Look how cheerful my new sock is! I haven’t had enough time to sit with it to make a ton of progress, but I’m carrying it around with me and knitting on it a few minutes at a time and that’s enough right now.

On the reading front, I am listening to Katherine Arden’s The Bear and the Nightingale, which folks in my book group compared to Uprooted, which I loved. It’s unclear thus far whether that’s just because it’s set in Eastern Europe and fantastical or if there are more meaningful comparisons that will become obvious later on.

I am nearly done with Morgan Parker’s poetry collection, There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé. It’s full of sex and the music and the Black female experience, both positive and negative, and I recommend reading it.

I have started Down and Across by Arvin Ahmadi, but ran straight into the problem that a lot of books that are set in a place you know really well experience and that’s the incongruenties with your lived reality. The book references early on row houses on M Street. M Street in the section of D.C. where the story is taking places, is exclusively a retail section. And I know this is a minor detail and that I’ll get past it, but it just grated and something else came along in the meantime that I’m enjoying too much for me to go back to.

That something is A Dash of Trouble, the first in a planned series called Love Sugar Magic, a middle grade story of brujas who run a bakery and the youngest sister who stumbles onto the family secret a little earlier than she’s supposed to. This was also recommended to me from my book club (and apparently I have a fondness for magic bakery stories), and so, when I found it during Independent Bookstore Day blurbed by my favorite D.C. bookseller as being her favorite new series since Harry Potter, I bought myself a copy.

Next up (as soon as I remember to retrieve it from the bedroom when Rudi’s not sleeping in there) will be fellow Conn alum David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, which has won many accolades and which I hear is the sort of narrative nonfiction I particularly like. It’s a little more grisly than my normal reading, but is in keeping with the sort of books I read in college and grad school (when a lot of my studies focused on marginalized American cultures), so I’m hoping I can handle it.

As usual, head over to As Kat Knits for more of what folks are reading and crafting.