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?

A new book and new knitting this week.

Here we have the start of a sock. It’s just a basic ribbed top, stockinette sock, but I find I have the most likelihood of finishing boring socks than fancy ones. The yarn is Regia Snowflake that Mum and Dad gave me for Christmas a couple years back.

The book is the Brittany Cavallaro’s second Charlotte Holmes/Jamie Watson novel, The Last of August, which, despite the name, takes place in late December. It’s fine thus far, but a little slow to get started, so I’m hoping it picks up its pace soon. I think I recall this being an issue with the first one, as well, which is probably why it took me this long to revisit the series. I’m listening to The Woman Who Smashed Codes and enjoying quite a bit this biography of the nation’s forgotten foremother of codebreaking.

Head over to As Kat Knits for more reading/crafting combo posts!

Rudi and I are on different sleep/wake cycles with him doing both on the earlier side (note, not early by normal standards, just earlier) and me on the later.

Our cats have long sorted themselves out at night accordingly, often by following the person they liked best. (In the morning, Corey will sometimes get up with Rudi, but everyone returns to sleep after he leaves for work.) Della went to bed with Rudi. Posey floated between us, but took over that role once she was gone. When it was just the three of them, Jeremiah stayed out with me. When we once again became a family of three cats after Della died, he would go in with Rudi to make sure he got settled, but would come back out to me. Once Posey was gone, Jer took her place, so Rudi wouldn’t have to sleep alone. Corey will go in with Rudi and Jer if I’m not home, but normally remains out with me until I’m ready to go to bed.

But that doesn’t mean he wants to just hang out in the same room. No, at night, he wants to be doing the same thing I am doing. So if I am typing a blog post, Corey wants to be draped across my left wrist and part of the keyboard. And as you can see here, he also wants to help me read my book. He tried both sides in case I had a preference, but since my preference was for him to remain on the far side of my book, eventually he gave up and took a nap on Rudi’s chair until I picked up the laptop and it was time for us to write to you. (He says hi.)

Today’s Top Ten Tuesday topic from That Artsy Reader Girl invites us to look back at the books we meant to read last year but didn’t get to (and that, presumably, we intend to read in 2019). I am really bad at lists like this, not because I can’t make them, but because there are so many books I want to read (3,035 according to my Goodreads list as of this moment).

My track record is mixed. The list I made in 2018 includes only three titles I finished, but the one I set for myself in 2017 had seven completions. And I’ve read only four off 2016‘s list. So that’s 29 titles and less than half of them completed.

But what’s life without goals, right?

Here are ten titles I meant to read last year that I really think I’ve got a shot at:

1. Sarah McCoy’s Anne prequel, Marilla of Green Gables
2. Mackenzi Lee’s sequel, The Lady’s Guide to Petticoats and Piracy
3. Markus Zuzak’s Bridge of Clay (Rudi gave this to me for Christmas, so it’s high on this year’s TBR pile)
4. Bruja Born by Zoraida Córdova
5. The Kiss Quotient by Helen Hoang
6. Tiffany Jackson’s Monday’s Not Coming (I own a copy of it, so it, too, is a get-to sooner book)
7. Aisha Saeed’s Amal Unbound
8. Circe by Madeline Miller (Karen gave me a copy for Christmas and it is conveniently sitting right next to me)
9. Rebound by Kwame Alexander
10. What Truth Sounds Like: Robert F. Kennedy, James Baldwin, and Our Unfinished Conversation About Race in America by Michael Eric Dyson

How about you? Were there books you meant to read in 2018 you didn’t get to?

As you can see from this shot, I’ve decided to pick the shawl back up again. I continue to have problems with it, but it is user error, rather than instructional, and at least I’ve loosened up my tension enough that I can move the stitches on the needle again. A sure sign these days that I should put knitting down and not pick it back up again until I’m less anxious. I am coming up with a game plan for knitting this year, which involves socks and abandoned UFOs and finishing a sweater, and I’ll let you know more in the coming week or so.

I’ve mostly moved on to new reading this week. The Harry Potter continues to be picked up for a chapter here and there. They did not issue the fourth book in illustrated format this year, so I will have to either switch over to my original tomes (not a problem after I take down the Christmas so I can once again reach where the four of them are on my shelves) or wait until next year to read the next one. Luckily, I do not have to make a decision one way or another until I am so moved to revisit the Tri-Wizarding Tournament.

The Best We Could Do by Thi Bui is a graphic memoir about her Vietnamese family who immigrated to the U.S. in the late 1970s. The Emissary by Yōko Tawada (and translated by Margaret Mitsutani) is a novella focusing on a dystopian future in which an as-yet unnamed environmental disaster has left children unbelievably delicate. Mumei lives with his great-grandfather, Yoshiro, who literally has more pep in his step than his young relative. It just won the National Book Award for translation and has been described as delightful, funny, joyous, and playful, so I’m eager to find out why. And finally, I have a new audiobook on the go as well, having just finally started The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine who Outwitted America’s Enemies by Jason Fagone about the preeminent American codebreaker responsible for the capture of numerous Nazis. Right now there are no Nazis in sight and she’s on the estate of an eccentric Illinois millionaire who has brought her there to help his wife prove there’s a secret code embedded in Shakespeare’s plays that proves they were written by Francis Bacon. Enjoyable starts, all.

Check out As Kat Knits to see what everyone else is reading and knitting.

January is a month for beginning as you mean to go on. So I thought, even as I need to put together my end-of-year reviews for 2018, that I would share what I’ve read in the first half of the month.

So far this year, I have finished three books. The first was an audiobook I started during my drive to Connecticut for Christmas, but the other two were new reads begun this month:

When Santa Fell to Earth, by Cornelia Funke

When, in mid-December, the sleigh/caravan of Niklas Goodfellow, the last real Santa Claus left on earth, crashes in a small town and his reindeer, Twinkletoes, runs off, Niklas and his comrades (two small angels and a group of grumpy elves) must scramble. Not only do they need to make repairs to the caravan and find their reindeer, but they must learn what the local children want for Christmas while evading detection by the evil dictator of the North Pole, Jeremiah Goblynch, and his gang of evil Nutcracker goons. Goblynch, who only gives children mass-produced presents and asks only the parents what they’d like their kids to receive, has enslaved or killed all the other Santas, turned the reindeer into meat, and turned the elves out into the freezing wilds of the North Pole — and he’s gunning for Niklas, who has already escaped his clutches once. Luckily two children loyal to the idea of Santa Claus — Ben and Charlotte — have found Niklas and are actively working to help him save Christmas.

Funke narrates the audiobook, giving the story more of a European flair with her German accent than I might otherwise have ascribed to it. I liked, but didn’t love the story, but would definitely seek out a print copy of the story to see the illustrations, and would recommend it for older children who are starting to question holiday traditions. Also, I thought this would make a fantastic film — either for the big screen or the small — but it turns out it’s already been adapted, way back in 2011. However, it was made in German and overdubbed in English, and has a limited DVD availability. So, I guess I still stand by the statement, pending some way to watch the version that’s been made.

Pages: 167. I borrowed an audiobook version from the library, which I listened to on my phone.

The Hollow of Fear, by Sherry Thomas

The Lady Sherlock series keeps getting stronger. In this, the third installation, which begins at the exact moment the second concludes, Charlotte must add a new role to her repertoire. In addition to playing Sherlock Holmes, noted consulting detective, she must also add the role of his brother, Sherrinford, whom she must play in drag, in order to come to the rescue of Lord Ashcroft Ingram, who has been accused of murder at his country estate.

Without giving away spoilers about what has happened thus in previous installments, all of your favorite characters from the series stop in. Livia has a larger role to play in this book, which made me happy, but Mrs. Watson and her niece get much smaller pieces of the pie. The Marbletons make brief cameos, with the promise of a larger role in the next novel for one of them. Elder sister Bernadine is not forgotten, nor is half brother Myron, and we are introduced to yet another Ashcroft brother — Remington. And Inspector Treadles makes a triumphant comeback from his petty reaction in the first novel, giving him some of the best growth in the series thus far.

If you have already read the first two novels in this series, you will be delighted by this one, which promises plenty of twists and lots of deduction. And if you haven’t yet embarked upon the series, I urge you to do so. A feminist Victorian-era take on the most famous detective in literature awaits! And you can spread out the first three novels before the fourth comes out in the fall!

And, yes, this, too, would make a great adaptation for the screen!

Pages: 326. Personal copy.

Dear Mrs. Bird, by A.J. Pearce

Emmy Lake, who has long aspired to be a war correspondent, finally gets her break when she answers an ad at the London Evening Chronicle seeking a junior. So caught up is she in the romance of her dream being nearly realized, she neglects to ask any questions about the job during her interview, a mistake she soon realizes when it turns out that she’s been hired to work as a typist for the grouchy editor of the newspaper’s sister publication, a neglected weekly women’s magazine. When the editor (the titular Mrs. Bird), who doubles as the magazine’s misanthropic agony aunt, presents Emmy with an extensive list of topics she has deemed Unsuitable — including nearly every one Emmy thinks relevant to the tumultuous early days of World War II — Emmy decides to start sending back her own advice under her boss’ name.

In between, Emmy and her childhood BFF, Bunty, shelter from the German air raids, go on dates (Emmy gets jilted early in the book, but Bunty has a longtime beau, who is a shift commander at the fire brigade where Emmy volunteers several nights a week) and generally try to live as bright a life as 20-somethings can behind their blackout curtains and dim torches.

Reading this book gave me a twinge of sadness because I would have loved to talk with my grandmother about it. She wouldn’t have read it — it made her too sad to see detailed retellings of a war she survived — but she would have appreciated the contemporary slang and the context of carrying on — and excelling — even under great duress.

Three for three endorsements for an adaptation. I’m not sure this is feature film material, but it would make a great Masterpiece addition.

Pages: 281. Library copy.