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.

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?

Today’s Top Ten Tuesday at That Artsy Reader Girl asks us to share books with single-word titles. I figured I’d run through my Goodreads list and give you the books I’ve liked best with only a single moniker:

1. Summerland by Michael Chabon: This was the first book I reviewed here on the blog oh so many years ago. It’s a middle-grade book that combines folklore and baseball and maybe needs to be reread in the near future.
2. Wonderstruck by Brian Selznick: Selnick is a master at combining art and words in unusual ways to tell a story, making middle-grade books that are doorstoppers but also simultaneously page-turners. This particular story tells seemingly parallel stories about disability and adventure in New York City.
3. Rooftoppers by Katherine Rundell: Part Peter Pan, part A Little Princess, part Mary Poppins, this middle-grade book focuses on a little girl found floating in a cello case in the wake of a shipwreck, the kindly man who raises her, the system that wants her to conform to societal norms, and the Parisian waifs who help her pursue her dreams.
4. Landline by Rainbow Rowell: This is the Gen X book for longtime sweethearts, but maybe particularly for those of us who feel like we’ve been the steady, introverted, unexciting half of a couple for a long time. This is one of Rainbow’s two adult novels and sort of falls into what I (but maybe not strictly abiding by the literary definition of) magical realism.
5. Uprooted by Naomi Novik: This coming-of-age fairy tale (shelved sometimes as YA and sometimes for adults) talks about female friendship and reimagines what it is that we should really fear in the dark wood.
6. Booked by Kwame Alexander: In this middle-grade verse tour-de-force, Alexander gives us a boy who comes to love soccer and words equally.
7. Obsidio by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff: In this finale of The Illuminae Files space opera trilogy, all of our teen heroes (and our favorite formerly murderous AI spaceship) return to the place where the story began — a planet with an illegal mining operation where a gigantic militarized corporation has terrorized the population.
8. Savvy by Ingrid Law: In this middle-grade folklore story, everyone in this family develops a magical superpower (like the ability to open locks or direct rain) on or leading up to their 13th birthday. When on the eve of her birthday, a girl’s father is suddenly hospitalized, she must figure out how to channel what she assumes is her “savvy” to save him while keeping it a secret from those who might not understand what makes her so different.
9. Homecoming by Cynthia Voigt: The first in The Tillerman Cycle, this decades-old middle-grade novel features a teen girl who must somehow ferry her three younger siblings from Connecticut, where their mother has abandoned them, to the South (I am surprised to discover that’s southern Maryland, about an hour from here, rather than Georgia), where the grandmother they’ve never met lives.
10. Ghost by Jason Reynolds: In the first of his four middle-grade Track novels, Reynolds introduces us to a troubled boy who excels at sprinting who happens onto a track team one afternoon. But he is being held back from success by his past and until he deals with those ghosts (with the help of his three new teammates and his ex-Olympian coach), he won’t be able to move forward.

How about you? What are the Madonna’s, Prince’s, and Beyoncé’s of your favorite reads?