I haven’t knit on my sock in a couple of days, but I take it up to the park with me each evening, along with my book, which I have been working on. I’d thought I’d leave A Murderous Relation until later, because it looks distinctly possible that what was once a two-week slog could go on for months. But this week has been more painful than I expected, and time with Veronica and Stoker is comforting, which seems like an odd things to say about a book set in London with main characters pursuing Jack the Ripper.

I should resume listening to The Bride Test by Helen Hoang, but it hasn’t quite captured my interest the way I’d hoped it would. I have downloaded Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman for Rudi and me to listen to together. And I also just added the next Inspector Gamache novel, Cruelest Month, to aptly take me into April.

Unraveling along with As Kat Knits.

(No, my computer isn’t fixed yet, but washing the dishes gave my old tablet enough time to charge.)

My top ten titles on my spring tbr list:

1. Recipe for Persuasion by Sonali Dev
2. Clap When You Land by Elizabeth Acevedo
3. Shuri: A Black Panther Novel by Nic Stone
4. Aurora Burning by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff
5. Check, Please!, Book 2: Sticks and Scones by Ngozi Ukazu
6. The List of Things That Will Not Change by Rebecca Stead
7. The Happy Ever After Playlist by Abby Jimenez
8. Mulan by Grace Lin
9. Orphan Eleven by Gennifer Choldenko
10. By the Book by Amanda Sellet

How about you? What books are you looking forward to this spring?

D.C.’s public library gave us the advantage of a couple days’ notice that they were going to close for the rest of the month, which meant that I had the opportunity to add a few things — mostly cookbooks and dvds — to the burgeoning collection of materials I already had checked out.

DVDs:

• The Big Year (I’m not a huge fan of Steve Martin, Jack Black, or the Wilson brothers singly, let alone in combination, but I’m hopeful.)
• Rush Hour (I never saw the original movie, but I enjoyed the tv remake that came out a couple years back, which friends assure me was sometimes based line for line on its source material.)
• Spy (I like Melissa McCarthy and am hopeful this will fall on the silly side of funny, rather than stupid.)
• Spider-Man, into the Spider-Verse (I have seen it. And loved it. And wanted to see it again.)
• Charlie’s Angels (We missed it when it was in the theaters last fall, probably due to my volleyball schedule. I know it got terrible reviews. Probably I would have watched it anyway.)
• Veronica Mars: Season 1 (This is the new tv show. No, we didn’t watch the original tv show and the series is old enough that our library system has all the seasons broken up into multiple dvds, so you can’t really request them and instead have to wander around the various branches searching out the discs you need. We understand the overall concept, if not all the nuance.)
• Frankie Drake Mysteries. The complete second season
• The Goldfinch (Honestly, even the preview for this movie made me anxious, but I still wanted to watch it. I just might not have picked it up right now if it hadn’t already been on hold for me.)
• Brooklyn Nine-Nine: Season 5

Nonfiction

• Sheet Pan Suppers Meatless by Raquel Pelzel
• Great British Bake Off — Bake It Better. No. 8: Pastry & Patisserie by Joanna Farrow
• Red Truck Bakery Cookbook by Brian Noyes (All three of these were picked up yesterday, when the urge to start stress baking on a daily basis started rearing its head.)
• The Library Book by Susan Orlean (Yes, I’ve had this out for like six months. Apparently it’ll be mine for at least one more.)
• Dreyer’s English by Benjamin Dreyer (This has also been checked out to me for a while, but I haven’t started it. Guess I have time now…)
• The First Dinosaur: How Science Solved the Greatest Mystery on Earth by Ian Lendler (Ian was my childhood neighbor and is the first person who introduced me to Tolkein.)

Adult Fiction

• A Murderous Relation by Deanna Raybourn
• The Travelers by Regina Porter
• The Bookish Life of Nina Hill by Abbi Waxman
• Red Letter Days by Sarah Jane Stratford

YA Fiction

• Wayward Son by Rainbow Rowell (I need to find and reread Carry On, and now, apparently, I have time to figure out where my copy is.)
• I’m Not Dying with You Tonight by Kimberly Jones (Seems about right for our current situation, although it’s actually about race relations.)
• Don’t Date Rosa Santos by Nina Moreno
• Sorcery of Thorns by Margaret Rogerson
• The Downstairs Girl by Stacey Lee
• The Beast Player by Nahoko Uehashi

Middle-Grade Fiction

• Tristan Strong Punches a Hole in the Sky by Kwame Mbalia
• The Remarkable Journey of Coyote Sunrise by Dan Gemeinhart
• Song for a Whale by Lynne Kelly
• Homerooms & Hall Passes by Tom O’Donnell
• Crush by Svetlana Chmakova
• Roll with It by Jamie Sumner
• Stargazing by Jen Wang
• Each Tiny Spark by Pablo Cartaya
• Other Words for Home by Jasmine Warga

Do you have materials out from the library to help you through your hours at home?

That right there is not a nearly completed pair of Sock Madness socks, close to being finished by Saturday’s noon deadline so I can advance to the next round.

Nor is it a nearly finished single Sock Madness sock that will allow me to keep receiving patterns.

But what it is is a start to a sock I’m enjoying making. And that will just have to be enough this year.

I’m several chapters into The Bookish Life of Nina Hill, which I’d like to be enjoying more than I am. I am hopeful that now that we’ve introduced everyone and set up the plot the story will pick up a little more, but so far it’s a bit thin and thinks itself a bit more clever than it actually is. If it doesn’t improve, I may just let it go back to the library.

I finished Louise Penny’s Fatal Grace on audio and now have Tara Westover’s Educated to start and Helen Hoang’s The Bride Test to finish.

Head to As Kat Knits for a roundup of what others are reading and crafting.

Tonight on Twitter, a meme was going around asking us to share our top nine albums from the 1990s. Lists like that are arbitrary, and, much like any list, will vary from day to day as to what my response will include.

Like many of my Gen X friends, the ’90s was a crucial decade for me. It ran from high school, through college, and into my first years of adulthood — and my major years of concert attendance. But because my high school years extended into two decades, I had to check which decade some pivotal albums came out. (Maybe sometime soon I’ll consider my top 8 albums from the ’80s…)

But for tonight, these were my answers:

1. Boys on the Side soundtrack: While out with my volleyball teammates a couple weeks ago, we were considering all-important questions of places we wanted to visit and places we’d recommend. One asked if there was a specific song that we associated with being on vacation. I couldn’t think of one, but I associate this soundtrack with roadtrips and sunny days heading down the highway. This would be my convertible album, if I owned a convertible.
2. Rites of Passage, Indigo Girls: This isn’t my favorite Indigo Girls album, but is probably the one I know best.
3. Little Earthquakes, Tori Amos: Tori was the first artist I discovered in college and this angsty, heart-rending album epitomizes my first year.
4. Automatic for the People, REM: This was the first cd I bought just before heading off to college.
5. River of Dreams, Billy Joel: I can remember Grey Kitten and I going into Caldor’s to buy this the summer after my first year of college. “Lullabye (Good Night My Love)” is one of my favorite songs.
6. The Honesty Room, Dar Williams: This album brought me back to my folkie roots. Dar’s written many other great songs and albums that I’ve loved, but no more so than her first commercially successful one.
7. Beauty and the Beast soundtrack: What bookworm didn’t see Belle on the screen and immediately see herself reflected back at her? If someone offered me a yellow ballgown to this day, I would immediately say yes, because I would know that there were hours of reading and waltzing in a magnificent personal library in my future. Who’d have guessed, indeed…
8. New Moon Shine, James Taylor: J.T. has many great great songs that date back before I was born. But this album seems to finally find him feeling comfortable in his own skin and his own place in history, and I appreciate that.
9. Jagged Little Pill, Alanis Morissette: If Tori started the early ’90s with a feminist yowl, Alanis picked it up in the later half of the decade, giving voice to so many of women in their 20s.

In true definitive list format, as soon as I was writing this I realized I’d left off a crucial album: Kenny Loggins’ Return to Pooh Corner. For years that album sang me to sleep and soothed me through stressful moments, and I don’t know how I could have overlooked it. Which album would it replace? Maybe J.T., if push came to shove. But no one is going to push or shove, and so my list comes in at a round ten.

Do you have nine albums from the 1990s you consider to be part of you? Or a similar list from another decade that’s more meaningful to you?

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic from That Artsy Reader Girl asks us to share authors we have fun following on social media. I don’t know that I have particular fun following these folks on Twitter, but I do follow them:

1. Rainbow Rowell
2. Jason Reynolds
3. Angie Thomas
4. Laura Lippman
5. Tim Federle
6. Becky Albertalli
7. Adam Silvera
8. Eliot Schrefer
9. Stephanie Pearl-McPhee
10. Jasper Fforde

Do you follow any authors on social media?