It’s time for the final Bout of Books readathon for 2021.

The Bout of Books readathon is organized by Amanda Shofner and Kelly Rubidoux Apple. It’s a weeklong readathon that begins 12:01 a.m. Monday, August 16, and runs through Sunday, August 22, in YOUR time zone. Bout of Books is low-pressure. There are reading sprints, Twitter chats, and exclusive Instagram challenges, but they’re all completely optional. For all Bout of Books 32 information and updates, be sure to visit the Bout of Books blog. – From the Bout of Books team

I’d like to finish one of the two print books I’m actively reading this week and read a majority of the days this week. But if that doesn’t happen, I know not to stress about it. There is no failing at Bout of Books, after all!

Today’s weather forecast promised to be unsettled, so I’d expected to spend a large part of it indoors. However, the storms west of us kept breaking up as they came over the mountains, giving us an ever later target for when to expect the rain and lightning — first early afternoon, then teatime, then after sunset, and finally sometime overnight.

This meant we were able to spend hours at the pool and then wrap up the evening on the patio of our local watering hole (also, a yuppy grocery store) — and that we could also take our chances with not watering the garden.

As I type this, the rain has moved in. It’s not heavy enough to hear it over the a/c, but Rudi could hear it when he went into the bedroom. My phone just warned me of flash floods, but I am tucked inside for the night, so I think it will be fine. But maybe I’ll go check the dry bags by the window just to be safe.

Here’s what I’m thinking I might get up to for the rest of the weekend:

• Swim, just preferably not immediately before the thunderstorms are expected Saturday afternoon.
• Go to the library to return a dvd and pick up some things coming off the hold list.
• Cook tomatoes. (I reserved a flat that I need to pick up at the farmers market.)
• Knit more on my shawl, now that I’ve fixed my error.
• Read, preferably outside.
• Get my volleyball team organized for the fall.
• Do laundry.
• Paint my nails.
• Clean the kitchen.
• Replace the batteries on the fairy lights.

Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. Work gave us Friday off as a staff appreciation day. I’m going to appreciate starting my long weekend by sleeping in tomorrow.

2. I participated in a gift exchange last month, but my Santa fell through. It happens sometimes, and I try not to take it personally. But the swap organizer emailed today to say I shouldn’t despair; she and some other participants were taking over as elves.

3. One of our summer interns wrapped up her time with us this week. Her last act was to send me an email telling me how much she’d learned and enjoyed her internship and how much my hands-on approach to mentoring had been something she’d really appreciated.

How about you? What’s been beautiful in your world lately?

If you look closely at my knitting, you will see that the rows on the left, tucked under my book, do not match the earlier ribbing section on the right. That’s because I didn’t do it correctly, so the ripping out of a couple rows is imminent. I just need to grab a small needle to facilitate picking the stitches back up. That’s what happens when you get cocky and don’t look at your pattern quite closely enough.

I told Rudi when we got to the beach on Monday that if I didn’t finish Gods of Jade and Shadow while we were there, we’d need to come back at least once more. It has been my beach book this summer, and I don’t want to start reading it not at the beach. While I’m nearly halfway done and enjoying it, the action hasn’t gotten so intense that I feel bad leaving Casiopea and the God of Death on their own in between trips.

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

For this week’s Top Ten Tuesday, That Artsy Reader Girl asks us to share which secondary characters need their own books. Although this is a favorite topic of mine, this was harder than I thought it would be:

1. Gigi, the Brown sisters’ grandmother in the Talia Hibbert series
2. Eshna Raje, the oldest cousin in Sonali Dev’s Austen-inspired series (since I have confirmation from the author there will only be four books in the series, rather than the six I’d hoped for, I’m now hoping Eshna’s story gets a happy ending in the final book (although I expect the main character to be the youngest Raje sibling).
3. Isola Pribby from The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
4. Luigi Lemoncello of Escape from Mr. Lemoncello’s Library
5. Georgie and Clem of The Greenglass House
6. Rosa Ramona Díaz’s mother (when she was a girl) from A Properly Unhaunted Place
7. Angelica from With the Fire on High
8. June Claremont-Diaz from Red, White, and Royal Blue
9. Garrison Griswold from Book Scavenger
10. Berta Lundgren from The Discreet Retrieval Agency books

How about you? Are there favorite secondary or tertiary characters you’d like to have tell their own stories?