It's Hip to Be a Square

Good news -- by the time I go to bed tonight, I should have one completed blanket square!

Here's what it looked like when I put it down last night. I need to knit about four more rows on the border on the left and then all that will remain is the final side of the border. I don't think I'll have any issues doing that tonight. It's still looking a little wonky, but I know that most of that will be resolved with blocking.

As I've been working on this square, I've come across a few inconsistencies within the pattern. I've been making notes to myself so that I'll have an easier time when I knit the second square -- something that I hope will happen this weekend.

This square is really all that I've been working on this week (at least that I can show you); to be honest, it feels like I haven't gotten much crafting time this week, despite having two days off. The Mister has been on a work trip since Sunday, so that's left me to do everything around the house, do all the child wrangling, and do all the drop-offs and pickups. I'm thankful that there's a long weekend coming up with only a few obligations.

Seeing as my knitting content is so sparse, how about a reading update? I've finished a few more books since I last talked about what I'd been reading.

• Sweetbitter by Stephanie Danler: I borrowed this from the library (digitally) and read it over the course of two days. I think I heard about it because it's now a Starz show, so I looked it up. For some reason, for most of the book, I had it in my head that it was a memoir -- this despite the fact that it clearly says "a novel" on the front cover. Once I realized it wasn't, I think I liked it less. I gave it 3 stars. I enjoyed the parts that were actually about working in a restaurant, but I lost interest when it got too deep into relationships, drugs, and drinking.
• Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi: I read this after Kat recommended it, and I'm so glad I did. It reminded me a great deal of Roots, but with a twist that it followed two branches of what is essentially the same family -- one side ends up in America via the slave trade and one side remains in Africa. It was a really unique take, I thought, and I really liked that each chapter told the story of a new generation. I gave it 4 stars.
• The War I Finally Won by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley: I read the first book in this two-book YA series last year and really enjoyed it, so I was happy to find the sequel available from the library. It was a quick and easy read, as you would expect from something intended for kids, and I gave it 4 stars. I felt that it tied up the story nicely while still leaving room for the story to continue.
• Forty Autumns: A Family's Story of Courage and Survival on Both Sides of the Berlin Wall by Nina Willner: This book had long been on my "want to read" list, so when I got one of those wonderful e-mails from Goodreads that the Kindle version was on sale, I snapped it up. I devoured this book -- I found it absolutely fascinating. There have been so many books written about true stories of WWII, but I don't think that before reading this I'd heard much of anything about what it was like to be behind the Iron Curtain when it fell. This book is part family history, part memoir, and I found it to be really well written. I gave it 5 stars.
• We Were the Lucky Ones by Georgia Hunter: This was the only one of this handful of books that I read in hard copy, and that meant that it took me quite a bit longer to read it (mainly because my hard-copy reading is usually limited to about 10 minutes each night before I go to bed). This book follows a Jewish family from Poland just prior to WWII through a year or so after its end, and each chapter focuses on a different family member or two. Unlike many of the books about the era that I've read, it didn't have any story line end up in a concentration camp. SPOILER ALERT! Everyone in this particular family survived, some by leaving Europe altogether and some by hiding or living as gentiles in plain sight. What makes the story even more extraordinary is that it's largely true; while certainly the author had to make up some things, all the characters are based on actual members of her family. I gave it 4 stars.

I'm currently reading only one book while I wait for a couple of holds from the library. I'd long wanted to read Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential, even before he died, so when I saw it on the book table at Costco the last time we were there, I didn't hesitate to buy it. I'm only about 50 pages in (nighttime reading strikes again!) but am enjoying it so far and hope to squeeze in some extra time with it this weekend.

If you're here in the United States, I hope you have a wonderful long weekend! If you're elsewhere, enjoy the first days of September!