I was hoping Corey would stay asleep on the chair so I could demonstrate that I’d legitimately made progress on my shawl, but my counting woke him up. But this week’s book is the same size as last week’s books, so hopefully you can tell I’ve been working hard even without a 20-pound cat as a constant.

The knitting itself is not difficult, which, of course, means I’ve messed it up a bunch of times. Somehow alternating just two stitches on half the rows is harder than my brain can handle. Also, next time remind me not to wind my single ply yarn into a center-pull ball because holy hell, the knots and yarn barf I’ve had to put up with!

The advantage of actually knitting means I’m also doing a lot of reading. Sometimes it’s listening to an audiobook, which has the advantage of not needing to turn pages, but because of the aforementioned fuck-ups, I sometimes need to chant the stitches when I’m having difficulty paying attention, which then means I need to pause the book because I can’t pay attention to someone reading to me while talking aloud to my brain. Otherwise, I can read a print book, paying attention to the pattern on the right-side rows and reading a couple pages while knitting back on the wrong sides. It’s slow going, but not horrible.

On my phone, I have finished my cycling book, The Adventures of a Girl Called Bicycle, and downloaded the first of Peter Mayle’s Sam Levitt heist series, Vintage Caper, which is about to move from Los Angeles to France. It seems appropriate for Tour de France knitting, although I’m also pretty sure I figured out who perpetrated the crime in the scene in which that character was introduced, so it’s good that I’m looking for setting in this book, rather than solid crime writing.

In print, I’ve started Jasmine Guillory’s The Proposal, a modern Los Angeles romance, in which the meet-cute happens because a writer’s boyfriend proposed to her at a Dodgers game (spelling her name wrong on the Jumbotron) and then, after she turns him down, a doctor and his sister help her escape from the media who want to interview her about it. You know, as it happens all the time. It’s light and frothy and innocuous, which is probably about right, given I can’t reliably wrap my head around two stitches.

I have Tommy Orange’s There There out from the library, so I should probably turn to that next, since there’s bound to be a long holds list for it. But if it doesn’t grab me right away, I might just return it again and resume reading my wintry books, Early Riser and Naughty on Ice, to combat our heat.

Want to see what other folks are reading and crafting? Head over to As Kat Knits for the roundup.

Today’s Top Ten Tuesday topic from That Artsy Reader Girl is “auto-buy authors.” I’m positive I don’t have ten (although I’ll note below which they are), but I certainly have ten whose works must immediately be put on hold at the library:

1. Jasper Fforde (must buy)
2. Rainbow Rowell (must buy)
3. Barbara Kingsolver
4. J.K. Rowling/Robert Galbraith
5. Sherry Thomas (I need to track down her backlist)
6. Brian Selznick (must buy his later works; still have to finish going through his backlist)
7. Toni Morrison
8. Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff (only applies to their works together, since I haven’t read either of their solo catalogues)
9. Becky Albertalli
10. Nicola Yoon

Erin Morganstern has only published The Night Circus, but if her sophomore effort, due out this fall, is anywhere near as good, I’ll be adding her to my must-buy list, too.

Yes, Corey is awake in this picture, although he’d been sleeping shortly before. No, he didn’t go after the yarn. Yes, he is a good kitten and I told him so.

I have made it through the first section of my Tour de France knitalong shawl, which I have nicknamed Forever in Bike Shorts.

There has been some tinking, when I screwed up the pattern stitch and couldn’t figure out how to fix a knit-1-below stitch I’d dropped down to repair. But it was relatively straightforward getting it back on the needles, although I definitely would prefer not to repeat that once there are several hundred stitches on my needles, rather than just several dozen. I should definitely not attempt to knit on this while sleeping.

I did not end up picking either of the yarns I showed you on Sunday, nor the next one I tried the following day. But then, while hunting for something else, I came across this baggie of yarn I had unraveled from a sock-in-progress that had been attacked by a moth several years back. It’s Neighborhood Fibers in Dupont Circle and works really well with the Iris. (It has some purple variegation over the pink, so even when the MadTosh bleeds — the strong smell of vinegar suggests it will — it shouldn’t be a problem.) I’m excited to get to the mosaic section, although I admit that the skein now being in 12 balls ranging from a few yards to 200-300 yards is probably not quite ideal. But I will make it work because I am going to love the hell out of this thing when it’s done.

Much of my knitting thus far has been done not to bike racing on tv, but to the audiobook of Christina Uss’ The Adventures of a Girl Called Bicycle, a middle-grade novel I started listening to in May, then had it expire on me as I was about halfway through. Bicycle grew up in a Nearly Silent Monastery in D.C. and instead of getting on a bus to go to a Friendship Factory the way her guardian intended (because she had a poor record of making friends herself), she took herself off on a cross-country bike ride to meet her cycling hero in San Francisco.

When my hands aren’t occupied, I’m still reading Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors and Red, White, and Royal Blue. I’m about halfway through both. I need to finish the former by this weekend, because otherwise I’ll have to pay the library for returning it so late.

Want to see what other folks are reading and crafting? Head to As Kat Knits to check out her round-up!

Today’s Top Ten Tuesday from That Artsy Reader Girl invites us to invent our own topic relating to book characters. I thought I’d share ten of my favorite found families of literature — the ones who are brought together by fortune or happenstance, rather than blood, à la Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings or Sherlock and Watson (in any of their iterations):

1. A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman: Shared location
2. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Anne Shaffer and Annie Barrows: Shared location/interests
3. Night Circus by Erin Morganstern: Coworkers
4. The Illuminae Files trilogy by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff: Shared nemesis
5. Akata Witch by Nnedi Okorafor: Classmates/Shared abilities
6. Check, Please!: #Hockey, Vol. 1 by Ngozi Ukaza: Teammates
7. Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik: Shared nemesis
8. A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles: Shared location
9. The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman: Shared location
10. Geekerella by Ashley Poston: Coworkers

How about you? Have you enjoyed any books that center around found families?

I didn’t knit at all this week. Mostly, I didn’t even take it with me. But the Tour de France (and its associated knitalong) starts up on Saturday, so I have been doing a lot of mulling over of patterns. A new shawl may be in the works come this time next week! Or, you know, something else entirely.

I did, however, read. And because I read, I took books back to the library and brought home new ones, including Casey McQuiston’s Red, White, and Royal Blue, which I started today in honor of the Fourth of July. It’s about the first female president’s son, who causes an international incident with an heir to the throne in a $75,000 scuffle at a Royal Wedding. I am entranced with both Alex and Henry and if I resurfaced for air after a kiss in the Rose Garden, well, let’s say it was just so I didn’t stay up all night reading straight through.

I’m also reading the Austen-inspired, Indian-American-centric Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors by Sonali Dev and listening to Daisy Jones & The Six, which read by a full cast (including some well-known voices) and which is the book equivalent of a Behind the Scenes special about a 1970s pop star and her band. It’s excellent help at distracting me while pitting a seemingly endless supply of cherries at the kitchen sink.

Head over to As Kat Knits to see what people who’ve actually been crafting this week have been working on.

Today’s Top Ten Tuesday topic at That Artsy Reader Girl asks for ten of our favorite childhood books, which I took to mean books I read up through elementary school:

1. Horton Hears a Who by Dr. Seuss (While I love the message of this book and credit it for being a cornerstone of my beliefs in empathy and using your voice and collective action, I also acknowledge that Seuss has a problematic relationship with race in some of his books.)
2. Be Nice to Spiders by Margaret Bloy Graham (My approach to insects indoors dates to this book. I can vaguely recall a time where I’d screech for my parents to come kill any spider I came across as a little kid, so I’m guessing that may be where this book’s arrival in my life came from. Since reading it, though, I tolerate many types of insects living in the corners of my apartment — there’s a spider in the bathroom as we speak — although I admit it’s an unequal system that’s biased against mosquitoes, wool moths, ants, flies, and cockroaches, in part because of their ability to wreak havoc and in part because of their tendency to show up in spring-break in Florida quantities if allowed to stay.)
3. Richard Scarry’s Please and Thank You Book (Honestly, I have no idea why. I have never given this book as a baby shower gift, although it is still in print.)
4. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis (I have mentioned before that when my town was building a new, modern library, they sent a librarian around to my school to encourage us to get a library card when they opened. She came a couple of times, reading us a chapter of this book at a time. It worked. I got a library card — and copies of the first three books in the series for Christmas.)
5. Amelia Bedelia by Peggy Parrish (Yet another book I was introduced to in school, this time by our second-grade teachers who would pull both classes into one room — this literally meant sharing desk chairs — and read one of the books in this series aloud to us periodically. If you don’t know it, it features a very literal-minded housekeeper and her upper-crust employers who are prone to ask her to draw the drapes or dress the chicken while they’re out only to return to artwork or their dinner still raw but suited up. This is a silly children’s series for people who love the power of words.)
6. The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett (My maternal grandmother took this out of the library to preview whether it was suitable for me and I found it and started reading it. She quickly returned it to the library, so she could buy me a copy for my birthday, and took out A Little Princess instead in an attempt to derail my interest, but I was hooked and grabbed my library’s copy to finish it. Not to worry, I’ve read this copy many times since then.
7. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (Also, Eight Cousins. I read both dozens of times. None of the other four books in the Alcott collection I have (one of my favorite gifts ever from my paternal grandparents) come anywhere close. Maybe it’s time for a reread.)
8. Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery (This is the book that made me a book buyer. I received this copy as a gift for Christmas. (We got book plates that same year and I clearly recognized how nice a book this was, because I convinced my brother to trade me one of his color bookplates for one of my black-and-sepia ones just to use in it.) But I bought the rest of the series, and some of her other titles one at a time at Walden Books in the mall.)
9. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle (I loved Meg and Calvin and Charles Wallace and Mrs Who, Mrs Which, and Mrs Whatsit. And then I loved Vicky and Poly and Canon Tallis.)
10. Nancy Drew and the Secret of the Old Clock by Carolyn Keene (This is the first of the Nancy Drew books and while it’s probably not my favorite (I preferred the George and Bess books, rather than the Helen ones), it’s the one that made me a mystery reader. I think my mother gave me the first five books for Christmas one year (the 1960s edits, rather than the 1930s originals) and then I took off from there. I read them quickly and then tore through every copy I could get my hands on from our library. I even read some of contemporary The Nancy Drew Files series that came out when I was in middle school.)
11. Trixie Belden and the Secret of the Mansion by Julie Campbell (I’m guessing this was another gift from my folks, because I owned a bunch of them, and I don’t know that I would have bought any of them myself without having read the first one, and this wasn’t a series my library carried. While I liked Nancy Drew, I related to Trixie, who had siblings, chores, and a more realistic life.)

Oops. I ended up with 11, but with a lifetime of book love, that seems a reasonable number