The Best Things in my Brain, November 2025

I’ve always been a person who loves to learn and find new things and share them with others, but these things don’t always warrant a full blog or social media post. So I’m offering a once a month, short and sweet post on the best things I learned, read, heard, or saw recently.

I’ve been reading a lot lately, so the November Best Things is all about book recommendations! Please note, the Bookshop.org link in this post is an affiliate links, and I do get a small amount if you purchase.

Also, I hope you’re enjoying the new sidebar (or footer if you’re reading on your phone)! Most of my blog traffic comes directly to a specific post from Pinterest, so the sidebar will hopefully encourage a few of those folks to explore a little further while they’re here. Plus, the aesthetic gets me closer to those early 2000s craft blogs that I’m trying to bring back!

Best Thing in my Brain, Craft Edition:

I have recommended Ysolda Teague’s size charts to my clients for years as one of the more comprehensive, size-inclusive charts available for garment design. Recently the tech editor book club I’m in read Little Red in the City, which I missed when it came out initially. This is a great companion to those size charts and an excellent resource for anyone (designer or maker) who wants to make handknits that fit well! It is primarily written for makers (I’d recommend it for advanced beginner knitters and up), but designers dipping into graded garments will find a lot of food for thought here as well. She self-published this book, and you can still purchase the e-book from her website here.

Best Thing in my Brain, Non-Craft Edition:

The Last Days of the Dinosaurs: An Asteroid, Extinction, and the Beginning of Our World by Riley Black (Bookshop.org link)

This is possibly the best science nonfiction book I’ve ever read – definitely the best I’ve read in decades. This book has a truly unique structure — the first half is a narrative of the massive asteroid collision with Earth billions of years ago that caused the dinosaurs (and a large chunk of all living species on earth at the time) to go extinct, while the second half explains how the author collected the facts on which the narrative was based from current paleontology studies. The first half is a gripping tale, and the second becomes a fascinating look at both how scientific understanding of the time before human existence has evolved and how fossils and other geologic markers are used to help scientists come to that understanding.

I enjoyed this book so much that when my library borrowing period expired when I was halfway through, I returned it but immediately placed a new hold so I could finish it – I basically NEVER do this, but rather than try to rush through the last half I knew I wanted to give myself time to really absorb it, even if I had to wait for about a month to get it back.

What’s the best thing currently in your brain?