I’ve had great fun doing the past two Ninja Book Swaps, and while I thought about sitting this one out, I decided that I’d enjoyed them too much to skip it. I sent a package off to Louise in Derbyshire and got one back from Kate in West Midlands, which I finally managed to collect from DHL this week after we had some difficulties getting it dropped off:

I didn’t even know that colored packing peanuts were a thing! Incidentally, Corey thought this was the best part of the package, since he loves packing peanuts. He tried to steal several of them!

Kate sent me two books I’ve been wanting to read from her personal collection: The Magicians, which I’ve been wanting to read since it first came out, and The All-Girl Filling Station’s Last Reunion, the latest novel by Fannie Flagg, who’s one of my favorite comfort-read authors.

She also sent me some shortbread cookies and a box of tea, which she, not being a tea drinker, picked up at her sister’s suggestion. I’m looking forward to late-night snacks while reading.

Finally, she sent me an ordinance map of Wolverhampton, where she lives. She did not reside there in 1901, however, but she included an awesome card guiding me around the map to find the spots where they would eventually build all the places she’d lived in.

Thank you, Kate, for such lovely gifts! I love them! And a hearty thank you to Bex, for organizing the swap! If you think this sounds like fun, I recommend signing up for the mailing list, which will get you reminders when the next round is coming up.

I’ll admit to being in a low place, which means I play more computer and phone games and watch inane or repeat television shows than do productive things like read or knit. I know some of what’s causing it and that time is just going to have to get me through the next couple weeks, which are likely to continue being hard. However, volleyball starts back up this coming week, sunset creeps later every day, and the ski season is over. I’ve sat outside several days this week and have gone on a couple bike rides. The garden is under way, and we’ll pick our baseball games for the year this weekend. Much like getting pulled under by a big wave at the ocean, I know that if I don’t panic about the sinking feeling, I’ll come out the other side a little battered, but not much worse for the experience.

That said, I did start a new book this week: Vaseem Khan’s The Unexpected Inheritance of Inspector Chopra starts on the title character’s final day at work as a Mumbai police inspector before a medically recommended early retirement. It’s also the day he gets a letter from his uncle informing him he’s about to receive a bequest — a baby elephant. I’ve only reached the day after retirement, and already Chopra’s feeling a bit antsy. I don’t think retirement is going to suit him too well.

I’ve started carrying around, although haven’t yet started working on, the second sock of my Sock Madness pair. I cast on a random sock twice this month, once with too few stitches and now with too many, so clearly that yarn needs to go into time-out until it can decide it’s going to cooperate and fit a leg properly. Hopefully it will see sense and allow itself to be re-jiggered (60 stitches, maybe) before the next time I need some mindless knitting for a concert or meeting.

Yarning along with Ginny at Small Things.

Every spring, Carl hosts a reading event, Once Upon a Time.

This year marks the tenth year of the challenge, and I’m excited to participate once again. I’m even eager to review the books, which I’ve been remiss about the last couple years. I’ve found Quest the First is the best fit for me, so I’ll be reading five books that fit into the fantasy, fairy tale, folklore, or mythology genres.

While I reserve the right to change my mind about my choices or to add a secondary quest (which offer the options to read A Midsummer’s Night Dream or short stories, play games, or watch tv or movies within these genres), right now, these are the books I’m considering reading (you saw some of these the other day):

• Carry On by Rainbow Rowell: A Harry Potteresque school with a cast of characters that includes a chosen one, ghosts, and an evil nemesis, who may also be a vampire.
• Court of Fives by Kate Elliott: Apparently, it’s Little Women meets courtly fantasy. It got good buzz in my Twitter timeline when it came out. I’ve had it out from the library and it either needs to get read soon or go back to them.
• An Ember in the Ashes by Sabaa Tahir: Another book I’ve had out from the library for ages. Sarah & I caught part of the author’s talk at last fall’s National Book Festival. I’m not sure if it’s my style (one of the main characters is a soldier), but I ought to at least read a few chapters to find out and return it if it’s not.
• Echo by Pam Muñoz Ryan: A Newbery Honor book from this past year that features a magical harmonica. Do we really need to know any more?
• The Library at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins: A lot of people have classified this one as horror (Jenn? What do you think? Is it overly intense?), so it might be an early exiter for me, but it features a library and a Zeus-like character
• Unnatural Creatures edited by Neil Gaiman: Short stories about magical creatures.

I’m noticing several of the books I’ve selected sound awfully intense, which hasn’t been my speed recently. Only time will tell whether I jettison all of the stressful reads in favor of some of the gentler fantasy I have on my shelves and my online queue (and in that list from the other day).

Have you read anything recently you’d recommend that falls into these categories?

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic from The Broke and the Bookish is the top ten books on my to-be-read list/pile:

1. Carry On by Rainbow Rowell: One of the books I’d hoped to get to last fall, but that didn’t come my way until last month when it arrived as a birthday gift from Rudi’s mom (picked out by Rudi)
2. Truthwitch by Susan Dennard: The book that all of Twitter was talking about this fall. (Well, at least all of my bookish Twitter). She came to speak in the area last month and I splurged and bought myself a copy.
3. To Catch a Cheat by Varian Johnson: The other book I bought myself this year was Varian Johnson’s follow-up to The Great Greene Heist, which was a favorite of mine a couple years back. It hasn’t gotten as much buzz, but I’m not sure if that’s because several of the bookish people I would have expected to tout it are just reading female authors this year or on its own merit. I’m looking forward to find out, because I love a good caper book/show/film.
4. A Darker Shade of Magic by Victoria Schwab: This is overdue to the library, where it has a dozen holds on it, so I need to finish it this week. But I’m not giving it back until I’m done. (My library aids in this bad civic behavior by not fining me for the first 30 days after the book is tardy.)
5. Big Magic: Creative Living beyond Fear by Elizabeth Gilbert: I read and was underwhelmed by Eat, Pray, Love, but Gilbert’s last two books have had more critical acclaim than popular success, so I’m willing to give her nonfiction a shot. (But I’m also willing to ditch it after 50 pages if I don’t think it’s any better than her breakout book.)
6. Most Dangerous: Daniel Ellsberg and the Secret History of the Vietnam War by Steve Sheinkin: I loved (if by loved one means was horrified by but could not stop talking about the content contained within) The Port Chicago 50 a couple years ago, and Sheinkin writes reliably outrageous books that are routinely shortlisted for the best book prizes in the nation.
7. Unnatural Creatures, edited by Neil Gaiman: Rudi gave this to me for Russian Christmas, and I’m looking forward to reading the fantastical short stories contained within this pleasantly chubby tome as part of the upcoming Once Upon a Time reading challenge.
8. Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine: I started this collection of poetry last fall, but it got put aside for some reason. I’ll make it a priority to be the next poetry collection I finish.
9. Mansfield Park by Jane Austen: It’s the last complete Austen book I haven’t read, and Karen and I have been planning to read it for months. I’m voting we get it on our calendars in ink this spring (pending her approval, of course).
10. The Unexpected Inheritance of Inspector Chopra by Vaseem Khan: I want to read more international fiction, so thought I’d start with some mysteries/detective novels set around the world. Plus, it features a baby elephant!

How about you? What are you hoping to read this spring?

This is just a quick post because, frankly, I’m starting to realize exactly what a mess I’ve left my knitting in in order to advance in Sock Madness. I have until midnight on Monday night to finish, but I’m not yet to the heel on sock #1. And apparently the heel is a challenge. And it’s toe-up, which means getting it off the needles is more time-consuming than toe down.

So, here’s my plan:

Tonight: Go to bed after I’ve finished my tea. Getting enough sleep to not fall asleep while knitting is crucial to the rest of the plan.
Tomorrow (Thursday): Get through the heel on sock #1.
Friday: Knit the entire leg of sock #1.

Saturday: Knit the foot and heel of sock #2.
Sunday: Knit the leg of sock #2.

This leaves Monday after work for overflow when that schedule proves unrealistic. It doesn’t sound bad right now, but I did want to do some things other than work and knit for the next few days, and I can’t afford to eat every meal out between now and then!

(That photo could look less awkward; there’s a ball of yarn in the toe (as well as my own toes) from where I moved through the skein to get to a more contrasty section.)

Anyway, I’m still listening to Death at Wentwater Court by Carola Dunn while I knit, and I’ve been sneaking in the short chapters of The Country of the Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett, one of the novellas my library picked for its Rush Hour Reads series, in microbursts on my commutes. I am enjoying and recommend both.

I read nine books last month, so in the interest of getting through them all, I’m going to divide them into two posts. Tonight, I’ll give you the first four:

Honest Engine: Poems, by Kyle Dargan

Poetry is the one type of book that I’m regularly tempted to buy even if I know nothing about the book or the author. If the blurb or cover are appealing, I’ll pick it up, and if I like a poem in it, there’s every chance it’ll come home with me. Poetry, being more immediate than prose, has a way of bypassing all that getting-to-know-you crap that prose needs to engage in and beelines to your soul. It’s like it skips the small talk and jumps straight to either sucker punching you in the gut or stroking your hair (in a totally not creepy kind of way). So, when, last summer, I was browsing the new releases table at Politics and Prose, and I came across a cleverly designed cover and a blurb that suggested the poems inside would examine “the mechanics of the heart and mind as they are weathered by loss,” I was hooked, still recovering, as I was, from my grandmother’s death.

I’ve already recommended this accessible collection from a D.C. resident once before, and I’ll underscore that again now. Dargan’s poetry runs the gamut from the State of the Union to sleep deprivation to a dozen or so poems about loved ones gone from this earth, with a surprising amount of science fiction fandom thrown in for good measure.

Published: 2015.
Pages: 96.

One Crazy Summer, by Rita Williams-Garcia

The Garcia sisters — 11-year-old Delphine, 9-year-old Vonetta, and 7-year-old Fern — have traveled from Brooklyn to Oakland to visit their mother who left them when Fern was a baby. Set in 1968, the story focuses on the girls striving to navigate the unknown waters of life with a woman who rejected them and of an unknown city, where the Black Panthers, who run the recreation center where the girls spend their days, are gaining power and recognition. Just as they discover that the Black Panthers are more complicated than White TV and their Southern grandmother has led them to believe, so, too, do they find that their mother, a poet, and her reasons for leaving are equally complex. The girls may never get to the beach or to Disneyland, but they will definitely feel like they’ve seen a lot by the time they head back home.

The third book in the Garcia girls’ story just won an award this winter, which reminded me that I hadn’t yet read the first novel, also a prize-winner. Destined to be a classic, this middle-grade novel is an enjoyable read about a girl whose world is going to change over the course of one summer, but just maybe not in the ways she’s expecting it to. Combine that solid story with the book’s parallels to our modern day at a time when police violence toward Black citizens across the nation is regularly making headlines and when protests against that violence feel the need to echo the plea and refrain that Black Lives Matter, and you have an important book for us to read, particularly with our kids. The distance afforded by the fifty years between its setting and today allow a safe lens for exploring some of the roots of the movement while simultaneously underscoring why it’s frustrating that so many of these conversations (and the events that prompt them) still happen today.

Published: 2012.
Pages: 218. Library copy.

The Book Itch: Freedom, Truth, & Harlem’s Greatest Bookstore, by Vaunda Micheaux Nelson, with illustrations by R. Gregory Christie

I don’t review every picture book I read, but if I read them at home for myself (as opposed to reading them in the bookstore with an eye toward gifting them to small children), I count them. I requested this non-fiction book from the library without realizing it was a picture book, but that didn’t stop me from enjoying it. Nelson tells the story of her great-uncle, who opened a Black-centric bookstore in Harlem in the 1930s, from the perspective of his son who grew up in the 1950s and 1960s. Lewis loved the sense of community the store brought to the neighborhood, the vehicle it provided residents for protesting injustices, and the celebrities, such as Muhammed Ali and Malcolm X, who visited the shop. Christie’s illustrations help bring the store and the period of time to life.

While this is a picture book, I would not recommend it for youngest readers, because the climax of the story focuses on the day Malcolm X is killed, at an event Lewis’ dad is attending and will be upsetting to particularly small kids. It is a great way, though, to share a piece of history with older elementary and middle school readers in an accessible way that may inspire them to further investigation into the topic and which will certainly help them appreciate the power of the written word.

Published: 2015.
Pages: 32. Library copy.

Emmanuel’s Dream: The True Story of Emmanuel Ofosu Yeboah, by Laurie Ann Thompson, with illustrations by Sean Qualls

I requested this picture book with Rudi in mind, because bicycles. But after he’d finished it, I couldn’t help but read it myself before returning it to the library. Yeboah was born disabled in Ghana, where disabilities are considered a curse and where the disabled are expected to become beggars. His mother and his grandmother, though, don’t just see a bad leg, but a curious and bright child. They make sure he goes to school and instill in him a sense of industry and ambition, which lead him to playing soccer with his schoolmates and, eventually, to learning to ride a bike. Later, in 2001, as an adult, he will ride 400 miles across Ghana to raise awareness of what disabled people are capable of, if only people will give them a chance to show it. He used that fame to raise funds to further that cause and to build schools across his country.

This nonfiction picture book is appropriate for even the youngest readers and offers lots of opportunity for discussions about disability, poverty, and international differences.

Published: 2015.
Pages: 40. Library copy.