I haven’t been very good about getting around to other folks’ blogs to be social and cheer on their reading progress, so I’ll work on that tomorrow.

Day 2 Progress: I finished a second book! Jane and the Twelve Days of Christmas by Stephanie Barron was my audiobook during December. I finished the last couple hours while washing dishes and knitting (not at the same time) during the first few days of the year. I hadn’t read this series in a while, and jumped way ahead for the seasonal book. But while the series is tied to Jane Austen’s life and career, it is mostly episodic, so one story doesn’t necessarily build into the next. I seem to remember having an earlier book in the series unfinished somewhere in the Burrow, so I’ll have to track down its whereabouts.

Day 3 Progress: I’m reading Nicola Yoon’s The Sun Is Also a Star, which was my first book of the year. I also read the first chapter of Sherryl Woods’ A Seaside Christmas, which I suspect may be as far as I feel like going into it right now. I’d picked it up as an impulse grab off the library’s Christmas display, in part because it was set on the Maryland shore, but it may be too cheesy for the mental state I’m in right now. (It seems to be the equivalent of a bad Netflix Christmas chick flick.) I may give it the rest of the second chapter to see if I care enough about the main characters to keep going, but otherwise it’ll head back to the library later this week, since I can’t waste eye-rolling on fluffy novels this month.

I love when my knitting matches my reading. I cast these on back in October, when I was coordinating my yarn with a different book cover.

I’m down to the final two rows in Mum’s Christmas shawl, but it seems unfair to show that to you now. There was an error in the antepenultimate row of the pattern, which meant I ripped back 337 stitches unnecessarily. So fun, but at least I realized it was the pattern, rather than me, before ripping back a second time.

Last month I took part in the bookish holiday Secret Santa event that The Broke and the Bookish, #TBTBSanta, runs every year.

Gina of Satisfaction for Insatiable Readers was my awesome Secret Santa. As you can see, she was remarkably generous, offering me gifts to open 12 days in a row. I do love surprises:

Paddington arrived with 12 numbered parcels. While I was oohing and aahing and hunting for package #1, Paddington raided the cupboards, since he was feeling a little peckish from his journey.

Once he was feeling like his normal, growly self, he gave me a hand with opening the presents.

The packages contained all sorts of goodies, from cute Japanese stationery …

… to adorable stickers, which Paddington thought we should immediately use on the Christmas cards.

There were a lot of books! Paddington loves a good story and is spending much of his time getting caught up on some fun books:

Eventually he started inviting others in the household to join him for story time:

(I could totally have edited out the vacuum cleaner, but a) real life and b) then you’d have missed Corey lying there on the floor, waiting to hear what’s going to happen next.)

Thank you so much, Gina! This was a wonderful package and I had such a fun time opening every single gift. I can’t wait to start reading! Now I just have to choose which book to begin with!

(And thank you to Jamie at The Broke and the Bookish, who organizes this international gift exchange each year. It really is a blast!)

Once again, I’ve signed up to participate in the Bout of Books readathon. If you also love books, you can still sign up through 11:59 p.m. CST today! What is Bout of Books, you ask?

The Bout of Books read-a-thon is organized by Amanda Shofner and Kelly @ Reading the Paranormal. It is a week long read-a-thon that begins 12:01 a.m. Monday, January 2nd, and runs through Sunday, January 8th, in whatever time zone you are in. Bout of Books is low-pressure. There are challenges, giveaways, and a grand prize, but all of these are completely optional. For all Bout of Books 18 information and updates, be sure to visit the Bout of Books blog. – From the Bout of Books team

My goals for this readathon are nearly always the same: I’d like to read every day. I’d like to finish a couple books or a couple hundred pages. And I’d like to participate online in some way each day, either by posting an update here, by participating in the online challenges, by commenting on others’s progress, or by sharing updates via Twitter.

Day 1 Progress: Success! I finished Kelly Link’s The Girl Who Drank the Moon early this evening. The length of time it took me to finish the book does not remotely reflect the quality of this magical middle-grade novel about the consequences of a witch accidentally feeding a baby moonlight (rather than nourishing, but benign starlight) during a rescue mission.

I also took part in the #BoutofBooks Twitter chat, which are always fun, if fast-paced. One of the questions reiterated the day’s challenge, which was to describe yourself in six words. I opted for “Quadragenarious knitting reader. Pissed off liberal.”

Today’s Top Ten Tuesday topic from The Broke and the Bookish asks about the Top Ten Books We’re Looking Forward to for the First Half of 2017:

(Natalie Lloyd and Jasper Fforde both purportedly have books being published in 2017, so obviously if their novels come out, they’ll jump high up on my list. Pending that…)

1. Becky Albertalli’s The Upside of Unrequited
2. Deanna Raybourn’s A Perilous Undertaking (2nd in the Veronica Speedwell series)
3. Adam Silvera’s History Is All You Left Me
4. Steve Sheinkin’s Undefeated: Jim Thorpe and the Carlisle Indian School Football Team
5. Jennifer Chambliss Bertman’s The Unbreakable Code (follow-up to Book Scavenger)
6. Benjamin Alire Sáenz’s The Inexplicable Logic of My Life
7. Roxane Gay’s Difficult Women
8. Ashley Poston’s Geekerella
9. Nina LaCour’s We Are Okay
10. Elizabeth Wein’s The Pearl Thief (prequel to Code Name Verity)

How about you? Any upcoming titles you’re particularly looking forward to?

There’s less than a month until Christmas, which means all the current projects are gifts I can’t show you. I can, however, show you my latest finished project, my Christmas mitts!

I cast these on three years ago to be a pair of socks when I realized that the other stripy Christmas yarn I had, which has white stripes as well as red and green, would not hide the grime of holding onto Metro escalators nearly as well as this pair. So I switched things up and these became a pair of improvised fingerless mitts, and the other yarn became socks.

Last Christmas I bound off the first one with a sewn picot bind-off similar to the cast on I’d used, but I wasn’t happy with it. This year, I ripped that back and experimented with a different picot bind-off. Then I ripped it back again to get a unified color bind-off. And once more to add in some seed stitch in that final stripe to try to control the rolling. (It wasn’t successful.) I will give it the season to see if I can live with it, and if I can’t, I’ll try to come up with a new solution next year. I also bound off the thumb at least three times, trying to find a non-ridiculous solution to that with a picot, but eventually conceded it was beyond my ken and just did a garter bind-off.

I also had to duplicate stitch over the thumb join on the second mitt when I rejoined the yarn in red, rather than the green of the first one and didn’t notice until after I’d sewn in all the ends. I can see I’ve done it, but I don’t think the casual observer would notice.

The yarn is Beyond Basic Knits Stripey Superwash Sock in an undisclosed colorway. She seems to have shuttered her shop since I bought this yarn at the Shenandoah Valley Fiber Festival back in 2009. I probably only used half the skein, so there could be more Christmassy knits in my future, particularly since there was yarn leftover from the socks, too.

There was not a ton of time for reading last week, so I didn’t finish either book I was working on, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours by Helen Oyeyemi and The Girl Who Drank the Moon by Kelly Barnhill. I did start three new books this week, though, to add to the collection: Jay Asher’s new Christmas YA novel, What Light, about a girl growing up on a Christmas tree farm; Dear Data, a nonfiction art book of weekly postcards exchanged between two visual data compilers, Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec; and Jane and the Twelve Days of Christmas by Stephanie Barron. I’m listening to that last one, part of a historical fiction mystery series starring author Jane Austen as the sleuth. I started that series years ago, but got sidetracked from it. I recommended it as a seasonal read to someone from my Twitter book club last year and she enjoyed it, so I decided to give it a go myself out of sequence this Christmas.

Yarning along with Ginny at Small Things.

I’ve got a lot of books to tell you about before the end of the year. Here are three more I read back in June:

The Entirely True Story of the Unbelievable FIB, by Adam Shaughnessy

This book, written by a fellow English-major classmate of mine from college, is the second book in June in which Baba Yaga makes an appearance. Prudence aspires to solve mysteries just like her police detective father, who was recently killed while on duty, but her sleuthing tends to get her into trouble. But then she and ABE, the new puzzle-solving boy in town, team up to answer the question, “What is the Unbelievable FIB?” written on a note slipped under Prudence’s bedroom door one night while she slept, a pretty big mystery indeed.

In the course of the book, they’ll meet a talking squirrel, several Norse gods, and Mr. Fox, who spent some time living with Baba Yaga. But, in addition to figuring out about the note, they’ll also need to solve why their town seems to be suddenly shrouded in perpetual bad weather or the consequences could be dire. Good for the kid who’s read every Rick Riordan, but still wants more gods come to earth hijinks.

Pages: 272. Personal copy.

Summerlost, by Ally Condie

Pages: 272. Library copy.

Cedar and Miles and their mom are spending a couple months in the small town outside Salt Lake City where Mrs. Lee grew up as a way for them to get through the first summer vacation since Mr. Lee and their youngest brother Ben were killed in a car crash. Twelve-year-old Cedar is understandably resentful of being yanked away from her friends, but is intrigued when she sees a boy her age riding down the street dressed in a costume. It turns out Leo works for the local summer stock theater, Summerlost, and Cedar gets a job there, too, selling programs.

Soon, though, Leo and Summer are leading illicit tours about the life of the mysterious actress who died in Iron Creek decades ago, while performing at Summerlost. Her ghost may haunt the theater. And now there seems to be a ghost haunting Cedar, as well, leaving her small trinkets of the sort that her youngest brother used to be attracted to.

This story had an old-fashioned feeling to it, despite its modern issues. Probably a good fit for those who like other kid lit books set during summer, such as The Penderwicks or The Great Good Summer or Gone-Away Lake.

Love & Gelato, by Jenna Evans Welch

Apparently I was on a roll for reading books featuring dead parents, because there’s one in Love & Gelato, too. In this case, Lina is 16 and her beloved artist mom has recently died after a battle with cancer. Her dying wish was that Lina be sent to live in a Tuscan cemetery with Howard, a man her mother has never before mentioned, but with whom, her grandmother informs her, her mother lived with just before returning home to have Lina. When her mother’s journal of her year in Tuscany arrives at the cemetery (care of the assistant curator of the museum, whom her mother also knew), Lina figures this is her mother’s way of explaining things to her herself. As she reads along, she sets out to see the things her mother described, from the gelaterias to the dance halls to the museums, all with the company of her new friend, Ren, whom she meets while out running. The two of them will work to unravel the mystery of Lina’s and her mother’s past and to help Lina find peace in her new circumstances.

Recommended for fans of 13 Little Blue Envelopes and Stephanie Perkins’ and Sarah Dessen’s books.

Pages: 390. Library copy.

One more installment to get us through the June reads. Hopefully coming soon…