Joining Kat and her merry band of Unravelers. Go see what the others are up to.

Knitting.

Reading.

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The Narrowboat Summer / Anne Youngson. I finished this one. It was a delightful book about something I knew little about. If you happen to follow Lucy Neatby on Instagram you have seen her photos of her vacations on a narrowboat. More: #Narrowboatlife. 4★

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Maid / Nita Prose. The titular character is somewhere on the spectrum. She was raised by her grandmother, who explained the world and its rules to her so she could survive. But Gran is dead now, and Molly must interpret things on her own. She is a lovable character who becomes a murder suspect. But the friends she has made save her. 4★

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HumanKind: Changing the World One Small Act At a Time / Brad Aronson. I have been reading bits of this for a few weeks; it is a mood lifter, for sure. It is a collection of essays, each one about one person’s act of kindness that grew into something much bigger: a woman cooks and delivers a meal to an elderly neighbor, it grows into a network of people doing the same thing. I recommend everyone have this book on their shelf and read a story or three whenever it seems the world is full of sh!theads and a$$holes. 5★

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The Fallen Stones / Diana Marcum. Non-fiction account of the author’s year(s) on a butterfly farm/sanctuary on a hilltop in Belize. What started out as a vacation ended up becoming a passion that lived through a hurricane and a pandemic. 3★

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The Maid’s Diary / Loreth Anne White. A suspense novel about a house cleaner with a compulsive snooping habit. As her friend warns her, this could lead to her knowing dangerous things about an employer. Lots of twists and turns in this one. 3★

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Night Angels / Weina Dai Randel. A Kindle freebie that I should have liked more than I did. It is a novel based on the true story of a Chinesee diplomat and his wife who risked their lives to help Viennese Jews escape the Nazis. 3★

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The Devil You Know / P.J. Tracy. This is #3 in the Detective Margaret Nolan series by this author. Back when P.J. Tracy was a mother-daughter team, their books were better; mom died in 2016 and daughter carries on. The prose is overwrought and wordy. Not sure I’m gonna finish this one. 2★

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David Copperfield / Charles Dickens. I wanted to read this, the original, before reading the current best seller based on it, Demon Copperhead. Little did I realize it was 790 pages of small print, narrow margins. I may have read a condensed version as a child, but never the full monte. Dickens is amazingly readable for a 19th century author, though, so I am enjoying it so far. 4★

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Mark Twain for Cat Lovers / Mark Dawidziak. Did you know Mark Twain loved cats? He had dozens over the course of his life and incorporated felines in many of his writings. The book turned out to be not as interesting as I expected, so I didn’t finish. Back to David Copperfield!

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Listening.

The Four Winds / Kristin Hannah. This is a heartbreaking story about the refugees from the Dust Bowl states and how they were treated when they got to California. It started slow but got much better. (I finished this the same day I finished Night Angels, above, both books about how humans make other humans The Other so they can treat them like animals…or worse.) 4★

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Local Woman Missing / Mary Kubica. Read the Goodreads summary at the link. I am in the middle of this one and cannot possibly describe it. 3★ so far.

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Watching.

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New Amsterdam on Netflix. Imagine my delight when last week season 3 dropped on Netflix! I was nearly done with season 2 and contemplating what to choose next. Now I am good for another few weeks.

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The Big Short. What a depressing movie. It reinforced every negative impression I ever had of the New York City financial ecosystem. I worked for seven years in the far-far-flung suburbs of that ecosystem (mix metaphors much, Kat?) and what I saw in the movie rang true. 5★