1. I have accepted a job offer and start next week. The work is worthwhile, the new colleagues seem nice, and the title and salary are a step up from my last job. I am nervous and excited and feel slightly twingy in my stomach when I think about it, which I usually take to mean I should do exactly what scares me most in that moment because it’s the right decision.
2. When Rudi and I attended a concert at the start of the summer, we entered to win tickets to a future show — and Rudi won. The show was this evening, Jenny Lewis, with the opening act of The Watson Twins. It was a great show, full of harmonies and a sense of whimsy and a love of music, and I’m so glad we were able to attend.
3. I spent last Saturday afternoon tucked away in the convention center listening to writers talk about their books and processes and other miscellaneous information. I didn’t get to hear everyone on my list, but I did get to hear enough of them to be pleased with the result and I got to check out a couple new-to-me writers as well whose work I’ll be looking for at the library in the near future.
How about you? What’s been beautiful in your world lately?
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.
Count me as a fan of Neil Diamond, not because he has the rare claim of being beloved by both New Yorkers and Bostonians alike (the former because he grew up in Brooklyn and the latter because “Sweet Caroline” is considered a good luck charm of sorts at Red Sox games), but because he was a frequent guest of my parents’ record player.
Today’s Top Ten Tuesday topic from That Artsy Reader Girl asks us to share books we loved that were outside our comfort zone:
The Book of Unknown Americans by Cristina HenrÃÂquez: I mostly don’t love multi-POV novels, so it was a huge surprise that this ended up being the best book I read in 2014.
Maus 1: A Survivor’s Tale by Art Spiegelman: This was the first graphic novel I ever read, back in college when Spiegelman was coming to speak. I don’t love WWII stories and I hadn’t read a book where pictures were equally important to the story in ages.
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald: Spoiler alert: I don’t love tragic novels. But this one was so well-crafted that I couldn’t help but be impressed when I read it in grad school.
All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr: Sometimes I get swayed by all the positive reviews I see of a book, but when it isn’t for me, I quit reading. Again, WWII and multiple POVs, but in this case the short chapters and change in narrators gave me places to breathe and put the book down when things got too intense to keep reading.
Exit West by Mohsin Hamid: More war. But the lyrical prose and the distance between the reader and the main characters combined with the magical realism of doors that transcend space made this a must-read story about refugees.
The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender: When I first reviewed this book, I stated quite plainly that while I could see its appeal, I didn’t like it because I don’t like books that end in a depressing way. But when it came time to round up the best books I read in 2010, I found that it had stuck with me in a visceral way that other books hadn’t.
The entire Cormoran Strike series by Robert Galbraith: I like mysteries and detective novels, but only when they aren’t especially dark and tense. However, I also don’t like them when they’re stupid and obvious, and there’s a narrow path to walk between those two things. The more literary novels tend toward thrillers and the less uncomfortable ones tend to give the story away in the first chapter. When I’m trying to give people examples of where the line is I point them to the Cormoran Strike novels, which fall at the very extreme end of how dark a novel I can get through.
A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness: I’m pretty sure I just bawled through this entire novel, which is not how I like to enjoy my reading.
What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours by Helen Oyeyemi: I do not like short stories, but these were so well-executed and mostly much less dreary than most collections.
The Book Thief by Marcus Zuzak: While waiting unsuccessfully in line for the last panel of the day at Book Fest on Saturday, I struck up a conversation with a young woman holding a copy of this novel. I shared that I’d been put off by Death as a narrator so much that it took me forever to read it. (I took it out of the library back when it came out and then racked up library fines for six months before returning it and a large donation to the library and buying my own copy. This underlines why I appreciate D.C.’s altering their fine system because this is not the only book where this has occurred.)
How about you? Have you loved certain books in spite of their not being your usual reading fare?
A long weekend is definitely time to look at life through rose(ate spoonbill)-colored glasses. Feel free to (Goeldi’s) monkey around — you deserve to goof off during a three-day weekend!
