There’s less than a month until Christmas, which means all the current projects are gifts I can’t show you. I can, however, show you my latest finished project, my Christmas mitts!

I cast these on three years ago to be a pair of socks when I realized that the other stripy Christmas yarn I had, which has white stripes as well as red and green, would not hide the grime of holding onto Metro escalators nearly as well as this pair. So I switched things up and these became a pair of improvised fingerless mitts, and the other yarn became socks.

Last Christmas I bound off the first one with a sewn picot bind-off similar to the cast on I’d used, but I wasn’t happy with it. This year, I ripped that back and experimented with a different picot bind-off. Then I ripped it back again to get a unified color bind-off. And once more to add in some seed stitch in that final stripe to try to control the rolling. (It wasn’t successful.) I will give it the season to see if I can live with it, and if I can’t, I’ll try to come up with a new solution next year. I also bound off the thumb at least three times, trying to find a non-ridiculous solution to that with a picot, but eventually conceded it was beyond my ken and just did a garter bind-off.

I also had to duplicate stitch over the thumb join on the second mitt when I rejoined the yarn in red, rather than the green of the first one and didn’t notice until after I’d sewn in all the ends. I can see I’ve done it, but I don’t think the casual observer would notice.

The yarn is Beyond Basic Knits Stripey Superwash Sock in an undisclosed colorway. She seems to have shuttered her shop since I bought this yarn at the Shenandoah Valley Fiber Festival back in 2009. I probably only used half the skein, so there could be more Christmassy knits in my future, particularly since there was yarn leftover from the socks, too.

There was not a ton of time for reading last week, so I didn’t finish either book I was working on, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours by Helen Oyeyemi and The Girl Who Drank the Moon by Kelly Barnhill. I did start three new books this week, though, to add to the collection: Jay Asher’s new Christmas YA novel, What Light, about a girl growing up on a Christmas tree farm; Dear Data, a nonfiction art book of weekly postcards exchanged between two visual data compilers, Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec; and Jane and the Twelve Days of Christmas by Stephanie Barron. I’m listening to that last one, part of a historical fiction mystery series starring author Jane Austen as the sleuth. I started that series years ago, but got sidetracked from it. I recommended it as a seasonal read to someone from my Twitter book club last year and she enjoyed it, so I decided to give it a go myself out of sequence this Christmas.

Yarning along with Ginny at Small Things.

I’ve got a lot of books to tell you about before the end of the year. Here are three more I read back in June:

The Entirely True Story of the Unbelievable FIB, by Adam Shaughnessy

This book, written by a fellow English-major classmate of mine from college, is the second book in June in which Baba Yaga makes an appearance. Prudence aspires to solve mysteries just like her police detective father, who was recently killed while on duty, but her sleuthing tends to get her into trouble. But then she and ABE, the new puzzle-solving boy in town, team up to answer the question, “What is the Unbelievable FIB?” written on a note slipped under Prudence’s bedroom door one night while she slept, a pretty big mystery indeed.

In the course of the book, they’ll meet a talking squirrel, several Norse gods, and Mr. Fox, who spent some time living with Baba Yaga. But, in addition to figuring out about the note, they’ll also need to solve why their town seems to be suddenly shrouded in perpetual bad weather or the consequences could be dire. Good for the kid who’s read every Rick Riordan, but still wants more gods come to earth hijinks.

Pages: 272. Personal copy.

Summerlost, by Ally Condie

Pages: 272. Library copy.

Cedar and Miles and their mom are spending a couple months in the small town outside Salt Lake City where Mrs. Lee grew up as a way for them to get through the first summer vacation since Mr. Lee and their youngest brother Ben were killed in a car crash. Twelve-year-old Cedar is understandably resentful of being yanked away from her friends, but is intrigued when she sees a boy her age riding down the street dressed in a costume. It turns out Leo works for the local summer stock theater, Summerlost, and Cedar gets a job there, too, selling programs.

Soon, though, Leo and Summer are leading illicit tours about the life of the mysterious actress who died in Iron Creek decades ago, while performing at Summerlost. Her ghost may haunt the theater. And now there seems to be a ghost haunting Cedar, as well, leaving her small trinkets of the sort that her youngest brother used to be attracted to.

This story had an old-fashioned feeling to it, despite its modern issues. Probably a good fit for those who like other kid lit books set during summer, such as The Penderwicks or The Great Good Summer or Gone-Away Lake.

Love & Gelato, by Jenna Evans Welch

Apparently I was on a roll for reading books featuring dead parents, because there’s one in Love & Gelato, too. In this case, Lina is 16 and her beloved artist mom has recently died after a battle with cancer. Her dying wish was that Lina be sent to live in a Tuscan cemetery with Howard, a man her mother has never before mentioned, but with whom, her grandmother informs her, her mother lived with just before returning home to have Lina. When her mother’s journal of her year in Tuscany arrives at the cemetery (care of the assistant curator of the museum, whom her mother also knew), Lina figures this is her mother’s way of explaining things to her herself. As she reads along, she sets out to see the things her mother described, from the gelaterias to the dance halls to the museums, all with the company of her new friend, Ren, whom she meets while out running. The two of them will work to unravel the mystery of Lina’s and her mother’s past and to help Lina find peace in her new circumstances.

Recommended for fans of 13 Little Blue Envelopes and Stephanie Perkins’ and Sarah Dessen’s books.

Pages: 390. Library copy.

One more installment to get us through the June reads. Hopefully coming soon…

I locked myself out of my site again last night and couldn’t get back in until this evening, so will be giving you an additional post sometime this weekend to make up for the missed one.

I was looking through my draft folder hoping to find a half-finished set of book reviews. Alas, they all require more work than that. However, I found this partially composed list of my favorite books from 2014, so I thought I’d share it, since they’re all out in softcover now, should you be looking for a reasonably priced gift for someone:

The Book of Unknown Americans, by Cristina Henriquez: A collection of linked stories about immigrants from South and Central America who live in an apartment building in Delaware. Some are here legally, some illegally, but all of them are looking for a better life and having mixed results in finding it.

The Port Chicago 50: Disaster, Mutiny, and the Fight for Civil Rights, by Steve Sheinkin: I picked up this book expecting a graphic novel and instead found a non-fiction book detailing a shameful incident in our nation’s military history. The outrage you feel for the men of Port Chicago will keep you turning these pages and will stay with you long after you’ve passed the final one. This book was the one that I kept walking up to people wanting to talk about. Give this to the person who keeps responding that “All lives matter” to help them understand or to the person who is sparked by righteous fury.

A Snicker of Magic, by Natalie Lloyd: The 11-year-old main character of this book is a collector of words (the best of them end up inscribed on her sneakers); her best friend is a boy who likes to do good deeds. They live in a Tennessee mountain town full of quirky residents and an ice cream factory, and once was was home to magic and music. Word lovers of all ages should pick up this middle-grade novel.

Landline, by Rainbow Rowell: A middle-aged tv script writer and her BFF get their big break, but it’ll require she work through Christmas and miss celebrating the holidays with her daughters and long-suffering husband at his family’s home — and possibly destroy her marriage. When she decides to stay at her own childhood home for a few days (it’s closer to work), she discovers that the phone she’d used all those years ago is giving her the opportunity to reacquaint herself with that past. A must-read for those of us who are in long-term relationships.

Seraphina, by Rachel Hartman: If the idea of dragons living as human scholars of mathematics and music in a castle setting doesn’t interest you, do not bother reading this book.

Mr. Lemoncello’s Library, by Chris Grabenstein: Kyle loves games of all sorts, so when his hero, a local eccentric who’s made billions inventing games and who’s put some of that money into reopening the town library, creates a Willy Wonka-like contest for its dedication, Kyle knows he wants to be amongst the competitors. An enjoyable read for fans of games, books, Roald Dahl, and tech.

Rooftoppers, by Katherine Rundell: A baby found floating in a cello case after a shipwreck is adopted by one of her fellow survivors, a solitary man. When the welfare folks come poking around years later and threaten to send her to be raised in a more suitable environment, the two of them run away to Paris — she to look for her mother and he to keep her a while longer. Beautifully written.

The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry, by Gabrielle Zevin: A curmudgeonly bookseller receives an unexpected gift that changes his life. It’s cheesy and you see the second half of the book telegraphed within the first, but you don’t care. Highly recommended for book lovers.

As You Wish: Inconceivable Tales from the Making of The Princess Bride, by Cary Elwes: I loved this memoir and how they got pretty much everyone involved to share sidebars. If your life is punctuated by quotations from this film, read it!

Brown Girl Dreaming, by Jacqueline Woodson: A middle-grade verse memoir about growing up black in South Carolina and New York City in the 1960s and ’70s. Even if you think you don’t like verse novels, check this one out.

Flight Behavior, by Barbara Kingsolver: A woman living at the foot of West Virginia’s Appalachian Mountains makes a disturbing discovery — the woods around her house are suddenly awash with thousands of brilliant butterflies. This book combines discussions of climate change and personal growth and offers a look at working class farmers just holding on and how both of those things affect them. I find Kingsolver to be a must-read pretty much all the time.

(Yes, I recognize that’s 11, rather than 10. I’d had nine on the list when I originally composed it nearly two years ago, and upon reflection, I probably would have replaced one of the items on the list with another. Since that didn’t seem emotionally honest, I thought I’d just expand the list to include them all.)

Coffeeneuring #9: Sugar Shack Donuts (804 N. Henry St., Alexandria, VA)

Saturday, Nov. 19; 12.1 miles
Apple cake doughnut and caramel apple cider

I’d planned to get up and moving earlier than I did on Saturday, which meant that when I did finally walk out the door, dressed for the early afternoon’s sun and temperatures, that I was in for a surprise within minutes. We live below ground, which means that our view of the sky is rather a small one and can give false impressions, as it did then. Only half the sky was still blue when I emerged on the street and by the time I pedaled down to the river and across the Potomac, barely a sliver remained free of clouds. The wind picked up, which did not make the ride an enjoyable one. The gusts were particularly bad near the airport, where a lack of ground cover gave the wind a running start. By the time I reached the edge of Old Town, I was glad to encounter a bus shelter where I could seek refuge while checking my directions and putting on the measly warm layers I’d brought with me.

I stopped in at Fibre Space (nothing on their side of the street to lock the bike to) for a while to see if they had something in stock, but they were out, so I continued on to my destination: Sugar Shack Donuts (bike racks right out front). I’d bought a Groupon for a half dozen doughnuts earlier in the season, imagining Rudi and I would have more opportunities to ride together, but his unavailability wasn’t going to stop me from visiting. The selection was diminished, but there were enough to put together a box to bring home with me. I added their drink of the day, a hot caramel apple cider, and parked myself at a table in the back of the shop. This marked my only Coffeeneur stop that necessitated sitting indoors, but the waning daylight and impending rain and plummeting temperatures did not make me think that I needed to make myself miserable in order to be consistent.

Knowing that rain was possible, I’d packed a slender personal collection of comics, Young Avengers, Vol. 1: Style > Substance, rather than a library book that might be ruined by the weather, and my Christmas mitts. I read my book and started working on a thumb and ate my very tasty apple doughnut and nursed my cider. I texted Rudi to say I’d decided to catch Metro back to the District, rather than ride back in dim, damp, blustery conditions. This wise decision was reinforced when I emerged from the shop to discover that the rain had indeed begun and that my main headlight was dead. I got off at GW and pedaled home from there, being extra-cautious since I was down to my tadpole light in front.

I’d planned to go out one more time, on Sunday, but it was such a miserably windy day that I made the executive decision to make Saturday’s my final Coffeeneuring stop of the season.

So, with that, over my nine rides over seven weeks, I covered 63.2 miles, just shy of my personal Coffeeneuring best from two years ago.

My theme was reading and knitting. I’d hoped it’d be finished objects, but not a single knit item was completed, although I did get closer on the eight projects I worked on. Of the nine books I was reading at my stops, I had better luck, finishing six of them so far. (Not Your Sidekick, Magic in Manhattan, and The Girl Who Drank the Moon are all still in progress.)

Thanks, once again, to MG for hosting such a fun event!

The rest of this year’s rides: 1-4, 5, and 6-8.

I have been working on these fingerless mitts for three years nearly to the day. (Please note, of the three projects shown, only one is done.) I refuse to think another Christmas season will come without my getting to wear them, so I’m saying here that they will be done and on my hands by next Friday.

I bound off the first one (on the right) last Christmas using a sewn picot bind-off that I wasn’t happy with. It felt bunchy and rolled outward, and I may have misjudged the evenness of the rows, because the picots didn’t really pop or look pretty, which would seem to thwart the point of having them in the first place. So a couple weeks ago, when looking for a project to take Coffeeneuring, I pulled these out and decided to see what other options I had for creating a pretty top edging. While this still rolls outward (anyone have a solution for that?), it solves the other problems, so I can probably live with it.

Thanks to knitting (and washing dishes), I’m into the final chapters of the audiobook of The Heist, by Janet Evanovich and Lee Goldberg. The book I want to be reading is in the center of the photo, Kelly Barnhill’s The Girl Who Drank the Moon, which I’m enjoying quite a bit. The books I should be reading, Matthew Desmond’s Evicted and Rebecca Traister’s All the Single Ladies, both need to be back in the library by Sunday to avoid fines. Nonfiction is just slower. And requires thinking. And just feel exhausting this month. But the hold list for both is months long (even when someone doesn’t keep them out late). We’ll see…

I always read more in the summer, so I’ll break up the reading from those months into a couple posts, because no one has the patience to read my thoughts on nine books in one go. (Or, more accurately, I don’t have the patience to post them all at once.)

So here are the first couple books I read during June (it was supposed to be four, but I’ve been stuck on the latter two for a month now, so it’s time to just get something up):

The Unexpected Inheritance of Inspector Chopra, by Vaseem Khan

On the day Inspector Chopra retires from the Mumbai police force, he discovers his favorite uncle has died, leaving him the titular bequest, which turns out to be a baby elephant. But before we can get to the pachyderm (which is going to be a problem since he and his wife live in a middle-class high-rise with a rather ornery woman heading up the condo board), we must first deal with the workplace farewell. Middle-aged Inspector Chopra loves his job. He’s very good at his job. He doesn’t want to leave his job. But he’s had some heart trouble, and between pressures from his wife and the Indian bureaucracy, he’s been forced to leave the force early. He has instructions his final day is meant to be strictly a formality; his jurisdiction as head of his station has already passed onto another, who’ll arrive the following day. But when a young man from a lower-class section of town dies and his mother comes in to complain that it’s been dismissed as suicide when her son couldn’t possibly have been suicidal, Chopra doesn’t have the heart to show her the door. He quietly orders some extra tests to be conducted on the body, with the plan he’ll return later in the week to pass on the information to his successor. But when that man turns out to be a drunk and when the autopsy turns up some abnormalities and when sitting around the apartment with his wife and mother-in-law turns out not to be any fun, Chopra decides to split his time between unofficially investigating the young man’s death and figuring out what to do with a baby elephant who is literally wasting away while chained up on the common lawn of his building. He’ll spend his time consulting vets and zookeepers and low-lifes alike while trying to keep all his activities from his loving wife.

Written by an Englishman who spent ten years working in India, the story is a little slower than I would have liked, but still ultimately was an enjoyable tale. Chopra and his wife (from whose perspective we get about a third of the story) are good characters, and the end of the book suggests this could become an ongoing series. If you like Tarquin Hall’s Vish Puri detective series, I’d suggest giving this a try, as well. If anyone has any recommendations for contemporary Indian detective series written by actual Indians, I’d be eager to check them out.

Pages: 314. Library copy.

Baba Yaga’s Assistant, by Marika McCoola with illustrations by Emily Carroll

In this graphic novel, a motherless teenager whose father is getting remarried to a woman with an obnoxious little girl of her own decides to answer the help wanted ad Baba Yaga places in the newspaper seeking a new assistant. Having grown up on her grandmother’s detailed stories about Baba Yaga and how the witch could be outsmarted, Masha is prepared to move to the woods and use her wits to gain access to the witch’s walking home. But when one of Baba Yaga’s instructions involves cooking and children and one of those kids turns out to be her new step-sister, well, Masha is going to have to get even more creative.

I wanted to like this book more, although I can’t pinpoint where, exactly, it fell flat for me. Aimed at a middle-grade audience, it’ll likely appeal to anyone with an interest in Russian/Slavic lore.

Pages: 132. Library copy.

Stay tuned for the next installment of June’s reads, hopefully coming soon to a blog near you!