I’m narrowing in on the end of the shawl. I have four more rows of mosaic work and eight rows of garter stitch before the bind-off. There are four rows of the purple — two colorwork and two plain — and while I think it may be tight, I’m hoping it’ll be okay. I have more of the pink (although how much of it has been munched on by moths and needs to be spit-spliced remains to be seen. Either way, I think that my fallback goal of having it off the needles by the start of next week is doable, although I may not have it blocked until the following weekend.

My reading currently centers around mid-1980s library fires, although wholly unintentionally. The Library Book is a nonfiction recounting of the fire that destroyed the Los Angeles Public Library’s main branch. Orlean has a very lyrical way of storytelling, so so far I’m enjoying the book. (If you didn’t know there was a massive fire at a major city library in the U.S. 30 years ago, that’s because it was the same day as the Chernobyl disaster.)

A Covert Affair is a contemporary romantic espionage novel about a librarian-cum-spy who gets involved when an ambassador and some priceless books go missing from the Library of Congress. The kidnappers make demands that relate to Operation Blue Star in India. I was woefully uninformed about this real-life event, in which a radical Sikh started espousing separatist views, the Indian government retaliated by attacking the most holy Sikh site where he was holed up, and in the aftermath the Sikh Reference Library was set ablaze. The only question that remains (in real life and in the novel) is whether the holy texts contained therein were incinerated or whether agents of the Indian government removed them first. Should you also not be familiar with Operation Blue Star, you most certainly heard of the action that resulted from it — the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.

Head to As Kat Knits for the roundup of who’s knitting and reading what.

I had hoped to have my shawl done by the end of August and to block it over Labor Day weekend, but I just haven’t put the time in on it the last few weeks to make that happen. Part because life and part because the rows are so long now that it takes almost half an hour to get a pair of them done. That said, Saturday is the National Book Festival and in rooms where I can get a seat (the children’s stages allow for standing because they’re in a cavernous room that extends a couple city blocks), I will be knitting while I listen and tweet. (I go by myself, so that’s how I make it a little less lonely and anxiety-inducing.) So I suppose it’s a possibility that I could still finish, but I won’t count on it. I’ve told myself that wrapping it up next week would still be within the two-month mark which is pretty good for me.

On the reading front, my lack of ability to concentrate on anything means I continue dipping in and out of books. Wordslut (nonfiction on feminism and linguistics) and The Kiss Quotient (adult romance) are both overdue at the library, so I should finish them up first. I’m nearly done listening to The Lady’s Guide to Petticoats and Piracy (historical fiction), which is good because it expires over the weekend. The Dust Bowl Ballads and Shuri are both graphic novels and could be finished quickly if I put my mind to them. Tove Jansson’s memoir, The Summer Book, is topical and I’d like to start it soon. There There is important, but neither a format (connected short stories) nor a topic (mass shootings and racism) I enjoy, so I keep picking it up and then putting it back down (even skimming the ending didn’t really help). Girl Waits with Gun (historical fiction) is mine and I can read it in places where it might get wet. You see how things go…

If you want to see how some people actually progress with their goals, head over to As Kat Knits for the weekly roundup.

It wasn’t until earlier this week, when Rudi and I were sitting on the patio of our local coffeehouse, that I realized my shawl matches our summer sunsets. I wanted to try to capture that, so I apologize for the wrongly focused image, but it does catch the glint of the sparkles in the purple yarn better than other shots I’ve taken.

This week’s reading has included portions of a mystery set in wintry 1920s Vermont; a contemporary mystery set in India; a detective novel set in New Jersey in 1914; a feminist guide to linguistics; a graphic novel about Black Panther‘s kick-ass hero, Shuri; and a feminist y.a. novel set in the early 18th century. So mysteries, history, and feminism, basically.

Check out what other folks are reading and working on at As Kat Knits’ Unraveled Wednesday roundup.

I admit that there’s been a lot going on around here behind the scenes recently, which hasn’t left me as focused as I’d like for knitting and reading. Half of my train travel this week was spent sleeping or drowsing and much of the other half mentally puttering, although I did pick up my knitting at each station we stopped at, offering passengers boarding the train the option of picking a seat next to me and my needles or next to someone else with less pointy occupations. (It worked to my advantage.)

I’m into the second set of mosaic knitting of the pattern, which puts me in the final third of the shawl. I love the color combination and the copper sparkle in the purple yarn (which never shows up in the photos I take) and the pattern itself. Were it not for my choosing to include a yarn that has both been munched on by moths and nicked by my ball winder’s gear (meaning I need to spit splice yarn back together with surprising frequency), I do believe I’d be done already. I recommend it to anyone who might want to work on a mosaic shawl, and I can see myself making a second one in the future (but with unnicked yarn next time).

I also thought I’d finish A Covert Affair, the second book in the Librarian and the Spy series), but I didn’t do that either. The first part of the book was set locally, but the characters are now off to India, so I’m hoping the change of scenery will interest me more. I started Hope Rides Again on the train (it seemed appropriate), but the opening chapters annoyed me. As I said to my book group today, probably what most annoys me is that real life Joe Biden continues to participate in the presidential bid, so I have very little sympathy for the fictional counterpart also engaged in that activity (as well as amateur sleuthing. But I’m also questioning some authorial choices, including having the fictional Joe reading a fictional version of the real first book in the series. It feels a little too on the nose and a little too self-congratulatory and a lot lazy, which is disappointing. I’m going to give it 50 pages, but there is a possibility it will go back to the library.

The audiobook du jour is Mackenzi Lee’s A Lady’s Guide to Petticoats and Piracy, which expired the last time I had it out before I had a chance to get very far into it. Our heroine is about to set forth for the Continent and a future in medicine and although I believe this means we will have to say farewell to Percy and Monty, I’m excited for Felicity’s prospects of getting to practice medicine again.

Head over to As Kat Knits to see what other people are reading and crafting.

My Tour de France shawl was not finished by the time the cyclists circled the Arc de Triomphe the final time, but progress does continue noticeably. It would be faster if I didn’t have to keep doing spit splices of my pink yarn. Some of the breaks were due to moth damage from a project I was working on several years ago, but I’m now also finding problems on the interior of the center pull ball, which makes me think I got it caught in the yarn winder gear, which happens periodically. It’s been probably eight years since I wound it, so I don’t have a ton of recollection about the specifics of winding it up. Either way, I’m one more repeat of the pink pattern stitch section to go before I return to more mosaic work. Keep your needles crossed for long sections of unbroken yarn.

I started Aurora Uprising by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff this week. The pair wrote The Illuminae Files trilogy, my favorite y.a. space opera series in a while, and this marks the start of a new series for them. They are good at characters and pacing and plot and impending doom, and really all you’d like for a book set in space in the future. I look forward to finishing it over the weekend while Rudi’s away biking. (I also still need to finish There There, which I’ve made progress on, and Red, White, and Royal Blue, which I haven’t picked up in a couple weeks, since they’re both overdue to the library.)

As I knit, I’m listening to The Big Kahuna by Janet Evanovich and Peter Evanovich, who replaces Lee Goldberg as coauthor for the latest installment of the Fox and O’Hare heist series. The change is not to the betterment of the series, which is disappointing. The series is not great literature in the first place (although it is a lot of fun and a quick listen), and to the younger Evanovich’s credit the word “panties” has not appeared in the first two thirds of the book, which definitely beats all the previous novels in the series.

Want to see more of what people are crafting and reading? Head to As Kat Knits for the roundup!

I have reached the first mosaic portion of my Tour de France shawl! I’m really happy that I didn’t end up settling for a different contrast yarn, holding out for finding something in my stash that really popped. It is remarkably unlikely that I’ll be done knitting by the time the cyclists are circling the Arc de Triomphe on Sunday afternoon, but I could be through this first mosaic section and maybe even through the first solid pink section, provided I’m a little more careful with not having to rip back the pattern stitch that populates the solids.

On the reading front, what you see here are the three books I picked up at the library this evening. I’m glad I brought a plastic bag with me, because I was heading to my volleyball game afterwards and a rogue rainstorm drizzled on us for over an hour. I’ve only read the first few pages of Wordslut so far, definitely not enough to form any reasonable opinion about the work.

I need to finish reading Red, White, and Royal Blue and There There, both of which are overdue to the library with long holds lists. I should be able to cross both off my list and return them this coming week.

I have a handful of chapters left of Peter Mayle’s The Vintage Caper to listen to. It’s been a light, pleasant, French-centered accompaniment to my Tour de France watching and knitting, but I am not so caught up in it that I’ll be sorry to reach its finale. That feeling is probably increased by the fact that a bunch of audiobooks have come off hold for me recently, and I have Jenny Colgan’s The Bookshop on the Shore, Janet and Peter Evanovich’s The Big Kahuna, and Tricia Levenseller’s Daughter of the Siren Queen waiting impatiently in the wings.

Want to see what other people are reading and crafting? Head over to As Kat Knits for the roundup.