I know this looks a lot like the photo I posted two weeks ago, and you’d be right. I’ve made slow progress in Modern Lovers, in part because the border of the shawl required too much attention to work from a print book as I went, so I’ve been listening to audiobooks instead. I finished Louise Penny’s Still Life, which I enjoyed well enough, and have moved on to The Heist, a romantic caper by Stephanie Evanovich and Lee Goldberg. Modern Lovers is about a third done and nearly a week overdue, so hopefully I’ll get it finished up this weekend in time for a trip to the library.

The expanded border is completely done, as is the first ball of yarn, nearly. The stripy section begins next, as do mindless knitting, the final two balls of yarn, and regular decreases. I’m looking forward to all of it (although carrying three balls worth of yarn in my courier bag is definitely going to be a little more tricky than just toting around the one. The Tour de France ends on Sunday, and while it’s possible that I might finish in time, it’s not looking overly optimistic unless I find the stripes far faster than I expect to. That said, I’d guess that it’ll be done before the end of the month, which will let me get back to my purse-friendly Hitchhiker as I figure out my knitting project for the Ravellenic Games to be knit during the Olympics. Will it be the traditional August finishing of the socks? Or will finishing new projects be so addictive I need to start something else? Things to consider…

Yarning along with Ginny at Small Things.

Every year the Tour de France comes along and the knitalong I do pops up and I’m torn between finishing something previously started and starting something new. I’ve competed in the former category the past few years, and so this year decided to give something new a shot. (Yes, I do recognize my Hitchhiker was going really well and that this may not have been the smartest plan. The heart wants what the heart wants.)

A yellow jersey project requires a certain amount of fortitude (and stitches), and while I yearned to cast on something gorgeous and delicate, like Rock Island, I decided to listen to Rudi’s advice of not making it so complicated I had to become a hermit. While flipping through the stash on the hunt for a different yarn, I turned up three skeins I’d bought years ago to make Andrea’s Shawl. Since that pattern was also already paid for and in my possession, I decided to do a little stash-busting.

This shawl is knit from its widest point to its narrower end after you knit the entire border. It’s an easily memorized four-row repeat, so I’ve been working on it while watching racing coverage and also while listening to an audiobook, Trouble Is a Friend of Mine by Stephanie Tromly. The story and the characters are fun (Girl moves to new town, where an abduction has recently taken place; a boy loops her into an investigation of the case, which resembles a similar abduction from eight years earlier. He’s quirky; she’s angry. Hijinks ensue.), but listening to it highlights that it needed additional editing that may not as been as obvious when reading it on the page. There are whole sections of dialogue that run like this:

“Simple sentence,” she said.
“A different simple sentence,” he said.
“More simple, more said,” she said.
“Getting the picture?” he said.

An editor should have pared down all of those extraneous “he/she saids,” particularly when it’s just two characters in the scene. As underscored when reading Mansfield Park earlier this year, not having enough attribution in dialogue can be confusing, but it doesn’t need to be every single line. If I weren’t enjoying it otherwise, I’d throw in the towel just for that reason (or switch to print, where, as I said, I might not have noticed it as much), because it keeps making me grit my teeth. But I am, so I’ll finish it off this week.

I’m only a few more pages into Modern Lovers than I was last week (having finished and started two different books in the meantime).

Look! Color changes! Thirteen more teeth than last week! This continues to be mindless knitting easily worked on during tv, meetings, and baseball games.

I realized late last week that I really wasn’t enjoying Big Magic. I may skim a few sections later in the book to see if she ever gets around to something that resonates with me, but otherwise I may give it up. (Giving up a book during the library’s summer reading program is painful, but that really ought not to be a reason to keep reading a book that sprains my eye-rolling muscles.)

Instead, I’ve turned to two books relevant to my summer holidays. Summer of the Gypsy Moths is written by a woman from and takes place in the Cape Cod town where we vacationed earlier this month. We’ve started out the book with a dead (of natural causes) body (which two pre-teen girls are going to bury in the garden), so it definitely catches you.

Modern Lovers has appeared on every summer reading list I’ve seen this year and focuses on a group of college friends in their forties. How could I, in the year of my 20th reunion from college not at least give it a shot? I’m looking forward to getting started on it tomorrow.

(Apologies for the glare-filled shot. I dozed off on the couch after volleyball tonight and am too tired to retake it.)

What are you reading these days?

Yarning along with Ginny at Small Things.

Summer reading continues apace. I finished three books last week while on vacation and one since returning home. These are the two I’m currently working on:

Big Magic I’m reading for the #TBRTakedown on Twitter. One of the challenges was to read a book outside our comfort zone and self-help by an author whose first book I didn’t particularly like definitely qualifies. Lots of people put it on their best-of lists last year, though, including some who didn’t love Eat, Pray, Love, so I figured I’d give it a chance. The Unexpected Everything is a recent release YA contemporary featuring the daughter of a Connecticut senator and her father the summer he experiences a scandal at the office. The first couple chapters were long and slow, possibly because my head was still wrapped up in the ending of Carry On, the book I’d just finished prior to starting it, but I hear it picks up. (It’ll count for a book from my most recent haul in the Takedown if I finish it this week.)

While I read a lot on vacation, I didn’t knit much. I’ve only got seven Hitchhiker teeth so far, but I’m approaching the end of the red, I think. I’ve got a meeting to sit through tomorrow and a film tomorrow evening if the rain holds off, though, so I should get a couple more teeth done before the weekend.

Right there you see the first two “teeth” of my new Hitchhiker shawl. I started it a month or so ago and had difficulty keeping track of which row I was on, but a tip on Ravelry about where to put a stitch marker to keep track of the stitches helped immensely, and I can now see it becoming a project I can work on while around others.

Hamilton (better known on social media as #Hamiltome) is filled with essays about the source material, actors, staff, and history of this weekend’s presumptive Tony Winner. It’s also contains an annotated libretto by Lin-Manuel Miranda with notes about where he was when he wrote particular songs, the raps and musicals that inspired certain lines, and where his version differs from the actual story (such as that there were a ton of Schuyler brothers or that the band of brothers introduced in the tavern during “My Shot” don’t actually meet that early in the story). I’m through the first act and am looking forward to reading (and listening) along into the final act in weeks to come.

I picked up Adam Shaughnessy’s The Entirely True Story of the Unbelievable Fib over the weekend and finished it tonight. It’s a middle-grade novel about Pru, a sixth-grade “detective” (whose last investigation into the Sasquatch sighted in the school parking lot gets her detention from the teacher whose new fur coat had just been publicly maligned), and her new classmate ABE, who find themselves in the middle of a Norse-god-themed mystery. Adam was a classmate and fellow English major at my alma mater and I bought the book because I was curious and wanted to be supportive. I can now say he’s written an enjoyable book, with a bunch of passages I particularly liked, such as his opening paragraph:

The envelopes arrived during the uncertain hours of Thursday morning — those dark, early hours between tomorrow and yesterday, between not-quite-yet and nevermore. It’s a time when the day is still young, still taking shape, and still open to possibility.

I liked those lines immediately when I began the book on Saturday, but having just finished it, I can see they pretty much summarize the theme of the novel. If you like kid lit fantasy, like the Percy Jackson or Artemis Fowl series, or mystery, like Harriet the Spy or the Enola Holmes series, I’d recommend you pick the book up.

I look forward to reading the second one, which will be out in the fall.

Yarning along with Ginny at Small Things.

Several bookish items to check off today:

First, here’s my Yarning Along photo. I picked up Paper Girls, a graphic novel written by Brian Vaughan about a quartet of middle-school paper girls back on Nov. 1, 1988, when weird goings-on start up in their hometown of Cleveland. I was a middle-school paper girl myself on that date, and although very little supernatural happened to me at the time, I couldn’t help but pick it up when I saw it on sale at Comic Book Day last weekend.

The knitting is my vanilla sock that just so happens to match my new book. I’m through the heel decreases and back to foot knitting thanks to a work meeting and some tv time.

My Bout of Books progress is going well. In addition to my above reading, I’m also still listening to Ally Carter’s All Fall Down and reading Mansfield Park, where I just passed the halfway point today. I’m hopeful two of the three will be done by the end of the week and may check a third book off, as well.

Tomorrow’s challenge asks us to recommend a book, and I’m happy to comply. If you like light crime/crime solving with an Audrey Hepburn-like lead, a merry band of urchins, and a Parisian setting, I recommend you check out Bandette, Vol. 1: Presto, a graphic novel by Paul Tobin and Colleen Coover. The sequel was another one of the graphic novels I picked up over the weekend, and I can’t wait to see what happens next in this fun caper.

Finally, today was the first day of Armchair BEA, and organizers asked us to introduce ourselves by answering some questions:

1. What is the name you prefer to use? I go by many names, but Sprite is probably how I’m best known online.

2. How long have you been a book blogger? I have been blogging since 2005 and published my first book review in my first week of publishing.

3. Have you participated in ABEA before? This will be my fourth year.

4. Do you have a favorite book? I know it sounds trite to say Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone, but I’m going to say it anyway. When I’m feeling low or am in a reading slump, I know that finding myself back on Privet Lane will get me through it.

5. If you could recommend one other book blogger, who would it be and why? Raidergirl3, who blogs from Prince Edward Island, writes An Adventure in Reading, and was probably the first book blogger I followed. She likes audiobooks and crime series and fantasy novels, so I guess I like her because we have similar taste and therefore I feel confident that if she likes something there’s a good chance I’ll like it, as well.

6. How do you arrange your bookshelves? Is there a rhyme or reason? Or not at all? Two rows of one bookshelf contain favorite series, including Alcott, Fforde, Tolkein, Montgomery, Lewis, Rowling, and Wilder. (They also contain a book that belonged to my dad’s aunt that my grandmother passed on to me as a child, my favorite Seuss, my bible, and my now ancient dictionary and thesaurus.) After that, there’s sort of a loose organization, with knitting books in one spot and poetry in another and writing books yet another. Language books are by the door. Cookbooks are on the butcher block. Fiction is everywhere. Library books are in a bag next to my chair.

7. What book are you most excited for on your TBR? What are you most intimidated by? On my overall TBR list? Good god, that’s thousands of books! Ummm… At this moment, I’m staring at Rainbow Rowell’s Carry On, which I’m excited to finally get to this spring. I don’t know that any book particularly intimidates me, but there are some that I feel like I ought to read, rather than that I want to read them, and at the top of that list is Thoreau’s Walden, which I tried reading several times several years ago unsuccessfully.