With last week’s realization that I’d need to figure out how to solve my Sock Madness socks, I decided to spend some time revisiting old projects and wrapping them up. Maybe this weekend you’ll get some modeled stripey socks. If I’m productive, you might also get these Smock Madness. I’m a repeat away from the toe decreases, which means less than two hours until two finished pairs this week. That would be a nice feeling.

I’m also wrapping up some books that I’ve had lingering around the house and that the library is now adamant about wanting back. Sal and Gabi Break the Universe is a perfectly enjoyable middle-grade read (thanks for the recommendation, Rebs!), and, in any other situation, I’d have been done with it right after I borrowed it from the library. This being what it is, it keeps getting put aside and buried under work and whatnot near my couch.

Head over to As Kat Knits to see what others are reading and crafting.

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic from That Artsy Reader Girl invites us to share ten funny book titles. Here are ten I’ve read (and recommend):

1. Come Hell or Highball by Maia Chance
2. Sal and Gabi Break the Universe by Carlos Hernandez
3. Be Careful What You Witch For by Dawn Eastman
4. Visions of Sugar Plums by Stephanie Evanovich
5. The Princess Diarist by Carrie Fisher
6. Nothing Is Wrong and Here Is Why by Alexandra Petri
7. Tuesday Mooney Talks to Ghosts by Kate Racculia
8. The Lady’s Guide to Petticoats and Piracy by Mackenzi Lee
9. The Big Over Easy by Jasper Fforde
10. Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman

How about you? Have you read any books with amusing titles recently?

So … Sock Madness 2021 … We can now officially chalk it up as the year I wasn’t paying attention.

See how we have two flowers next to each other?

We should not. They should be set off from one another, by half, so that they alternate down the leg like garden stepping stones, rather than like the rectangles of a hopscotch board. I just absolutely read the pattern wrong, which is a little irksome because I thought to myself that if I’d been designing this pattern I would have alternated them … exactly the way the designer did … rather than spacing the flower rows out by a couple dozen twisted rib rows.

It’s fine. I had already missed a smock on the other side, which would have eliminated me from competition anyway. But now I am left with the decision of what to do with the sock. Obviously it would be silly to keep knitting it the way I thought the pattern had been written, since I already didn’t think it should be done that way. I could rip it back to the start of the first flower and knit it right. In the grand scheme of things, I haven’t gone far past it, but I do not love twisted stitches and would prefer not to redo a couple dozen rows. I could decide I’m doing a variation, with a row of flowers at the top, not dissimilar from a band of colorwork and then just alternate from the nearest spot it makes sense to begin down the leg, which could look a little wonky with flowers that close together vertically, but also might look fine. I could come up with some other sort of variation that stops the twisted stitches once I get to the foot. Or, I could rip back to the cuff, which is pretty and not so many twisted stitches I would resent having to replicate them on a second sock and knit some other pattern down the leg. Thoughts? Other ideas?

I started Ring the Hill tonight and have not gotten very far, because I’m having to stop myself from wanting to tweet out/highlight gems of quotes every couple paragraphs. I’m in a bit of a reading funk, so finding something where I like the language is helpful, but not really for finishing a book quickly. I’m also still listening to The Midnight Library, but it’s also not hooked me so much that I want to listen nonstop.

If you want to see what others are knitting and reading, head over to As Kat Knits for the weekly roundup.

The seasonal Top Ten Tuesday lists at That Artsy Reader Girl tend to be among my favorites, partly because they just require I give you a list of the books I’m looking forward to reading the most over the next three months. Easy!

Here are ten I’m hoping to get to this spring:

1. Let’s start easy. These are my two most recent purchases: Reynard the Fox by Anna Louise Avery
2. Ring the Hill by Tom Cox
3. Adding to my British animal theme, Jasper Fforde’s The Constant Rabbit was a Christmas gift. Plus, I will always read everything he writes, even if I don’t always love it.
4. I haven’t yet picked up Murder on Cold Street, the latest in my favorite mystery series by Sherry Thomas, because they only had one copy at the bookstore at Christmas and it was a gift. The library across the river has a print copy, so I’ve requested they put it on hold for me.
5. An Unexpected Peril by Deanna Raybourn only came out at the beginning of this month. I’ve added it to my library holds list, as well.
6. The final book in Talia Hibbert’s Brown Sisters trilogy, Act Your Age, Evie Brown!, also just came out.
7. Gish Jen’s The Resisters, a baseball meets sci fi dystopia novel.
8. I heard about Serena Singh Flips the Script by Sonya Lalli during a local bookstore’s Galentine’s Day event, plus it’s set here in D.C.!
9. Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse was one of the Alex Award Winners, a category of adult fiction which tends to appeal to young adults.
10. Clap When You Land by Elizabeth Acevedo

What are you hoping to read this spring?

Sock Madness, the sock knitting competition I enter each March and rarely advance through the play-in round, commenced on Saturday with the pattern Senbonzakura by Natalia Vasilieva. It has smocked stitches and beads and twisted stitches meant to create an overall effect of cherry trees in spring.

I’m using a skein of Hobbledehoy sock yarn in the colorway “Crosswords,” which I’m finding to be a pleasantly round, bouncy yarn. It tolerates the tiny crochet hook I use to add beads well. The beads are blue-tinted with a silver core and they were the best of the batch I had on hand against the variegation and red undertones (overtones?) of the yarn.

(You can see the four Rudi and I gave serious consideration to. The clear ended up not being right, the blue was just too blue, the red was matte and I didn’t love it as much as I wanted, and then there’s the silvery blue I picked.)

And, yes, I am already significantly behind where I should be if I want to advance. It’s great if I move on and also fine if I don’t. Either way, I should have a great pair of socks at some point.

I started From the Desk of Zoe Washington by Janae Marks this evening. It’s a middle-grade novel about a girl who, on her 12th birthday, gets a letter from her birth father in prison. It’s the first one she’s ever received from him, but his letter suggests there have been others through the years. I look forward to finding out what happens next.

Head over to As Kat Knits to see what others are reading and crafting.

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic at That Artsy Reader Girl is a spring cleaning freebie, so I took the opportunity to finish off this draft that’s been sitting around for months.

I think I mentioned that for the first time in several years I didn’t hit my book-a-week target in 2020. However, I did finish 40, nearly all of which were new to me.

Here are my favorites from that group:

1. The House in the Cerulean Sea by T.J. Klune: A lonely, middle-aged, good-hearted social worker specializing in children with magical abilities is asked by the heads of his governmental bureau to check out a care facility and evaluate its caretaker. There is shadiness involved (the case files are provided in a very James Bondian way), and when Linus reaches the end of the train line, he discovers the care facility is located on an island in the ocean (which he’s long hoped to see), the six children in question include a wyvern, a were-Pomeranian, and the son of Satan (who, it turns out, shares a love of vintage vinyl with Lionel), and the caretaker is a most charming man. This is a story about acceptance and trust and found families and doing what needs doing, no matter how scary or hard that is. Recommended for everyone, even those who don’t traditionally read fantasy.
2. Tuesday Mooney Talks to Ghosts by Kate Racculia: In this Westing Game-like book for adults, Tuesday and her wacky companions race to solve a game set forth as the final wish of an eccentric local millionaire. See my review here.
3. The Art of Theft by Sherry Thomas: In the latest (at the time) story of Lady Sherlock, Charlotte, Livia, Mrs. Watson, Lord Ingram, and Stephen Marbleton must team up for an art heist in France. See my review here.
4. Meg and Jo by Virginia Kantra: This is a modern interpretation of a favorite story, focused on the two oldest adult March sisters. Meg is a stay-at-home mom of young twins who is trying to help her mom keep their North Carolina family farm afloat. Jo works in a NYC restaurant by day and as a food blogger on the down low by night. When their mom gets sick, they’ll struggle find how to remain true to themselves, but never with how to be true to each other. (Amy and Beth comes out this spring.)
5. New Kid by Jerry Craft: In this award-winning graphic novel, Craft tells the tale of Jordan, whose parents have decided he should leave the NYC neighborhood middle school he’s attended up until now and start attending a prep school across town where he’s one of a handful of kids of color. (He was okay with going to a new school, but he’d really hoped for art school.) The book covers the trials and tribulations of his 7th-grade year, from the microaggressions he deals with from teachers and students, the friends he makes (and the ones from the neighborhood he struggles to keep), and interactions with his parents and his beloved grandfather. See my review here.
6. The Flat Share by Beth O’Leary: After breaking up with her boyfriend, Tiffy is desperate to find an affordable apartment fast. Enter Leon, who works nights and who is equally desperate to raise some fast cash to pay the lawyer handling his brother’s appeal. He offers a unique arrangement — they become roommates, but don’t meet. He’ll get the apartment during the day and she’ll get it at night and on weekends. They communicate via sticky notes to sort out the usual roommate questions, and start to get to know one another. A really great read for the start of the pandemic, when we were all struggling with how to connect with people we couldn’t see IRL and a surprisingly deep read, as it deals with abusive relationships, lost loves, and racist aspects of the criminal justice system.
7. How Rory Thorne Destroyed the Multiverse by K. Eason: Sleeping Beauty meets Star Wars. The princess of a planet, anointed at birth with a variety of gifts by fairies, is sent to marry the prince of another planet in an agreement to end a war. However, she has thoughts about this (particularly after she discovers a plot against her betrothed’s life). Fun feminist sci fi, at its best.
8. I’m Not Dying with You Tonight by Kimberly Jones and Gilly Segal: Told from alternating perspectives, Lena has spent her entire life in this Atlanta neighborhood, while Campbell is a recent transplant, come to live with her dad, a struggling hardware store owner, after her mom is forced to take a job abroad. One fateful night, shots are fired at a football game and these two teenagers, one Black, the other White, flee together with a single working cell phone between them, must navigate getting home safely when chaos and violence erupt on their streets. I read this at the start of the summer as people took to the streets around the country, demanding an end to racist policing and policies.
9. Girl with a Gun by Amy Stewart: Historical fiction focusing on the eldest of three Kopp sisters, who would go on to become the first female deputy sheriff in America. See my review here.
10. Words in Deep Blue by Cath Crowley: A young man discovers his parents are considering selling the beloved family bookstore and a young woman returns to her roots in an effort to move on in the wake of a terrible accident. See my review here.

Honorable mentions go to Mira Jacobs’ Good Talk, Dan Gemeinhart’s The Remarkable Journey of Coyote Sunrise, Red Letter Days by Sarah-Jane Stratford, and Yes, No, Maybe So by Becky Albertalli and Aisha Saeed.

(Confidential to IRL loved ones: If I also owe you a Christmas gift from this year, please don’t suddenly start reading off this list, because those gifts are all sitting around my living room and it’s too late to return them.)

Random stats for the year:

Nonfiction: 3
Graphic novels: 7
Books from a series: 17 (includes two series where I read two books)
Books in a translation: 2
Authors of color: 11
Authors’ nationality: American, Canadian, British, Australian, German, Norwegian
Books I borrowed from the library: 33
Books written by men: 8
Books written for adults: 25
For YA: 5
For kids: 10