time, and The Wild Book. The Pink Carnation lingered about halfway done on my reading pile for a year, but I made some more progress when I took it with me to San Francisco.

I also made progress in American Street, which expired (again) from Overdrive before I could finish it. It looked like I was only a few chapters away from the end, but it doesn’t narratively feel close to being done, so who knows? Murder Games expires in three days, so I guess I’d better return to that one before the same thing happens there.

If you’d like to see what other people are reading or knitting, head over to As Kat Knits for the link-up.

I’ll show you some photos of my time in San Francisco tomorrow, when I’m a little more awake. But tonight I thought I’d share what I splurged and brought home from the course of my vacation day, when I stopped at two indie bookshops and two local record stores:

First the music: I bought two used cds (I still prefer cds): Holly Near’s and still we sing, a two-disc set, and Woody Guthrie at 100! Live at the Kennedy Center, a cd/dvd tribute concert. It includes performances from a variety of luminaries including Jackson Browne, Rosanne Cash, Donovan, Judy Collins, and Sweet Honey in the Rock.

The books include a signed copy of Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark; a collection of poems & short prose pieces about San Francisco gentrification by Tony Robles, Cool Don’t Live Here No More; and two novels in translation, Takashi Hiraide’s The Guest Cat and Juan Villoro’s middle-grade The Wild Book, about a boy who turns out to be a magical reader (which I already started on the flight home).

Oh, and one more thing — I bought a tote bag to hold all my purchases with the cool cat as record player design.

I didn’t mean to buy quite so much, but I decided music and books were a good splurge.

The final Unraveled Wednesday of the month finds me without having made much progress since last week on my Tour de France shawl, although I think the color changes (from pink and violet to salmon and a more reddish-violet) are more obvious now. I do have a lot of airplane knitting between now and Sunday when the cyclists reach Paris, but I am also really good at airplane sleeping, which seems a likely scenario, particularly since one of those flights is a red eye.

I started Audacity Jones to the Rescue on the metro this morning. She’s a plucky orphan whose philosophy is, “Everything will turn out splendid in the end. If it’s not splendid, it’s not the end,” which seems as good a life philosophy as any to me.

Apologies for the short post, but I have a plane to catch tomorrow and haven’t started packing…

Visit As Kat Knits if you’d like to see more knitting and reading posts.

I didn’t particularly feel like writing about this week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic, so I decided instead to tell you ten books I currently have checked out from the library and why I borrowed them. (I am a big library borrower. I have 16 print books out from the library, as well as five audio books checked out via Overdrive.)

1. Murder Games by James Patterson and Howard Roughan, because Instinct is one of the few tv shows we watch that was renewed for the coming year and I’m always interested in literary inspirations for tv adaptations.
2. The Epic Fail of Arturo Zamora by Pablo Cartaya: It was a Cybils Award finalist in the middle grade category this year, which is probably the category I like the best; a 2018 Pura Belpré Author Honor Book; and an Earphones Award winner from AudioFile.
3. Where the Mountain Meets the Moon by Grace Lin: Eight years ago a list of 100 best kids books came out from the School Library Journal and I decided to finish reading all the titles on it that I had never gotten to. Recently I realized I’d never finished that laudable goal, but that it was accomplishable over the next summer or two. This is one of the books from the list. (Plus, I loved her When the Sea Turned to Silver.)
4. The Thief by Meghan Whalen Turner: This is another one off that list.
5. The Wolves of Willoughby Chase by Joan Aiken: And another one.
6. Refugee by Alan Gratz: This was the Cybils winner in the middle grades category this year and is particularly relevant to the moment, but starting it just feels like work, which is why I haven’t started it.
7. The Room by Jonas Karlsson: I really liked his book The Invoice several years ago, so when I needed a couple books by foreign authors set in foreign places for my summer book bingo sheet, I decided to see if he’d written anything else my library had in stock.
8. The Problim Children by Natalie Lloyd: The last time I was at the bookstore, I saw Lloyd had a new book out. I loved A Snicker of Magic and liked The Key to Extraordinary, so decided to check this one out and see if it was one that I could like and move on from or if it was one I needed to own.
9. Ivy Aberdeen’s Letter to the World by Ahsley Herring Blake: Another book I saw the last time I was at the bookstore, this one had a striking cover and was on their recommended reads table.
10. The Refugees by Viet Thanh Ngyuen: This was the 2018 D.C. Reads title. I’ve had it out for months. I read the first story, it made me cry, and I was loathe to pick it back up again. Plus, it’s short stories, which I don’t especially love. I’m just having a hard time taking it back even though I don’t want to read it anymore because I think I should read it. I hate doing things I should.

How about you? What do you have checked out from the library at the moment and what made you pick it?

My Tour de France knitting continues apace. There has finally been some color shifting to salmon and a different hue of purple, which is exciting, and the shawl is now longer than my arm, which gives me hope it might someday be long enough to wear. I will need to pick up my pace, since we’re halfway through the Tour and I am not halfway through the knitting. I do have many hours of plane flight coming up next week, though, so it’s a possibility I’ll get caught up.

I’m reading and loving Julie Murphy’s Puddin’, the follow-up to her bestselling book (and soon-to-be feature film), Dumplin’, about two Texas girls who become friends. When I finish it, I’ll be heading back to Moxie, about a Texas girl who rallies other Texas girls to become feminists through her anonymous, Riot Grrrl-inspired zine. As I said to my book group today, apparently I’m all in for kick-ass Texas teen girl novels this summer.

I’ve been listening to a variety of things, but what’s stuck most is Murder Games, the book by James Patterson and Howard Roughan that inspired the tv show Instinct. I always find it interesting in tv shows/films that evolve from books what gratuitous things they choose to change. Here, for instance, one main character’s tv husband has a different name (Andy instead of Tracy) and aspiring career (bar owner instead of actor) and the other main character goes by the nickname (Lizzie) that she hates. The chapters are ridiculously short (which is probably partially what makes Patterson such a page-turner) and I remember from the tv pilot who the bad guy is going to be, even if that character has not yet been introduced in the book. (I suppose it’s a possibility that they changed that, too.) I am also listening to Being Jazz: My Life as a (Transgender) Teen by Jazz Jennings, an #ownvoices memoir which was one of the free Audiobook Sync titles from this year. It’s fine so far, but nothing especially amazing.

You can visit As Kat Knits for additional book and knitting pairings.