With the weather starting to crisp up, I have put socks on hold in lieu of larger, warmer work-in-progress. You may remember this shawl from the Tour de France knit-along, when I last worked on it.

I’m nearly done with panel #2 (of six or seven). What you see peeking over the book is all remains of that section — one zig and one zag. While I had a hard time at the beginning of the second panel with cleanly picking up the stitches at the edge of the first panel to tie them together, it’s gotten easier with time. That part’s still not mindless, but it’s the only part that isn’t. It makes for good tv/line knitting.

The book is Jasper Fforde’s latest, The Song of the Quarkbeast, recently released in the U.S. It’s the second title in his Chronicles of Kazam series. I started it at the beach on Sunday and it’s quite enjoyable so far. (I did consider putting Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone in the picture instead, since it’s my bag book right now and since Harry’s scar ties in well with the Lightning Shawl, but the Fforde book was on the table, so its handiness merited a starring role in today’s blog post.)

(Yarning along with Ginny)

The Broke and the Bookish’s Top Ten Tuesday meme asks this week for the top ten books on our to-be-read list this fall. Since I didn’t do a great job of reading the books on my summer list, you’ll see some familiar titles:

1. Rainbow Rowell’s Fangirl (I loved Eleanor & Park earlier this year and the folks up at the local bookstore inform me they thought this was even better.)
2. Elizabeth Wein’s Rose under Fire (Ditto for Wein’s latest. Her last book, Code Name Verity, which I read for the Cybils, made me bawl. Had I realized that this title wasn’t due out until this late in the month, I wouldn’t have included it on my summer list.)
3. Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior (I picked this up this spring and I started it on a plane flight, but it didn’t fit into the headspace I had available at the time.)
4. A.S. King’s Ask the Passengers (This made its way off my to-read list and onto my request-from-the-library list when author Eliot Schrefer raved about it on Twitter.)
5. Robert Galbraith’s The Cuckoo’s Calling (There were still over 100 people on the hold list at the library the last time I checked, but I’m hopeful that means it should become available later this fall. Mum had good things to say about J.K. Rowling’s foray into detective writing.)
6. Gayle Forman’s Just One Year (The sequel to Just One Day is high on my list of anticipated fall releases.)
7. Bill Bryson’s At Home (This has been on my TBR list so long that I have it a pre-publication ARC of it.)
8. Jacqueline Winspear’s Messenger of Truth (Fall is a good time for reading mysteries and the Maisie Dobbs series is a favorite.)
9. Anne Bronte’s Agnes Grey (I’m thinking November seems like a good month for reading a Bronte, particularly since my copy is included in a complete tome of all their novels — good for reading in one place, rather than on the go.)
10. Homer’s The Odyssey (I bought a pretty copy of it several years back and I’d like to finally dig it out.)

What’s on your list of books to read this fall?

Dead End in Norvelt, by Jack Gantos

From the jacket: “Being grounded has never been so deadly! Melding the entirely true and the wildly fictional, Dead End in Norvelt portrays an incredible two months for a kid named Jack Gantos, whose plans for vacation excitement are shot down when he is ‘grounded for life’ by his feuding parents. But plenty of adventure is coming Jack’s way once his mother loans him out to help a feisty old neighbor with an unusual activity involving the newly dead and the long departed … a motorcycle gang and a man on a trike … as well as twisted promises and possibly murder.”

My take: This middle-grade book was a quick, but enjoyable summer read that I polished off on in a single evening en route to Salt Lake City (accompanied by two cds of music my dad put together highlighting the hits of 1962, the year the book takes place). While the fictionalized Jack Gantos is figuring out who he is and what he wants to over the course of the book, author Jack Gantos is schooling us in the history of Norvelt, Pennsylvania, a town commissioned by the federal government as part of the New Deal. The town consisted of 250 homesteads (sold to families based on an application system) intended to offer subsistence farming to miners who’d been laid off during the Depression. The first lady insisted that each house be outfitted with electricity, interior plumbing, and even laundry facilities, making her the patron saint of the village and inspiring its name.

But 30 years later, when the story is set, Norvelt is hurting. Jobs are scarce. Homes stand abandoned and residents have died off or fled in search of work.

At the outset of the summer Jack Gantos turns 12, he “borrows” the unloaded Japanese rifle his father brought home from the war, pretends to take aim at the enemies on the screen of the drive-in across the valley, and pulls the trigger. When the gun fires, both Jack and his mother are shocked and Jack finds himself grounded for the summer. His only parole? Helping his elderly neighbor, Miss Voelker, whose hands are so arthritic that she needs to soak them in a hot paraffin bath to get any use out of them.

Miss Voelker has retired as town nurse, but remains Norvelt’s medical examiner and obituary writer, jobs she was tasked with by First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt herself at town’s founding. Her recollection for local lore is unparalleled and her ability to tie local lives to world history (in those obituaries) impressive, if somewhat … elastic.

No longer able to type the obituaries herself, she first enlists Jack, who suffers from chronic nosebleeds and timidity, to do them for her, then later asks him to chauffeur her around town to the homes of the recently departed, who seem to be dropping with alarming frequency this year.

Jack, though hesitant, is glad to escape home whenever he can, as his parents seem perpetually angry at each other and at him and at the stresses of living in a down-on-its-luck town that’s fading away (literally: the houses are being towed elsewhere). His best friend, Bunny, daughter of the town mortician, is annoyed with his inability to do things with her (including playing on their already several-players-short baseball team). Summertime when you’re a kid lasts forever after all.

Dead End in Norvelt won the Newbery Medal and the Scott O’Dell Award in 2012, which surprised me, because at first the book seems awfully light for such prestigious honors. But upon reflection, its narrator’s casual style and humor mask exactly how much history is packed between its covers, making it an excellent hook for getting kids interested in American history without making it obvious; rest assured they (and you) will be entertained and effortlessly educated by this book.

Pages: 384 (including appendices)

My energies have been devoted elsewhere recently, which ought to mean that I’ve been getting lots of writing done, but what that really means is that I’ve been watching a lot of tv with nothing in my hands. That’s not usually a good sign, although I’m willing to cut myself a little slack due to the combination of finishing two projects last week and allergies running unabated until today (when we switched allergy medications from what was effective during the spring to what we used last year, allowing us to breathe again without huge bouts of coughing, sneezing, and other cold-mimicking symptoms). Nonetheless, this weekend will see me finish off this sock I was supposed to work on in August:

I have 24 more rows of pattern (two repeats) and then an inch or so of ribbing before it’s time to bind off. While I am perfectly capable of knitting my socks up or down, I really prefer how speedy the post-heel knitting of top-down socks generally are with patterning on at most half the stitches and a decrease in overall quantity at the end. It just feels faster to get the leg out of the way first. This leg feels like it’s been in progress forever.

Once I’m done with this, it’s back to my shawl and my years-on-the-needles Hey Teach! sweater. I’m also going to cast on a new sock project or two. That will be exciting.

Reading has been a bit slow all summer long, much to my disappointment. But I’m meandering my way through Kathy Reichs’ Virals (the first in the series that focuses on the niece of forensic anthropologist Temperence Brennan) and I began the first Harry Potter again this week, with all the hoopla about the arrival of September 1, the day every year when the Hogwarts Express whisked young witches and wizards away for the beginning of term.

Waiting in the wings is Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior and A.S. King’s Ask the Passengers, which made its way off my to-read list and onto my request-from-the-library list when author Eliot Schrefer raved about it on Twitter.

(Yarning along with Ginny)

Designed by Emily of Emily’s Reading Room

Back in June, when I was participating in the Armchair BEA, a number of events and blogs had giveaways associated with them. I am a sucker for a contest, and so I entered some of them. And I won a few of them!

Books have been rolling in for the last six weeks and wanted to pull them all together (a little belatedly) and share the bounty with you:

First, were the prizes from the Armchair BEA folks themselves:

From them, I won Dead End in Norvelt by Jack Gantos (donated by Macmillan Children’s Publishing Group) and ebooks of J.B. Lynn’s The Hitwoman Gets Lucky and The Hitwoman and The Family Jewels (donated by the author).

I also won a couple contests from book bloggers:

From Caribou’s Mom, I won a Beth Kephart prize package. I was allowed to pick any of Beth’s books up to $30 in value, and I greedily chose three of them: Small Damages, Undercover, and Dr. Radway’s Sarsaparilla Resolvent. (How can you not opt for a book with “sarsaparilla” in the title?)

And from Always with a Book, I won Alison Atlee’s The Typewriter Girl.

Thank you to all of the prize donors and book bloggers who generously offered giveaways and picked me. I am truly grateful and am looking forward to reading all these exciting books.

I’m still reading and knitting the same things I was two weeks ago, although I’m further along with all of them.

Here’s my Éclair Shawl:

(Did you know, by the way, that éclair is the French word for lightning and that the pastry is so named because the filling resembles it when piped in?)

I’m working the second panel of six or seven, now. It’s slow going, but isn’t too difficult, except for making sure that I don’t shortchange myself rows.

I’m still reading Just One Day and A Monstrous Regiment of Women, although I’m now 2/3 and 1/3 through them, respectively. I’m enjoying both books, although they share little in common thus far, except maybe a desire for self-determination on the part of the main characters. I’m also listening to Penny Marshall read her memoir, My Mother Was Nuts. The beginning was a little confusing, but became less so when I took my iPod off of its shuffle songs setting. I was having such a hard time understanding why her friend was doing heroin in middle school… When listened to in correct chapter order, the narrative is laugh-out-loud funny, and Marshall’s delivery is done in her trademark deadpan. The book needed a stronger editor (there’s a lot of unnecessary repetition), but so far that’s my only complaint.

Now that I’m not watching hours of Tour coverage every night, I expect my reading will pick back up again.

Check out what others are knitting and reading at Ginny’s blog.