Don’t you just want to judge these books by their covers?

I finished The Assassination of Brangwain Surge by M.T. Anderson and Eugene Yelchin earlier tonight. If you like fantasy novels and Brian Selnick’s latest tomes, which alternate prose and illustration, I think you should give this middle grade book a shot.

The others are what I’m on to next: Martina Benjamin’s Insomnia, which has a sparkly purple cover, like the night sky — that my photo does not do justice to, is a collections of musings on not sleeping in the middle of the night. Circe by Madeline Miller takes on the goddess of magic. And A Winter’s Promise about a young woman who travels via ark until she is promised in marriage to a man from a floating sky island.

I’m still listening to The Woman Who Smashed Codes, but it expires very soon, so I need to power through it. We’re currently in the inter-war years in D.C. and Elizebeth Friedman has just quit working for the War Department, but knowing the course of her cryptology work, I suspect not for long.

I’m nearly to the heel of my sock; I gave it a day at this length to decide if I wanted to stop here, but I think I’ll do another repetition of the colors before moving on. Stripes have the two-fold benefit of making it easy to compare length and keeping progress moving forward. I’ll just knit until the next time it turns blue, you think, and an hour later you’re saying the same thing. Just one more color change! Just one more chapter!

Exactly. Keep telling yourself that, self!

Check out other posts about books and crafting at As Kat Knits.

Today’s Top Ten Tuesday topic from That Artsy Reader Girl asks for the ten most recent additions to my to-read list.

Today’s youth media awards from the American Library Association (they’re the folks who give out the Caldecott and Newbery and other prizes) added several books to my list including:

1. Sam Graham-Felsen’s Green
2. Courtney Summers’ Sadie
3. The Fox on a Swing by Evelina Daciūtė

Last week I partook of the #AskaLibrarian chat on Twitter and sought recommendations for books that would make me laugh. Raidergirl3 and others offered suggestions, including:

4. Stories from the Vinyl Cafe by Stuart McLean
5. Unclaimed Baggage by Jen Doll

A sequel to a book I read last week:

6. The Tea Dragon Festival by Katie O’Neill

A recommendation from the Bout of Books:

7. The Gilded Wolves by Roshani Chokshi

The next novels from three favorite authors:

8. A Dangerous Collaboration by Deanna Raybourn
9. The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern
10. Wayward Son by Rainbow Rowell

What have you recently added to your TBR list?

As you can probably see, I didn’t write either longer blog post I hoped to finish, but that doesn’t mean I accomplished nothing on this mild winter weekend.

I saw the sunrise on Saturday when I went to buy bagels. Corey and I then went back to bed, which is the only reasonable reaction to seeing the sun rise.

I went to Georgetown to the library, where I used their printer and picked up my hold and checked out the progress of the bulbs on Book Hill.

I then moseyed down to Baked & Wired for a cup of hot chocolate. The key during busy times is to forego cupcakes and other major sweets in favor of drinks (and, if you want, quick breads), because there’s rarely a line for the latter but almost always a line for the former on nice days.

Rudi and I made homemade pizza before he had to turn in for the night.

Today, I visited the farmers market for some vegetables and worked on getting my ukulele in tune. (I think I need new strings, because these are ancient and do not want to remain taut. Luckily, there’s a music shop a couple metro stops away, so there’s a task for later in the week.) Late in the afternoon, I headed to a local coffeehouse where I sat out on their patio for a while, listening to my audiobook and working on my sock. As I was walking home, I spotted some forsythia, a mid-winter staple in the area. (It was in focus in real life.)

Rudi and I concluded the weekend by watching the live-ish performance of Rent on tv — quite enjoyable.

I hope you also had a nice final January weekend!

Snowdrops by the bus stop to Georgetown.

This is the final weekend of January. Here’s how I’m thinking I’ll spend it:

• Spend time with Rudi. I think this the last weekend he’s around for a while with the ski race season peaking in February and all-weekend coaching duties calling, so that tops on my list. However, he’ll be gone during the day both days, so I also hope to…
• Hang up fairy lights around the perimeter of the room. We didn’t get them up before our December party, and then there was a tree preventing us from getting them all the way around the room. Since it’s now sitting on the curb awaiting composting and since we have many more months of darkness ahead (although way less each day than a month ago), I think this is an appropriate way to welcome February.
• Wash laundry. Now that I no longer have a tree taking up so much of my living room, we can once again use our larger laundry rack in its usual spot, rather than having to do the drying on the small rack in the bathtub (which we are grateful was an option).
• Buy bread. The bakery we like so much at the summer downtown farmers market will be doing a pop-up tomorrow just a mile away. I just need to get there before 12:30.
• Go to Georgetown. To the library in particular, since I have a hold that came in there that I forgot about that expires on Sunday.
• Eat pizza. There’s no real reason for this except pizza.
• Cuddle Corey. Both he and I need more snuggles right now.
• Play my ukulele. (That was the only thing from last weekend’s to-do list I didn’t get to.)
• Finish a book. I have several of the Cybils finalists out right now and would love to be able to have finished a whole category before the winners are announced on Valentine’s Day. I’d also like to get partway caught up with Middlemarch, which the library in the next town over is doing a group read of.
• Write a couple of longer blog posts, including the one where I figure out the best books I read last year.
• Enjoy the outside. There’s a rain storm and a cold day or two due mid-week, so I’d rather take advantage of nicer weather to be outdoors.

How about you? What are you hoping to do this weekend?

Today has been an absolutely craptastic day. I briefly considered that nothing seemed beautiful, but I know that’s not true from the perspective of one less dented in spirit than I, so I capitulated to tradition, against my lesser angels.

Here are three beautiful things from my past week:

1. Our friend Heidi had not an inkling when she returned home from dinner with friends that her her house was crammed with guests who wanted to wish her a happy 50th birthday.

2. I surrender the joy of bashing graham crackers to smithereens to Rudi as we make chocolate-butterscotch bars for tea.

3. On New Year’s Eve, one of the films we watched was On the Basis of Sex, the biopic of Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s formative law school and early career years. I was so captured by it (and by its local subject) that I borrowed the documentary RBG from the library. I’m delighted to report that it is also delightful and you will find the justice to be even more captivating after watching it than you thought before. (And it’s nominated for an Oscar in the documentary category, in case you care about that sort of thing.)

How about you? What’s been beautiful in your world lately?