I’ll be honest: I haven’t really felt like reading or knitting anything in the last few weeks.

Every few days I knit a couple rows on my Lazy Katy shawlette. The yarn is Lang Yarns Jawoll Magic Dégradé and there was a knot partway into the skein, which explains the weird color changes that will jump out at knitters, but hopefully not to too many other people. I am nearly done with the expanded stockinette body and will next turn to the lace edging. Despite my slow progress, I am looking forward to wearing it.

The books are ones that I’ve dipped into over the last month: The Pratchett is the first in the Discworld series, of which I’ve only read the first Tiffany Aching novel. Fablehaven was a Christmas gift from Karen, and I purposely put it aside to read this spring during my annual fantasy readalong. The Soul of Baseball is about one of the Negro League’s great names and promises (literally, in several places on the dust jacket) to be uplifting and make you feel better about life. I could use both right now, as well as being a general fan of baseball stories. Finally, the Sherlock Holmes companion piece is a collection of short works that accompany works in Conan Doyle’s canon. I admit I haven’t actually opened that one yet, but I’d like to see if I can’t read Gramma-style stories without weeping through them.

Technically, this photo is a lie.

I am NOT currently reading Lola and the Boy Next Door because I just spent six hours power reading it nearly non-stop. Stephanie Perkins writes YA contemporary romance and composes fun protagonists and swoon-worthy love interests. I might like Cricket, the scientifically minded guy in this story, even more than I liked St. Clair in Perkins’ debut novel, which is saying something significant.

And while that looks like the top of a sock and DOES, in fact, constitute two concerts’ worth of knitting, I’m just not completely sold on it becoming what I told it to be (which, yes, was a sock). It’s sport-weight yarn and it feels too thick to be a sock, but it maybe just wants to be a thick sock? I’m still mulling… which is fine because the next round of Sock Madness should begin by the weekend.

I’m still working on my Lightning Shawl and am loving the color changes along and between the panels and the bright hues of the yarn on such grim winter days. I am excited to wear it, even if that doesn’t seem likely for Hungary.

I’ve got a couple different physical books I’m wrapping up, but am listening to Anne Ursu’s Breadcrumbs, a modern retelling of the Snow Queen that seems especially apt in a week that involved several days of shoveling and a cold between two weekends of being home alone.

I’m looking forward to the start of Sock Madness next week and to picking a couple non-library books to take with me on vacation. My audio book selection is already downloaded to my phone — the fifth Harry Potter.

Tonight has been an evening of starts and finishes. I plowed through the final 100 pages of Katie Fforde’s Practically Perfect, a sweet romance set in an English village where Anna has just bought a cottage she’s renovating. There’s not a lot in the way of character development, particularly once you reach the secondary characters, but I didn’t mind. It wasn’t overly treacly, and I found myself missing the characters when I opted to take a different book with me to Connecticut last weekend.

While in Connecticut I finished the cowl I was test knitting (and which I’ll share with you once I have the designer’s go-ahead to do so), so needed either to cast on something new or pick up something old. I opted for both by pulling out my Lightning Shawl, which is knit in strips. Yes, I did cast on the next strip just for the sake of the blog post. And, yes, it took me three tries to realize that I’d used a different cast-on than what I’d expected on the previous strips. But we’re good now (I hope) and it’s not out of the question that this could be done in time to take with me to Hungary as a completed accessory.

Part of the problem with the end of the year is that it is chockablock full of best-of book lists. My poor friends on Goodreads know how much I enjoy them, adding multiple books to my to-read list daily and probably 100 over the season. In addition to adding them virtually, I also start requesting books from the library. This is fine for certain books, where hundreds of folks are in front of me in the queue, but more of a problem for books that are checked in and idling on the shelves of various branches of the D.C. Public Library.

I’ve had probably half a dozen books come in each week for the last month. (I have books sent to the main branch near my office for weekday pickups and the Georgetown branch for a weekend trip.) This means I currently have 27 physical books out*, 2 more waiting for me at the library, and five audio books on my phone.

Before you start offering the obvious advice, I do look over the pile each week, assessing the likelihood I’ll actually get to each one and whether it would make more sense to request it again later in the year. I’ve returned some that I know I just won’t get to, but I hold out hope that I’ll magically gain some extra hours in the day and continue to hoard the rest.

It’s seriously unlikely I can squeeze in 29 books before I head to Hungary next month. After all, I do have other hobbies and favorite tv shows and loved ones and a job and a bed competing for my time. It’s a problem.

But, without a doubt, it is a good problem to have.

Book Riot has created a reading challenge for 2014 that calls for participants to read books that cover 24 areas designed to broaden our horizons.

These “tasks” are as follows:

A book written by someone when they were under the age of 25

A book written by someone when they were over the age of 65

A collection of short stories (either by one person or an anthology by many people)

A book published by an indie press

A book by or about someone that identifies as LGBTQ

A book by a person whose gender is different from your own

A book that takes place in Asia

A book by an author from Africa

A book that is by or about someone from an indigenous culture (Native Americans, Aboriginals, etc.)

A microhistory

A YA novel

A sci-fi novel

A romance novel

A National Book Award, Man Booker Prize or Pulitzer Prize winner from the last decade

A book that is a retelling of a classic story (fairytale, Shakespearian play, classic novel, etc.)

An audiobook

A collection of poetry

A book that someone else has recommended to you

A book that was originally published in another language

A graphic novel, a graphic memoir or a collection of comics of any kind

A book that you would consider a guilty pleasure (Read, and then realize that good entertainment is nothing to feel guilty over)

A book published before 1850

A book published this year

A self-improvement book (can be traditionally or non-traditionally considered “self-improvement”)

Interestingly, the task I see myself having the hardest time with is the guilty pleasure. What would that be for me? I’m not inclined to feel guilty about what I read, so maybe I’ll categorize that as something someone else might feel guilty about. (In checking out the discussion on this topic in Goodreads, I see others with similar concerns have suggested impulse buys and re-reads as ways to fill this category.)