I finished Strange the Dreamer over the weekend, so I’ve returned to Sing, Unburied, Sing as my main book, since it needs to get back to the library this week in order to avoid a fine. Happily, it finally seems to have picked up its pace, so I think I should be able to read more than 10 pages at a time. I’m once again listening to Crocodile on the Riverbank, but am seriously considering abandoning it. If you like the Amelia Peabody books, please tell me why, because it feels like between the racism and the obvious bad guys that this book should fade into oblivion. And I read pieces of short stories from Kidnapped! Abductions in Time, Space, and Fantasy when I feel like sitting at my laptop for an additional ten minutes at a time.

You’ll notice no knitting in this photo. I’ve got nothing new to show. I’m stuck. Nothing interests me, except for the hat, for which I need to acquire the beads I want (rather than what the bead store has) in order to move forward. I know once I get past the heel with the Posey socks those should get me unstuck, but I admit that I’m contemplating just casting on a new pair of socks in the meantime. I know I’m feeling grumpy toward my knitting right now because my knitting is feeling grumpy toward me. Time will fix it all, I’m sure. If not, there’s no shortage of yarn in this apartment to try something new with.

Head over to As Kat Knits to see what else folks are working on.

PBS is launching a show next month about books, The Great American Read. I don’t get PBS over the air and don’t particularly care for the show’s host, Meredith Viera, but I do like to read books and to talk about books, so I suppose it’s possible.

But in the meantime, let’s look at the list. PBS says they did a phone poll asking people what their favorite novel was and that list was then narrowed down by an advisory panel. They condensed series to a single entry and limited authors to only one title. So take the list as what you will, but in the meantime, let’s look at what we’ve read from it and what we’re excited to read:

[I have bolded the titles I’ve read. I’ve used *** to mark titles I own but have not read and † to mark other titles already on my TBR list.)

I’m bolding titles I’ve read.

1. 1984 by George Orwell

2. A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole***

3. A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving†

4. A Separate Peace by John Knowles

5. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith

6. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain

7. The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

8. Alex Cross Mysteries (series) by James Patterson

9. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll†

10. Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie†

11. And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie

12. Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery

13. Another Country by James Baldwin

14. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

15. Beloved by Toni Morrison

16. Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo Anaya

17. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

18. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz†

19. The Call of the Wild by Jack London

20. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

21. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

22. Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White

23. The Chronicles of Narnia (series) by C.S. Lewis

24. The Clan of the Cave Bear by Jean M. Auel

25. The Coldest Winter Ever by Sister Souljah

26. The Color Purple by Alice Walker

27. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas†

28. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky†

29. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon

30. The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown

31. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes†

32. Doña Bárbara by Rómulo Gallegos

33. Dune by Frank Herbert

34. Fifty Shades of Grey (series) by E.L. James

35. Flowers in the Attic by V.C. Andrews

36. Foundation (series) by Isaac Asimov

37. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

38. Games of Thrones (series) by George R.R. Martin

39. Ghost by Jason Reynolds

40. Gilead by Marilynne Robinson***

41. The Giver by Lois Lowry

42. The Godfather by Mario Puzo

43. Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

44. Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell

45. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

46. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

47. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

48. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift†

49. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

50. Harry Potter (series) by J.K. Rowling

51. Hatchet (series) by Gary Paulsen

52. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

53. The Help by Kathryn Stockett

54. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

55. The Hunger Games (series) by Suzanne Collins†

56. The Hunt for Red October by Tom Clancy

57. The Intuitionist by Colson Whitehead

58. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison†

59. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

60. The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan

61. Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton

62. Left Behind (series) by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins

63. The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

64. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

65. Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry

66. Looking for Alaska by John Green†

67. The Lord of the Rings (series) by J.R.R. Tolkien

68. The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold

69. The Martian by Andy Weir

70. Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden***

71. Mind Invaders by Dave Hunt

72. Moby Dick by Herman Melville†

73. The Notebook by Nicholas Sparks

74. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez†

75. Outlander (series) by Diana Gabaldon

76. The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton

77. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

78. The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan

79. The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett

80. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

81. Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

82. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

83. The Shack by William P. Young

84. Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse

85. The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut

86. The Stand by Stephen King

87. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway†

88. Swan Song by Robert McCammon

89. Tales of the City (series) by Armistead Maupin†

90. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

91. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe†

92. This Present Darkness by Frank E. Peretti

93. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

94. Twilight Saga (series) by Stephenie Meyer

95. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy†

96. The Watchers by Dean Koontz

97. The Wheel of Time (series) by Robert Jordan†

98. Where the Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls

99. White Teeth by Zadie Smith***

100. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

I think that’s 39 read and another 25 on my TBR list in one form or another. Are there any I didn’t highlight you think I should?

I am stalled on several knitting projects, having not yet bought the beads I need to move on with the hat and having found a fatal flaw in the green stripey socks that will require ripping back to before the heel flap. So here I show you the knitting project I’ve already done the ripping on that’s ready to move forward. I bought some grey yarn to make heels from, so now I can get knitting on my Posey socks once more.

I spent the weekend reading Obsidio, so that’s one 600+-page book down and now I can finish Strange the Dreamer, which will let me check off the second one on my list. Both Sing, Unburied, Sing and We Were Eight Years in Power are both overdue, so I need to wrap them both up and get them back to the library. I’ve enjoyed listening to Norse Mythology, but it’s going to expire from my Overdrive app before I finish it, so I’ll need to wait to conclude my audiobook experience, but Crocodile on the Sandbank, Flat Broke with Two Goats, and The Bear and the Nightingale are all checked out to me for faunal listening. Finally, I’m reading my friend’s book, Kidnapped! Abductions in Space, Time, and Fantasy by Danny Atwood et al, on my laptop because that’s what you do when loved ones publish ebooks. I don’t particularly love short story collections and find they work best for me if I space the stories out with a couple days in between them, so that’s what I’m doing. So far, I’m liking it and recommend it if you do like short stories, particularly in the fantasy/sci fi vein.

Head over to As Kat Knits to read what else people are reading and knitting.

The knitting this week looks much the same. I have turned the heel and picked up the gusset stitches on the sock, so that’s ready to turn back into purse knitting. The hat, on the other hand, has reached the point where I’ll need to add that second ball of yarn (which it took me two hours to find over the weekend!) and beads (which I need to buy — I’ve resigned myself that cherry blossoms really are not red and that the red beads I have will not do), so now I’ll need to be home and able to follow a chart to move forward with that.

Luckily, I’ve just started Neil Gaiman’s Norse Mythology on audiobook, so that’s 6 1/2 hours of swoon-worthy listening during which I should be able to get a chunk of knitting done.

In paper, as I mentioned over the weekend, I’ve been reading #NotYourPrincess, a collection of poetry and short prose pieces by Indigenous North American women, and just have a couple pages left, having dozed off trying to finish it the other night. I’m down to my final 100 pages of Strange the Dreamer, and as all the characters are currently in relative safety, I have to leave it until such a point as I can tear through them all in a single go. So I’ve picked up Obsidio, the final book in the Illuminae Files trilogy, which I asked the library to buy (and which they obligingly did quite quickly). It’s written in an epistolary style with the short chunks of text comprised of video logs, email conversations, and philosophical musings from a sentient and formerly murderous AI currently housed in a tablet, all of which are evidence in a court trial (in space). Finally, in my bag, I’m only a few pages into Sing, Unburied, Sing, but nothing really sets the tone of your day like reading about the killing of livestock while on your way to work. I’m hoping it gets less graphic as it goes along, or we’re in for a bit of a slog through a book that’s already overdue back to the library.

What are you reading or crafting? If you’d like to see what others are up to, stop by As Kat Knits.

My trip to Connecticut didn’t have a lot of downtime, which means a lot of what you see here is not new. I didn’t end up taking the hat with me, because I need to figure out where the brown skein of yarn is still, so it’s only a couple rows further along than last week. Also, I stopped at the bead shop and they didn’t have exactly what was called for, although they had some other pink beads (and I have some reddish ones here at home) that might work. I suppose the only way to figure that out is to try them. The sock is my meeting and event knitting, which is up to the heel turn, so it needs to stop being my public knitting until I’ve got the gusset stitches picked up.

I did finish (and enjoy) A Gentleman in Moscow and am looking forward to pulling out Sing, Unburied, Sing and picking up Obsidio at the library this week. But in the meantime, I’ve started the 19th-century-set mystery The Secrets of Wishtide and am carrying on with Strange the Dreamer. Crocodile on the Nile was renewable, so I’ve put that aside and have started listening to The Bookshop on the Corner. I also have Neil Gaiman’s Norse Mythology out on audiobook.

How about you? What are you currently reading?

Visit As Kat Knits to see what others are knitting and reading.

I thought we’d follow up Monday’s book reviews with the second of three posts about my January reads, this time with two YA novels:

Turtles All the Way Down, by John Green

In John Green’s latest, recommended to me by my dad, Aza and her best friend, Daisy, in order to collect the reward money associated with a useful tip, try to figure out the disappearance of a fugitive billionaire from their Midwestern city, who also happens to be the father of a boy, Davis, she used to be friends with. First step, get reacquainted with Davis. Second step, stop worrying about all the bacteria desperately trying to kill her, causing her to obsessively spiral into dangerous thoughts and behaviors. But when Aza gets sucked into Davis’ surreal life (his father’s will specifies their pet reptile will inherit his fortune, rather than his two sons, for instance), she’ll find it’s a lot harder to escape her thoughts than it used to be and that she’s teetering on a precipice. Green, who suffers from mental health issues himself, portrays Aza’s with sensitivity and thoughtfulness, giving his readers an insight into how tricky the brain can be. Recommended. (Also, if you like this book, you might consider Tamara Ireland Stone’s Every Last Word, which touches on similar issues.)

Pages: 288. Library copy.

Daughter of the Pirate King, by Tricia Levenseller

Alosa, the titular offspring of the pirate king and herself the captain of a mostly female pirate ship, allows herself to be captured by her father’s enemy, only to find out that he’s been killed and replaced by his two sons. But that doesn’t change her mission — to find and retrieve a map crucial to her father. She’ll start out trying to find the map with stealth and skill, but the first mate holding her captive is not wholly taken in by her demure act and proves an impediment (if only he’d stop distracting her with his good looks and kind manner), so she may have to resort to other tricks she has up her sleeve. But there are other pieces in play, and Alosa may not be up to the task after all. This was a fun romp and I look forward to reading the sequel (the title of which contains a spoiler for this book) sometime soon. Recommended for those who love their YA stories slightly historical, slightly fantastical, and more than slightly feminist.

Pages: 320. Library audio copy.