First off, today’s post is not only my entry into Top Ten Tuesday at That Artsy Reader Girl, but also my sign-up for Bout of Books, which began today.

The Bout of Books read-a-thon is organized by Amanda Shofner and Kelly Rubidoux Apple. It is a week long read-a-thon that begins 12:01 a.m. Monday, May 13th, and runs through Sunday, May 19th, in whatever time zone you are in. Bout of Books is low-pressure. There are challenges, Twitter chats, and a grand prize, but all of these are completely optional. For all Bout of Books 25 information and updates, be sure to visit the Bout of Books blog. – From the Bout of Books team

Today’s Bout of Books prompt asks us to share our bookish favorites. Since this week’s Top Ten Tuesday relates to books and movies, I thought I’d share ten of my favorite book-to-screen adaptations (these aren’t really in any particular order):

1. The Princess Bride
2. The Wizard of Oz
3. The Thin Man
4. Pride and Prejudice (1995)
5. The Fellowship of the Ring
6. To Kill a Mockingbird
7. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
8. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (if for no other reason than the once-in-a-lifetime casting job of so many actors who went on to embody the roles for us)
9. Crazy Rich Asians
10. The Sun Is Also a Star (Rudi and I just saw this tonight, and it opens on Friday. Starring Yara Shahidi (who plays the oldest daughter on black’ish) and Charles Melton (who portrays Reggie on Riverdale from the second season on), this love letter to New York City and love itself remains faithful to the feeling of Nicola Yoon’s novel, if not always to the details from the page. Gone are the intertwined stories of tertiary characters and Natasha’s relationship with her dad, but excising those bits does allow you to focus solely on Natasha and Daniel’s single glorious day. If you enjoyed this book, I think you should give the film a shot, if only for the cinematography of modern New York City.

How about you? Do you have favorite movie adaptations of books? Or are you page-only all the way?

I’ll have a couple FOs to show you as soon as the sun comes back out. In the meantime, here’s the next sock pair I’ll be working on, which you may remember from March when I knit them in Sock Madness. I just need to finish that toe and I’ll be able to move on to sock #2.

On the reading front, I also finished several things last week, which means I have new things to show you this week. Delilah Dirk and the Turkish Lieutenant by Tony Cliff is a graphic novel set in 1807 in the Middle East and focuses on a swashbuckling adventurer with a flying boat and a former palace guard who brews an excellent pot of tea. I think it will be part Tintin, part Indiana Jones, and part Black Widow.

Girl Squads by Sam Maggs is a nonfiction collection of essays about female friendship around the world and through history. I’ve only read the first essay thus far, which focuses on a society of free divers on an island off the coast of South Korea. So far, it’s fascinating, but I’m not loving the author’s tone, which is a little breezier than I’d prefer.

Jenny Han’s P.S., I Still Love You is the sequel to To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, and like the first book in the y.a. romance trilogy, I’m listening to it. I wanted to check it off before the movie adaptation hits Netflix (although I don’t know when that’ll be). It’s cute.

I’ve got several other books sort of in progress, but those are the three I’m actively reading today.

Want to learn more about what folks are reading and knitting? Head to As Kat Knits.

I’ve returned to my Lightning Shawl for a final strip, although probably not soon enough to finish and block it in time to wear it to Sheep & Wool on Sunday. But either way, it should be done soon and that will be good enough.

On the reading front, on Sunday, I picked up Jeff Zentner’s latest, Rayne and Delilah’s Midnite Matinee, about two high school senior friends from Tennessee who host a public access program where they show old monster movies and do campy interstitials, à la Elvira or Svengoolie. It is good so far, but I can see where trouble lies ahead for the characters, which stresses me out. On a less stressful note, I’m listening to Jenny Han’s P.S., I Still Love You, the second in her romantic trilogy about the fallout a girl experiences after letters she wrote, but never intended to send, to her previous crushes get mailed. The first book was made into a Netflix movie, which I thought stayed true enough to the book (although with way fewer baking sessions than I thought should have been included) and the second one has been greenlit, so this seemed like a good time to listen to it.

Check out what others are reading and crafting at As Kat Knits.

Saturday was Independent Bookstore Day, the annual biblio-holiday celebrating the small, community-based bookstores around the country. D.C. booksellers put together a crawl that included discounts, and if you visited 10 of them, you’d get a tote bag commemorating the event.

I did not make it to all ten, having not finished my job application early enough to leave me time to accomplish the task before our movie showtime. Getting around town by bikeshare just takes the amount of time it takes — you cannot make bikes magically appear at deserted docks and I am a slow cyclist — and I would have needed another hour to check off the two other neighborhoods I didn’t make it to.

However, I made it to five shops and came home with a modest, budget-friendly haul — three books, a magnet, a sticker, and some birthday cards (not shown).

First the books:

• The Girl Who Drank the Moon is a special signed copy available for Independent Bookstore Day. I read it a couple years ago and loved it, and owning a copy seemed like a nice idea so that I could reread it periodically at my pleasure.
• archy and mehitabel is a 1927 collection of poems from a column at The Evening Sun purportedly written by a cockroach (archy) about his early 20th-century adventures with a his alley-cat pal, mehitabel. I mean, of course that had to come home with me!
• And, finally, Paroles is a collection of poems that came out just after the end of World War II about the French youth experience of growing up under German occupation. Because I’ve been working on my French comprehension, it seemed like a good fit for me. It was translated by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and the French and English poems sit opposite each other on the page, so I can make sure my understanding is accurate.

And, finally, the ephemera. The magnet reads, “Tea fixes everything,” which if not true, is at least the closest to true as one can get around here. And the sticker is a Langston Hughes quote: “Well, I like to eat, sleep, drink and be in love. I like to work, read, learn and understand life.” Seems about right.

I wish you all three.

I am one toe away from a finished pair of stripey socks. FO pictures later this week.

The book is Nevermoor: The Trials of Morrigan Crow by Jessican Townsend. It’s the first in a sweet middle-grade fantasy series in which the main character is a “cursed chld,” born on the wrong day and considered by everyone to be a bad omen. She is offered a reprieve on her death day by a man driving a mechanical spider.

Want to see what others are reading and knitting? Head over to As Kat Knits to see.