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.