Every Wednesday, Ginny at Small Things hosts a Yarn Along:

Two of my favorite things are knitting and reading, and the evidence of this often shows up in my photographs. I love seeing what other people are knitting and reading as well. So, what are you knitting or crocheting right now? What are you reading?

This is an appalling picture of my current knitting project in low-light, low-battery (and thus flash-less) conditions:

The zigzaggy thing is the start of a shawl. Specifically, Frankie Brown’s Lightning Shawl. The yarn is Crazy Zauberball and is much brighter than this picture would suggest. The needles are US5 straights, although I continue to second-guess the size choice. The project is my Tour de France knit. I started yesterday. The Tour ends in ten days. Yes, I know the odds are stacked against me. However, what this really means is that a new shawl is on the needles because the last one is off them! Stop back on Friday for pictures.

The books I’m currently reading are Gayle Forman’s Just One Day, the story of a recent high school grad on a European tour who randomly decides to visit Paris with a guy she barely knows. It got lots of good reviews over the winter, and I’m taking part in a French-themed blog event (Hey! I’m taking part in a French-themed blog event. I’ll tell you more about it later in the week!) throughout July, so this seemed a good fit.

The other book is The Monstrous Regiment of Women, the second novel in the Mary Russell/Sherlock Holmes mystery series by Laurie King. It’s one of the ten books I hope to read this summer, and one I’m considering taking to the beach this weekend.

What are you reading? And what are on your needles?

The Once upon a Time VII reading challenge concluded last week and I’m pleased to say I exceeded my goals of five books. Here’s the first of the reviews:

The Grimm Legacy by Polly Shulman

From the jacket: “Lonely at her new school, Elizabeth takes a job at the New-York Circulating Material Repository, hoping to make new friends as well as some cash. The repository is no ordinary library. It lends out objects rather than books — everything from tea sets and hockey sticks to Marie Antoinette’s everyday wig. It’s also home to the Grimm Collection, a secret room in the basement. That’s where powerful items straight out of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales are locked away: seven-league boots, a table that produces a feast at the blink of an eye, Snow White’s stepmother’s sinister mirror that talks in riddles and has a will of its own. When the magical objects start to disappear, Elizabeth and her new friends embark on a dangerous quest to catch the thief before they’re accused of the crime themselves — or the thief captures them.”

My take: Elizabeth is lonely. Her mother has been dead for several years. Her father has remarried and has little time to spend with Elizabeth, since he’s working hard to pay for home renovations for her new step-mother and college tuition for her two step-sisters. She’s had to transfer to a new school, where defending an outcast gets her blacklisted, and she’s been forced to drop her beloved dance lessons. So when her history teacher recommends her for a job as a library page, she moves quickly to secure the position — only to find out this isn’t your standard book-lending facility. Instead, it’s a repository of items, where people can borrow items as random as fondue pots or doublets.

Joining the staff of pages (who include Anjali, Aaron, and fellow schoolmate Marc) retrieving objects from the stacks, Elizabeth soon learns that the library also includes a collection of objects that inspired the Grimm fairy tales. And that a giant bird may or may not be stalking those with access.

When Elizabeth encounters suspicious behavior, she will have to decide where her allegiances lie and whether she can be the hero of her own story.

Aside from the irksomely placed hyphen in the repository’s name and some glossing over of inconvenient details in the conclusion, this was a cute middle grade read. The concept of an object lending library (even one without fantastical holdings) is something this city-dweller can get behind wholeheartedly. In addition to the Grimm Collection, the repository is also home to the Wells Bequest, the Gibson Chrestomathy, the Lovecraft Corpus, and the Garden of Seasons, offering plenty of inspiration for additional novels. (The second one is now out and its plot summary suggests they’re companion stories, rather than a straightforward series.) But unlike some initial books, this one will stand alone nicely if you don’t feel like continuing on. The characters aren’t drawn especially deep (although I admit I’d like to know more about Elizabeth’s teacher, Mr. Mauskopf, and his giant dog), but it’s not hugely bothersome. I’d recommend checking this out of the library if you enjoy fairy tales and retellings.

Pages: 325

Today’s Broke and Bookish Top Ten Tuesday topic arrives a few days before the solstice:

Top Ten Books at the Top of My Summer TBR List:

A handful from my 2013 reading list:

1. Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior
2. Jacqueline Winspear’s Messenger of Truth (the 4th Maisie Dobbs novel)
3. Laurie King’s A Monstrous Regiment of Women (the 2nd Mary Russell book)

A few from the home TBR pile:

4. Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury
5. Dr. Radway’s Sarsaparilla Resolvent by Beth Kephart

A couple library loans:

6. Rosencrans Baldwin’s Paris I Love You, But You’re Bringing Me Down
7. Kathy Reichs’ Virals (because my dad has told me repeatedly that I’d like this series)

An old favorite:

8. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone

And a pair yet to be published:

9. The Rathbones by Janice Clark (I have an ARC; publication date is early August)
10. Elizabeth Wein’s new book, Rose under Fire (already out in the U.K, but due in early September here in the U.S.)

How about you? Is summer your time for light reads or when you catch up on those big books you don’t have time for the rest of the year?

The theme of today’s Top Ten Books, hosted as always by The Broke and the Bookish, is travel:

Top Ten Books Featuring Travel In Some Way (road trips, airplanes, travelogues, anything where there is traveling in the book!)

I had a hard time deciding where to draw the line of what constituted travel in a book. Are short, but memorable, trips in a book ok? I decided yes, so my top ten list includes a few of those:

1. Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone and its sequels by J.K. Rowling: The scarlet Hogwarts Express so inspired my imagination that on my first trip to London, I sought out Platform 9 3/4 at Kings’ Cross Station.
2. The Polar Express by Chris Van Allsburg: I first encountered this story when read aloud by my high school French teacher. The train, which takes needy (in one way or another) children to the North Pole on Christmas Eve, is wonderful in any language.
3. Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C.S. Lewis: A London painting of a ship at sea suddenly becomes a ship at sea — in Narnia.
4. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkein: So. much. walking. (Whenever I find people who don’t like this trilogy, it’s almost always because 2/3 of the narrative is filled with endless, hopeless walking.)
5. An Abundance of Katherines by John Green: If Hassan had never convinced Colin to embark on a post-high school graduation road trip, they never would have met Lindsey and he certainly never would have figured out his girl math problem.
6. Swallows & the Amazons by Arthur Ransome: The Walkers and the Blacketts captain their respective vessels around a lake during summer holiday. Their adventures are epic and remarkably free of adult supervision. (Today’s parents could take a lesson.)
7. Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder: Crossing the open territory in a covered wagon (which they then had to dismantle when they got where they decided they were going to Pa and a very pregnant Ma could use its bones to build their house.
8. A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson: A non-fiction account of hiking the Appalachian Trail, filled in with Bryson’s trademark humor about appropriate gear, fellow travelers, and the countryside he’s traversing.
9. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain: I wouldn’t want to float down the Connecticut, the Potomac, or the Anacostia, let alone the mighty Misissippi — and on a raft!
10. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by J.K. Rowling: Rowling hooked me with a magical train, then pulled me in with a car enchanted to have expandable seats and trunk, invisibility, and flight.

Honorable mentions go to John Steinbeck’s fictionalized cross-country memoir Travels with Charley; Madeleine L’Engle’s Austin Family camping excursion, The Moon by Night; and Barbara Kingsolver’s The Bean Trees, because without a road trip Taylor would never have encountered Turtle.

Did I forget any crucial ones?

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Designed by Emily of Emily’s Reading Room

The final genre topic of Armchair BEA is one near and dear to my heart: kidlit and yalit.

Until last fall, I would have told you that I was a young adult aficionado. I like Sarah Dessen, John Green, and plenty of others who are shelved in the teen room at the library. But then I was chosen as a Cybils young adult realistic fiction judge and I was simultaneously inundated with recently published novels aimed at teenagers and by fellow panelists who read books at speeds that put me to shame. And I discovered I don’t love all young adult fiction equally.

I do not love books with depressing endings. In fact, it might be fair to say that an unhappy ending can entirely reverse my opinion of a book. I also don’t love books that feature virulent illnesses or with serial killers in them.

What I do love is books with strong characters who create a sense of family with people who aren’t related to them. I also love books with characters who make interesting choices or who can be described as quirky or offbeat.

And it may be that I like middle-grade fiction, where the stakes are a little lower and where the stress isn’t as ratched up, just as much as young adult fiction. I had previously suspected that middle-grade fiction was all Wimpy Kid books, but it turns out that some of my favorite books — the early Harry Potter, the Little House on the Prairie books, Anne of Green Gables — all fall into the middle grade category.

If you’re looking for a place to start in either category, these are some of my favorites (with linked reviews where I wrote them) from the past three years:

• An Abundance of Katherines by John Green
• Among Others by Jo Walton
• Crunch by Leslie Connor
• Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein
• Dash & Lily’s Book of Dares by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan
• Endangered by Eliot Schrefer
• Frindle by Andrew Clements
• Heat by Mike Lupica
• Maniac Magee by Jerry Spinelli
• Marcelo in the Real World by Francisco X. Stork
• Miss Peregrine’s Home for Unusual Children by Ransom Riggs
• Plain Kate by Erin Bow
• Savvy by Ingrid Law
• Spindle’s End by Robin McKinley
• Stargirl by Jerry Spinelli
• The Storyteller by Antonia Michaelis
• The Wednesday Wars by Gary D. Schmidt
• When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead
• Will Grayson, Will Grayson by John Green and David Levithan
• Wonderstruck by Brian Selznick

And thus far this year my favorites have included Wonder by R.J. Palacio, The One and Only Ivan by Katherine Applegate, Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell, My Life Next Door by Huntley Fitzpatrick, Dodger by Terry Pratchett, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making by Catherynne M. Valente, The Last Dragonslayer by Jasper Fforde, and Tuesdays at the Castle by Jessica Day George.

How about you? What’s been your favorite YA/MG book of recent years?

Designed by Emily of Emily’s Reading Room

Today’s Armchair BEA genre topic is non-fiction. Do we read it? If so, what kinds?

When I first started considering this topic, I was sure my list would be short, but it turns out I am a sucker for a broader swath of non-fiction than I expected.

If you divided up my reading time, only a tiny proportion of it would be devoted to non-fiction. Fiction fills a far larger percentage of my reading life. But if you looked at my shelves you could fill a whole bookshelf with non-fiction. That means, in general, I’m more likely to buy non-fiction than fiction, although I suppose if we took away books I purchased for college or grad school classes that number might shrink back to being more proportional.

Among the books you’d find on my shelves are:

• I like a good reference book. Dictionary, thesaurus, literture desk reference set… I know my use of these books have been cut down by the internet, but it doesn’t matter. I still want a hard copy. If I ever win a lottery, I’m going to buy myself a full-size set of OED. Then I will need to move in order to have enough space to store it.
• Writers manuals. I acquired some of these as a teen and still can’t help picking them up when I see them for sale for cheap.
• Foreign language textbooks. Apparently I really feel I can learn how to speak a foreign language just through reading about verb conjugation. Failed attempts at three languages aside, I still have hopes.
• Women’s studies texts. Also books on minority studies and American studies. I have an unofficial minor and a graduate degree in these topics, so they’re near to my heart. Also, when I first read Women in the Global Factory, I carried the thin book with me from dorm room to dorm room just pelting my friends with horrifying facts about atrocities visited upon women and children all in the name of our getting cheap goods.
• Cookbooks and knitting books. I want to live in the worlds portrayed in their pages. This theory was first posited in the podcast Stash and Burn in regards to particularly nicely styled photos of unremarkable knitted goods. I have expanded it slightly to include cookbooks, since I like to buy them, but I hardly ever cook.
• Identification guides. I love being able to flip through and find the bird I saw on the canal or a tree with unusual leaves.
• Poetry. Why this is considered non-fiction, I don’t know, but it is. And I love it. Mary Oliver. Elizabeth Bishop. Anthologies. All good.
• Shakespeare plays. Again, it feels particularly weird to classify these under non-fiction, but that’s where a library would put them.
• Travelogues. I quite enjoy reading travel narratives, be they about the Appalachian Trail or the Provençal countryside. Guide books are also interesting, but I only really read the ones for places I’m going, with the exception of themed guides, such as Storybook Travels, which offers vacation ideas for places like Chincoteague Island and the Plaza Hotel.
• Memoirs. When I was a kid, I devoured biographies, particularly that series of books that focused on famous people’s childhoods. But these days I more prefer memoir to biography. I have Penny Marshall’s on my iPod now and am looking forward to listening to Tina Fey’s and Mindy Kaling’s, too. Epistolary memoirs, such as The Delicacy and Strength of Lace or 84, Charing Cross Road, are especial favorites.

So that’s about it. Are there any aspects of non-fiction I didn’t touch on? Sure: history and economics and design and science and medicine and self-help and philosophy, to name just a few. None of them really do it for me as a class of books, although there are certainly individual books that fall into those categories that stand out.

How about you? What non-fiction categories are your favorites?

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