I’m a little further along on my sock foot than I was last week. I’m also about a third of the way through Jo & Laurie by Margaret Stohl and Melissa de la Cruz. And in audiobooks, I’m past the halfway point on The Bookshop of Second Chances and most of the way through No Time like the Future, Michael J. Fox’s latest memoir.

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I’m onto the foot of my first rainbow and clouds sock. Maybe I’ll finish it while I’m up visiting my folks.

I finished the print book I’d been reading and am now just picking which library books that are due soon after I get back to town I should take for vacation reading. Arsenic and Adobo by Mia P. Manansala is one possibility.

On Overdrive, I’m about halfway through Jackie Fraser’s The Bookshop of Second Chances. I’ve got a couple memoirs for Rudi and me to listen to on the drive — Michael J. Fox’s most recent one and the book Amber Ruffin wrote with her sister, Lacey Lamar.

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The Tour de France begins five weeks from today, which unless something drastic happens, my annual knitalong begins then, too.

I loved the shawl I made in 2020, after passing by the pattern at least twice. And I’ve loved other shawls I’ve knit as part of that knitalong. I don’t always rarely finish in the allotted time period, but at least they get done, as opposed to sweaters I’ve attempted to make. So, I think I’ll start now looking over shawl patterns I like and thinking about the yarn I own. That way I won’t spend the first couple days of the knitalong futzing around, mulling options and wasting precious knitting time.

Expect a couple posts about this in the meantime as I mull options. Part of the fun is getting folks to weigh in, even if I don’t promise to heed your advice. (Rudi absolutely did not love Reyna, but adores how it looks in the skein of yarn he’d given me the previous Christmas.)

I got through the heel of my sock during a conference call yesterday and am on to the foot. At least I think I am. I decreased the heel more than usual, so I need to try on the sock once the foot’s a little longer to make sure it doesn’t muck up the fit.

And I started two new books. On paper, it’s Sonya Lalli’s Serena Singh Flips the Script. Set in my neighborhood, it’s the story of a young woman figuring out how to find your people as an adult. I heard about it on my birthday weekend as part of an author event hosted by one of my local bookshops. So far, so good, which makes me happy, because one of her other titles has been in my audiobooks queue for a while.

And in my ears, it’s The Bookshop of Second Chances by Jackie Fraser about a middle-aged English woman who, after losing her marriage and her job in near proximity, discovers she’s inherited a great uncle’s Scottish house and library of first editions. It just so happens there’s a kind-hearted but curmudgeonly antiquarian bookseller in town…

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Just last night I wrapped up Murder on Cold Street, the latest Lady Sherlock novel by Sherry Thomas, and I’m still feeling a bit of a reading hangover from my favorite series, not quite willing to let go of my thoughts about Charlotte and Livia and Mrs. Watson and Ash. So I’m not quite sure yet where I’ll land yet on a print read, but it might be the comic collection of Check, Please!: Sticks and Scones by Ngozi Ukazu, about a hockey team at a small New England liberal arts college. I also wrapped up an audiobook this week, but I’ve moved on to A Deadly Inside Scoop by Abby Collette, the first in a new cozy mystery series set at an ice cream parlor in the Cleveland suburbs. I’m finding the reader’s style distracting and, for the first time, have sped up the speed in an attempt to see if that makes her less off putting. If it doesn’t, I may need to switch to paper on that one.

With my rainbow socks at the heel, I’m also feeling a little disconnected from my knitting. But I’ve started carrying around the bag that contains the Lightning Shawl, my oldest semi-active UFO, so I’m inclined to think that wants to come out of hibernation again. When I pulled it out of the bag to photograph, I discovered the needle and project had become detached, so some actual unraveling was necessitated to get the two reconnected once again. I think this had gone into timeout in its final strip because I’m working with scraps at this point and there was a weird blending that happened at the very midpoint of the shawl that looked unpleasantly obvious, so I don’t think that will end up having been even a minor setback. But wouldn’t it be great if 2021 were the year this finally became a wearable item, eight years after I started it?

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This week’s knitting and reading is just a continuation of what was begun last week. I continue to love my new socks, and Sherry Thomas has yet to disappoint me with her Lady Sherlock series.

I’m past the halfway point in the latest Fox and O’Hare audiobook. Evanovich’s latest co-author, Steve Hamilton, is himself a well-regarded author, and this story is a more solid caper than the last one in the series, which was written with her son. However, I’m starting to realize that secondary characters must belong to co-authors, because this is now the second book in a row to forego bringing in Nick Fox’s Irregulars. I enjoyed the wackiness of that group and this book, while a perfectly fine addition to the heist oeuvre, is a much more Serious Story with moments of levity provided by circumstance (Kate ends up in the drink twice in a single day) than by characters.

Head over to As Kat Knits if you’re interested in what others are reading and crafting.