Knitting is slow-going these days, but I finished the Brooklyn Tweed Irving toque this past weekend. It's a belated Christmas gift for my dad.

{I asked Greg to wear it for the photo. He gave two thumbs up for the Kathmandu tweed I found at Romni Wools to use as a substitute for BT Shelter.}

Books I Read on Vacation

I've recently spent a week in North-eastern Spain.

In addition to Girls Like Us, which I had started long before we left and which I finished on a train ride from Figueres, I packed Your Voice in my Head (Emma Forrest, 2011) and Babette's Feast (Isak Dinesen, published as a short story in 1958).

I read Your Voice in my Head on the beach in Sitges, lying on a lounge chair, facing the sea, trying to stay hydrated with bottle after bottle of water. It is not a typical beach read, but in a way, reading it under the most brilliant white sun was the best way to read it.

My travel companion, Claire, and I had planned a second trip to Sitges before our flight home the following day. I read Babette's Feast in a Starbucks in Barcelona, where we took cover from the rain, trying to save the day with a latte and free Wi-Fi. Babette's Feast is a lovely short story (turned movie), which I finished before I finished my drink.

The Last Five Books I've Read

The last five books I've read, in order:

Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins (2010); The Autograph Man by Zadie Smith (2002); Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins (2010); Nights Below Station Street by David Adams Richards (1988); and Girls Like Us by Sheila Weller (2008).

Girls Like Us was the second 1970's music scene biography I read this summer. I began it a few weeks ago and just finished it on a train ride last week, breaking up the reading with many magazine and newspaper articles in the interim. It inspired me to buy a copy of Carole King's Tapestry at the record store yesterday, an album which topped charts for more than six years and won four Grammy's in 1972. Carole King was the first solo female artist to win the Grammy Award for Record of the Year, and the first female to win the Grammy Award for Song of the Year. Tapestry is still one of the best selling albums of all time.

The Last Five Books I've Read

The last five books I've read, in order:

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest by Stieg Larsson (2010); We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver (2006), though I have yet to see the movie; The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement by David Brooks (2012); The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins (2010); and Just Kids by Patti Smith (2010).

After blowing through the first two books in Stieg Larsson's Millenium trilogy, I couldn't wait to read the third. It took a week of streetcar rides and late nights during the last month of my contract at work. It was far from the strongest of the three, but it helped me to love reading again.

I read We Need to Talk About Kevin on a long weekend at the cottage. It was a very troubling book. I'm not certain I can suggest anything that redeems it.

At the first opportunity, once back in the city, I bought The Social Animal and Just Kids, two books as different from the last two as I could find.

The Social Animal was so interesting I read passages out loud on a road trip Greg and I took to the coast in early May.

Everyone who read The Hunger Games told me that they read it in one sitting, staying up late, avoiding family and friends to finish it. I was no different.

And then I read Just Kids. Patti Smith, I had no idea I would love the story of your friendship with Robert Maplethorpe as much as I did. I loved it so much that I broke down crying at the end, in a public place, in front of strangers. I drank a glass of wine, and then read the ending a second time. The setting, the 1970's and 1980's music and art scene in New York City, suited my end of work mood and properly started my summer of being a flâneur in the city.

The Last Five Books I've Read

The last five books I read, in order:

Nadja by Andre Breton (1928); Last Nights in Paris by Phillipe Soupault (1929); White Teeth by Zadie Smith (2000); The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides (2011); McSweeney's Issue 39 [This took me from after New Years until last night, when I finished the story about Carlos the Impossible (bullfighting! And the bull won!)] (2011).

Of the first two, surrealism... I suppose. They're both French, though I read them in English. Maybe something is missing from the translation. White Teeth was a book club book, but I was the only one who actually read the book and so the book club failed. The Marriage Plot I loved so much that I recommended it to other people. McSweeney's Issue 39 was 95% excellent. That last five percent is missing because I couldn't get behind a poem called "Fifty Ways to Eat Your Lover". I tried, but "When he says he needs some time off, jam his hand into a toaster oven" and "When he shows up with flowers, nibble the hair from his arms" were two of the most benign of Amelia Gray's poetic offerings and I have a weak stomach for tortured love.