I’m still working on the books I showed you in my last update, although I listened to a whole audiobook on this weekend’s road trip and started a new one, Zac and Mia, in an effort to finish one more of last year’s AudiobookSYNC books before this summer’s downloads begin today. Tonight I’ve read some more of Word by Word and The Girl from Everywhere. The former is due back soon to the library (where holds prevent me from renewing it) and the latter is the furthest along I am in any of the current selection of books, making it the best contender for returning to the library this weekend. The Hate U Give will also be due back to the library soon, with a long list of people waiting for it, so I’ll need to get moving on that one this weekend.

On the knitting front, I’m down to the ribbing before the bind off on my cowl and I’m looking forward to completing that imminently. A friend is coming to town for her baby shower at the end of May and I’d like to have some knit things to hand off to her. One will be a hat that she started many years ago and then left with me when she moved away. Her notes don’t match the pattern she gave me, so I’ll need to figure out what was going on in order to preserve her start — it seems like a nice thing to give the baby his mother’s knitting, right? And from me I’m hoping to resurrect/restart a blanket I began for a baby who’s now finishing kindergarten. (So many of my infant projects go that way. I have sleeves for a baby sweater for a different kindergartener…)

However, I do have some finished knitting to show off:

This is the Violet Waffles Hat I owed Dad from Christmas this year. I bought skeins of yarn at A Great Yarn in Chatham, Mass., last summer on our family vacation with the intention of making gifts for Mum and Dad to commemorate our family trip. This is HauteknitYarn’s Superwash Merino in worsted weight in Chatham Yarn’s The Finest Hours colorway (the name references a book (and later film) about the 1952 rescue of the capsized SS Pendleton by the town’s Coast Guard). The yarn has a very nice hand. It’s very soft and squishy and played nicely with both wooden and metal needles. (Should Dad he decides he hates it, I’m totally taking it back and wearing it myself after adding a pom pom to it.)

I made a longer ribbing section so the bottom could be folded up for more warmth in the winter. I went up a needle size from what was recommended on the body of the hat because I had size 7s available and they seemed to work.

I finished the hat in the wee smalls before driving north and, thus, forgot to take a photo of it. I also nearly forgot to take one of Dad wearing it, so Mum literally popped it on his head as I was making lunch just before heading back home. Dad’s bemused look shows just how much he loves his daughter and her quirky need to document her knitting.

You can find more books and knitting at AsKatKnits’ Unraveled Wednesday.

I was fortunate enough to be able to participate in Bex‘s Ninja Book Swap once again this spring and got a great package at the start of April.

The box was bulging and after I pulled off the tape, a fun pillow sprang into my arms. This is what I found beneath it:

My swap partner sent me a ton of stuff, each carefully and decoratively wrapped. The cats really enjoyed getting to take part in the unwrapping as little balls of tissue paper were batted all over the apartment.

Eventually, though, nearly all was revealed:

In addition to the pillow, there were two books off my to-be-read list, Radio Girls and The Brontës Go to Woolworths, both of which are historical fiction I’m really looking forward to! There were notepads galore, several of which have already been put to good use and have been tucked into my various bags, colorful pens, literary buttons, and chocolate.

And there were three new nail polishes, because in the Twitter chat, someone had remarked you should remember your partner’s list when you go shopping or else you’ll only recall they like nail polish and then you’ll have to send them a package with just that. And I replied that that sounded like a very fun package!

The stickers were mine, but as you can see, they work really well with the other three! (Yes, it’s starting to chip, but it’s 10 days out from when I painted them, so, actually, it lasted a really long time undinged!)

This package was great, but one mystery remains: the identity of my swap partner! Usually a card or something contains a little note, but all I have are the return address details from the box. I had held off posting this, hoping my query on Twitter would reach my partner and she would reveal herself, but so far no further information has been forthcoming. I didn’t want to wait any longer in case she wasn’t on Twitter and was worried I either hadn’t received the box or wasn’t over the moon about its contents. Therefore, I’m hoping Em from California is reading today and can see how grateful I am for all the goodies she sent!

As usual, I’ve got several books going at once:

As noted the last time, I’m reading Kory Stamper’s Word by Word. She’s an editor for Merriam-Webster, which I now know is located only half an hour from my folks. If you love language, I’d recommend this book about how and by whom a dictionary gets made.

The Girl from Everywhere by Heidi Heilig is about a teen girl aboard a time-traveling (sailing) ship. She was born in Hawaii in the 1860s to a father born in New York City in the 1950s. Her mother died in childbirth, and now her father is looking to go back and save her. You’ve seen Back to the Future. How does this end?

Sleeping Giants by Sylvain Neuvel was the the book I picked up at my office’s new give-a-book, take-a-book shelves. (Confession: I did not give a book, but I did reorganize the shelf area to make it more browser-friendly, so I’m not going to feel too guilty.) I’d been reading this during lunch breaks when I take them, but was feeling that horrible sinking feeling at the end of each chapter when it was time to put it down and go back to work. So I brought it home to spend larger chunks of time with it. It’s a science fiction novel written in an epistolary format with interview transcripts, news articles, and journals telling us the story. It opens with a young girl falling into a hole in the woods and landing in what turns out to be a gigantic hand. She will grow up to become a physicist investigating the hand and other body parts unearthed. Thus far the team includes the scientist, two military pilots, a teenage linguist, and a shadowy mystery man pulling the strings.

I’m tired, so I decided not to pull out the knitting I just put away just for the photo. Trust me that I’m nearly done with the cowl and with another project, which is good, since a pregnant friend will be in town at the end of next month for the final time before having her first child, so I should get on the ball with her gift.

Joining Kat for Unraveled Wednesday.

Today would have been my maternal grandfather’s 98th 99th birthday. (Mum has informed me that I’d made Grampa a year younger. I assured her that he would have appreciated it and would have asked me to shave off another 30 years.) He liked to play golf and pool, sleep in (after he retired from being a mechanic), eat my grandmother’s baking, mix beets and mac and cheese (so the latter turned pink), watch sports (but not basketball) on tv, and build things (including beautiful dollhouses and delicate furniture to fill them, desks, cabinets, and stools). He was opinionated (but held those opinions close to the chest when he ran his own business) and kind and curious and proud and getting deaf in his old age (Saturday lunches were loud!), and I’m surprised (but shouldn’t have been) by how much I still miss him, even after 18 years.

I’d hoped to have this cowl off the needles last weekend, but did relatively little sitting around, so it’s still on the go. I’m about to add the final set of red stripes, so potentially it’ll be done this weekend. I did finish off two books (a verse novel in honor of National Poetry Month and a gender-bending retelling of Sherlock Holmes), and while I still have several others in progress, Word by Word from Kory Stamper, is probably the next title I’ll add. She’s one of the people involved in the website and social media of Merriam-Webster. If you aren’t following this dictionary on Twitter, you’re missing out. They share trending look-ups (and what’s caused that trend) and vocabulary of the day (sometimes in direct response to what’s happening in current events) and are generally snarky and fun and smart — everything you’d look for in an online friend/entity. So, obviously I’m looking forward to spending a book’s worth of time with one of the people behind that.

Ginny has hung up her Yarn Along hat, but Kat has offered a home to those of us who like to knit and read at her blog with her weekly Unraveled Wednesday post.

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic from The Broke and the Bookish asks what’s on my spring to be read list. Some of these are in my possession, some are on my holds list, a couple fall into the fantasy category for what I hope will once again be the Once Upon a Time reading challenge, and a few are still to be published:

1. The Hate U Give, by Angie Thomas, just came out last week and is one of this spring’s buzziest books.
2. Susan Dennard’s Truthwitch, which I bought last year at an author event. The second book in the series has since come out and someone from my online book group was telling me how much she’d enjoyed both.
3. Becky Albertalli’s The Upside of Unrequited comes out next month. I, along with everyone else, absolutely loved her debut, and I’ve heard good early buzz from advance readers.
4. Kids of Appetite, by David Arnold, has a recommendation from fellow book-lover Anne to bump it up my list. Also, my parents really liked his first book, Mosquitoland.
5. The Great Spring: Writing, Zen, and This Zig Zag Life, by Natalie Goldberg. Decades ago, my writing teacher gave me Goldberg’s most famous book, Writing Down the Bones. Recently her latest book was mentioned somewhere, and it felt like the right time to revisit her, particularly with a member sale at the bookstore last week and spring in the title of the book.
6. Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them, by J.K. Rowling, is the script to the film and a birthday present from my folks. I enjoyed the script to her play, so I look forward to what I expect will be a fast read.
7. Heidi Julavits’ The Folded Clock is a diary/memoir/personal essay series, and was a gift from Laura in last fall’s Book Ninja Swap.
8. Labyrinth Lost, by Zoraida Córdova, is another recommendation from a book group member and was a Cybils finalist.
9. The 13 1/2 Lives of Captain Bluebear, by Walter Moers, was a birthday gift from Rudi. Translated from the German, it looks like it may share a sensibility with some of James Thurber’s works (Goodreads suggests you’ll like it if you enjoyed Joan Aiken or Michael Ende).
10. The Girl from Everywhere, by Heidi Heilig, was nominated for best debut novel in the Goodreads Choice awards last fall and deals with time travel and Hawaii and sailing.

How about you? What are you looking forward to reading this spring?

Last week I thought I’d cut a stomach bug off at the pass, staying home from work one day to sleep through it and mostly feeling better for it. But yesterday, when the smell of my boss’ lunch made me nauseous, I realized it had sneaked out, brought in reinforcements, and was back to lay siege.

I’m glad to say that with yet more sleep, mostly liquid food for 24 hours, and the generous number of sick days my company offers, I think I’m feeling better. I suppose we’ll know for certain tomorrow.

But in the meantime, since Rudi left town today for his end-of-season coaching road trip, I had time to watch only the tv shows I like and to finish a couple books. Which means what I have to show you are two of the three new books I started tonight:

Phoebe Robinson is a comedian and her memoir got a lot of buzz last year, so I thought I’d give it a shot.

The Rose and the Dagger is Renée Ahdieh’s follow-up to The Wrath and the Dawn, which I read last year and loved, and together they form a retelling of the Scheherazade story. I’ve been looking forward to reading this for months and am eager to dive in.

On my phone, after flipping through audio book possibilities from my downloads and from the library’s Overdrive account, I settled on I’ll Give You the Sun, by Jandy Nelson, which was a big hit two years ago. I tried to read it in paper at the time, but couldn’t concentrate on it; however, I’m already past that point, so hopefully it was just a blip in the time-space continuum, rather than a huge divide, like the one I’ve encountered with My Name Is Lucy Barton and Big Magic, books everyone but me seemed to love. (Not really confidentially to raidergirl3: Did you see AudiobookSYNC has announced this year’s books already?)

On the needles is this year’s entry round for Sock Madness, the annual sock-knitting competition I compete in. This is Twisted Madness by Gina Meyer and the yarn is Socks That Rock Lightweight in Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. I’m not loving knitting the pattern (there’s a lot of twists and knitting through the back loop), but I am loving how the pattern and the yarn look together. The pattern reminds me of socks I would have worn in the 80s, all twisted and scrunched, so the yarn seems a fitting choice.