I ripped back my Lightning Shawl to try to fix that bad color shift when I switched yarns. This might be better — or it might be equally as bad. I think I’ll have to knit another couple inches away from it in order to really tell. I’m just so ready to be done with this project. Probably I should have just stopped after the end of the last strip, but I really wanted the shawl to be a little deeper than it was…

Below is the pre-ripping. Essentially, I pulled it back to before that solid golden splotch in the middle and am trying to make the gradient before and the gradient after play nicely. I have some long ends, so I’m wondering if I use it to sort of duplicate stitch over some of the other pre-merge point to help create a better semblance of matching.

Reading-wise, I started Elizabeth Acevedo’s new novel, With the Fire on High, tonight. So far, I’m really enjoying it. (Bridget, it’s set in Philly!) It’s about a senior in high school who lives with her abuela and her two-year-old daughter, Emma, and who loves to experiment in the kitchen.

The audio copy of Jenny Han’s P.S. I Still Love You came back off the holds list for me, so that’s what I’m listening to on my phone. I need to start listening to Daisy Jones and the Six this weekend, though, in order to give the cds back to the library.

Want to see what other folks are reading and crafting? Head to As Kat Knits for the round-up.

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic at That Artsy Reader Girl is one of my favorites: our quarterly reading plan.

So what are ten of the books I’m most looking forward to reading this summer? For the sake of tidiness, I’m only including books I haven’t yet started:

1. Elizabeth Acevedo’s With the Fire on High (It’s overdue, but I will get to it this week…)
2. Daisy Jones and the Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid (I have it out on cd, because that’s considered old-school media and had no waitlist)
3. Red, White, and Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston (First Son and Crown Prince in a romance!)
4. Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking back the English Language by Amanda Montell (I mean, duh…)
5. Jasmine Guillory’s The Proposal (baseball and romance!)
6. Nnedi Okorafor’s Shuri (A graphic novel about my favorite on-screen scientist? And done by a skillful SFF writer? Yes, please!)
7. Hope Rides Again by Andrew Shaffer (This is really the only way I want to experience Joe Biden in contemporary pop culture.)
8. The Bermudez Triangle by Marueen Johnson (Summertime teen romances, picked up yesterday from my local Little Free Library)
9. Amy Stewart’s Girl Waits with Gun (I picked up and then put down the first of the Kopp Sisters novels back the same year it was published, but always meant to circle back to it. It was also in the Little Free Library yesterday, so now the circle requires fewer steps.)
10. Jake and Lily by Jerry Spinelli (About the summer twins turn 11 from the author of Stargirl and Maniac Magee)

How about you? What’s on your summer TBR list?

I am in a knitting funk. I don’t want to finish up old projects, so I thought maybe I’d try carrying around the equipment for something new. But the both skeins of stripey sock yarn remains untouched and the needle remains stitch-free.

I would like to get the lightning shawl finished before this year’s Tour de France, though, so that gives me just over two weeks.

I started reading Sonali Dev’s Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors today while on the metro to the station nearest my library book club. I stopped at the cafe for lunch and some outdoor reading time on my bike ride home and can now say the start is rather slow. Also, Dev notes in her acknowledgements that this is an inspired by, rather than derived from, kind of story. The main characters are Indian-American Tricia, a neurosurgeon, and European-Indian caterer D.J. The start is a little slow, but I’VE heard it gets better, so I shall stick with it.

Head to As Kat Knits to see what others are crafting and reading.

I read five books back in April. Let’s get to them:

A Dangerous Collaboration, by Deanna Raybourn

The fourth book in the Veronica Speedwell series was the weakest so far in my mind. While the Victorian setting was fascinating — a castle on a remote island off the coast of Cornwall with a poison garden on the estate — it felt like scientist and detective Veronica seemed a little off her game. Asked by her partner Stoker’s older brother, Tiberius, to accompany him to the island to collect some rare butterflies for her museum (and under the pretense of his fiancee), Veronica finds herself tasked with solving the mystery of what happened to the bride of the manor who disappeared three years earlier on her wedding day — and who now seems to be haunting the castle. The problem? Everyone present seems to have had a reason to wish her ill — including Tiberius. Will Veronica be able to solve the mystery before she (and Stoker, who follows his brother and the woman we all know he loves) suffers a similar fate?

Of all the gender-bending Sherlock variations I read, Veronica and Stoker come closest to being a true partnership of equal skill and intellect. That aside, though, the reason I read them is because the woman takes the backseat to no one. Does Sherlock need Watson? Absolutely! Is Watson more capable than Sherlock at solving a mystery? Absolutely not! So it rankled a bit that in this mystery the advantage at solving the mystery seemed to favor Stoker. And I get that that may be necessary for overall character development for Stoker to get to take the lead in order for Veronica to truly see him as her equal (and therefore someone she should be willing to enter into a romantic partnership with), but it was irritating that in order for Stoker to get to take the lead in this, Veronica had to be willing to consider the fact that the castle was truly being haunted by a spirit. The author may have cloaked it as scientific open-mindedness, but it felt decidedly out of character for Veronica and led to a disappointing three-star review. Raybourn has announced that the Veronica contract has been extended to include at least another two books, so I’m hopeful they will right the ship. (The next one should focus on Jack the Ripper, since his murder spree was alluded to in this book.)

Pages: 323. Library copy. (more…)

Today’s Top Ten Tuesday topic at That Artsy Reader Girl is one of my semi-annual favorites: looking forward to the books to be published over the next six months. Specifically, what are our most anticipated titles?

1. The Starless Sea by Erin Morganstern: November (I loved The Night Circus (like wrote a fan email the minute I closed the book kind of love) and have been waiting for Morganstern to publish literally anything else since then.
2. Rainbow Rowell’s Pumpkinheads: August (A YA graphic novel set in a pumpkin patch in October. I have been looking forward to this since the day years ago that she announced she and Faith Erin Hicks would be collaborating on it.)
3. The Art of Theft by Sherry Thomas: October (The latest in the Lady Sherlock series, which is one of my all-time favorites.)
4. Wayward Son by Rainbow Rowell: September (A surprise sequel to Carry On, which I should re-read before this comes out.)
5. The Magnolia Sword: A Ballad of Mulan by Sherry Thomas: September (The author of my favorite mystery series takes on the teenaged Woman Warrior of ancient China.)
6. Jasmine Guillory’s The Wedding Party: July (I haven’t read any of her other books yet, but I’m on the waitlist for the audiobook.)
7. Mackenzi Lee’s Loki: Where Mischief Lies: September (Teenage troublemaker? Yes, please!)
8. Summerlings by Lisa Howorth: August (Set in Washington, D.C., in 1959)
9. Hope Rides Again by Andrew Shaffer: July (The second in the Obama-Biden crime-fighting bromance series)
10. The Tea Dragon Festival by Katie O’Neill: September (A prequel to the adorable Tea Dragon Society)

How about you? What new releases are you looking forward to coming out in the latter half of 2019?

While I have carried knitting with me a bunch of places, I’ve done nothing else with it this week. So I’m not going to bother showing you this week’s lack of progress on any of those three (!) projects.

I have, however, been reading.

Here are the four books I’m currently working on in paper:

I mentioned that Rudi found Peter Mayle’s final collection of essays at the book sale on Sunday. I’m loathe to rush through them because, well, he’s dead and no more will be coming. I love his humor and count A Year in Provence as one of my favorite books of all times. (And one I’d been thinking of re-reading in the near future.)

I bought Elizabeth McCracken’s Bowlaway at the start of this spring after Rudi mentioned hearing about a book that featured candlepin bowling in Massachusetts at the outset of the 20th century on NPR while driving home from the ski hill. She was reading locally soon after that and I noted how many people at the event enthused about her style. (I felt bad; I’d never heard of her.) The Tournament of Books is running a summer edition, Camp ToB, with several books I’m actually interested in, so I pulled it out earlier this week, and have proceeded to attempt to read aloud to anyone sitting still in my proximity clever turns of phrases, gems of sentences, and even whole paragraphs. (As an aside, isn’t it interesting how reading aloud, particularly to other adults, is such an intimate act, yet we really don’t value it as such? Here is something that nuzzles my soul, we say; I hope you will find it moving in a similar fashion.)

I started Emergency Contact last week and, to be honest, I’ve found the beginning a little slow to get started, and I would give up on it soon if my friend Jenn didn’t rave about it so. Our two main characters have finally just had their first solo encounter, so I’m hopeful that it’s about to pick up.

Finally, I had a day today and at 7:30 finally headed out into the beautiful evening to read at the cafe for a bit. I needed fun and familiar and pulled the latest Discreet Retrieval Agency novel out of my library bag to keep me company. Lola and Bertha (and dog Cedric) are up in Vermont on a case that’s gone pear-shaped just before Christmas. You may remember that I read the third book in the series, Come Hell or Highball, earlier this spring, and I don’t usually like to binge series. But I requested it from the library and it came in quickly and … well, it was what I needed tonight, so I’m glad it was at hand.

Would you like to see what other people are reading and hear about how they actually work on their knitting, rather than shifting it from one bag to another? Head to As Kat Knits for her weekly roundup.