This past week, I started three books: Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Refugees, a short story collection that’s been chosen as a D.C. Reads book for everyone in the city to read; The Folded Clock, by Heidi Julavits, a diary/collection of essays relating to time; and A Treacherous Curse, the latest in the Veronica Speedwell Victorian mystery series by Deanna Raybourn.

I’m also listening to Solo, a YA verse novel by Kwame Brown with Mary Rand Hess about the son of a rock legend/hot mess who finds out a family secret, and Neil Gaiman’s Norse Mythology, which I can’t help but populate with faces from the Marvel movies.

My sock is pretty much to the toe decreases. I really thought I’d get it finished tonight, but instead I dozed off (after a fun-filled day off for Rudi’s birthday), so obviously I should go to bed instead.

Hit up As Kat Knits for more posts about reading and knitting.

It’s time for one of my favorite seasonal reading events — Bout of Books!

The Bout of Books read-a-thon is organized by Amanda Shofner and Kelly Rubidoux Apple. It is a week long read-a-thon that begins 12:01 a.m. Monday, May 14th, and runs through Sunday, May 20th, in whatever time zone you are in. Bout of Books is low-pressure. There are challenges, giveaways, and a grand prize, but all of these are completely optional. For all Bout of Books 22 information and updates, be sure to visit the Bout of Books blog. – From the Bout of Books team

My goals for the week are to:

1. Take part in at least two challenges and at least one of the Twitter chats.
2. Visit at least one other Bout of Books participant’s blog a day.
3. Return some of my massive pile of library books to the library.
4. Read a little each day.
5. Finish posting my January reviews.
6. Stretch goal: Finish three books. (That’s not really a stretch, but I want to keep things low-key.

Day 1 Challenge: Introduce Yourself #insixwords

How about:

Feeling mopey tonight. Time to read!

or

D.C. resident seeks next great read.

or

I refuse to be limited by rules. 😉

I’m up to the heel on my cheery In the Wildwood socks, which I should be able to put a good dent in during a meeting tomorrow. Should that go fine (with the striping), it will have been a good decision to move to these socks. If not, they will join a list of projects that I need to deal with. Keep your fingers crossed for me.

As for the reading, it’s been Killers of the Flower Moon and Little Fires Everywhere, which is now the second “literary book with surprise twist” that everyone’s been talking about that I’m pretty sure I have figured out from near the get-go. I don’t know if this comes from a background of reading mysteries or if literary writers just really aren’t that good at writing plot twists. Or maybe Celeste Ng is and I will be totally shocked that what I think has happened in the past didn’t actually happen.

I’ve also been listening to The Bear and the Nightingale, but that’s expiring tomorrow without my having finished it, so I’ll have to wait for my turn to come around again. Hopefully it won’t be terribly long, but luckily it’s YA Sync season, so I have new audiobook downloads to listen to every week for free and Norse Mythology came back around for download tonight.

Head over to As Kat Knits for more books and knitting.

Look how cheerful my new sock is! I haven’t had enough time to sit with it to make a ton of progress, but I’m carrying it around with me and knitting on it a few minutes at a time and that’s enough right now.

On the reading front, I am listening to Katherine Arden’s The Bear and the Nightingale, which folks in my book group compared to Uprooted, which I loved. It’s unclear thus far whether that’s just because it’s set in Eastern Europe and fantastical or if there are more meaningful comparisons that will become obvious later on.

I am nearly done with Morgan Parker’s poetry collection, There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé. It’s full of sex and the music and the Black female experience, both positive and negative, and I recommend reading it.

I have started Down and Across by Arvin Ahmadi, but ran straight into the problem that a lot of books that are set in a place you know really well experience and that’s the incongruenties with your lived reality. The book references early on row houses on M Street. M Street in the section of D.C. where the story is taking places, is exclusively a retail section. And I know this is a minor detail and that I’ll get past it, but it just grated and something else came along in the meantime that I’m enjoying too much for me to go back to.

That something is A Dash of Trouble, the first in a planned series called Love Sugar Magic, a middle grade story of brujas who run a bakery and the youngest sister who stumbles onto the family secret a little earlier than she’s supposed to. This was also recommended to me from my book club (and apparently I have a fondness for magic bakery stories), and so, when I found it during Independent Bookstore Day blurbed by my favorite D.C. bookseller as being her favorite new series since Harry Potter, I bought myself a copy.

Next up (as soon as I remember to retrieve it from the bedroom when Rudi’s not sleeping in there) will be fellow Conn alum David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, which has won many accolades and which I hear is the sort of narrative nonfiction I particularly like. It’s a little more grisly than my normal reading, but is in keeping with the sort of books I read in college and grad school (when a lot of my studies focused on marginalized American cultures), so I’m hoping I can handle it.

As usual, head over to As Kat Knits for more of what folks are reading and crafting.

Today I took part in Dewey’s 24-Hour Readathon. Because it was also Independent Bookstore Day and Watch the New Avengers Movie Day, I did not spend as much of the day reading as I might otherwise have liked, but I did finish Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward, begin Anna Meriano’s Love Sugar Magic, and read a few poems from Morgan Parker’s There Are More Beautiful Things than Beyoncé. I read a little more than 200 pages over the course of five or so hours.

But now it’s time to go to bed and get a few hours of sleep. There are things to do tomorrow, too, after all.

Sometimes when I find myself getting stuck in a reading rut, I opt to return to an old favorite. When I was young, it was Little Women or, less often, Anne of Green Gables. These days it’s the Harry Potter series. Because it is familiar in a comforting way, but no matter how many times I read it, I find something new in it, whether it’s because different details pop out at me or because I’m a slightly different person than I was the last time I read it.

As I said yesterday, I’m feeling stuck with my knitting. And, to be honest, none of what I’m currently reading has grabbed my soul either. So while yes, I do want to finish all the things I’m knitting and some of the things I’m reading (and need to do so soon in some cases), a change was in order.

I could head back to Harry, but the version I want to read now is the illustrated one, which does not lend itself to Metro reading. So I’ve picked up Down and Across, a book Jenn recommended last year and which I bought months ago after hearing the author read from it and which takes place partly in my neighborhood. I’ve completely abandoned Amelia Peabody (the thing I liked best about the book was the narrator; otherwise the story reminded me of an overly long Scooby Doo episode with about the same level of sophistication). Instead I’ve started Katherine Arden’s The Bear and the Nightingale, which folks in my book group have compared to Uprooted, which I loved, and which I’ve enjoyed the first two chapters of tonight while washing dishes and doing some other nighttime chores.

The Harry Potter equivalent in my knitting world is stripey socks. And, yes, you would be right that the Posey socks are also stripey, but they are tinged with sadness, I think, and while I will definitely return to them — and not too far in the future — I needed something that made my heart sing with joy and that tonight was Knitterly Things’ Vesper Sock in In The Wild Wood, with stripes of verdant green, calming brown, and brilliant fuchsia. They are the colors of the azaleas that are coming into season right now and I think they’ll be just what I need to spring clean my soul and give it some space to return to other projects.

Sometimes it’s necessary to power through a problem, but sometimes it’s good to remind yourself that it might not really be a problem unless you make it one yourself.

Onward!