This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic from That Artsy Reader Girl asks us to share ten books in the Mardi Gras colors of purple, yellow, and green. Honestly, I don’t love cover challenges and thought about sitting this one out. But it seemed like more work at the outset to finish my top ten reads of 2020 post, so I started pulling together library books, figuring that of the 20+ books I have out, surely half must fall into this category. Nope. And by then I was committed, so the rest of the books are from my personal TBR collection that didn’t require dismantling shelves in order to extricate. (Yes, I do realize that makes it less likely I’ll read those books. Your point?)

Anyway, in the end I found 10:

They are:

Top row: Fast Cakes by Mary Berry, Undercover Bromance by Lyssa Kay Adams, Jake and Lily by Jerry Spinelli, Jo & Laurie by Margaret Stohl and Melissa de la Cruz, and Everyday Cookies by Dorie Greenspan
Bottom row: The Runaway Princess by Johan Troïnowski, Wayward Son by Rainbow Rowell, Selected Fables/Fables Choisis by Jean de La Fontaine, The Intrigue at Highbury by Carrie Bebris, and The Beast Player by Nahoko Uehashi

Have you read any of these?

I’ve been lazy this past week. (To be fair, I suppose there was also a lot of work, cake baking, and a visit with an old friend. But still… ) Please see last week’s post for the most recent knitting and reading works-in-progress. I’m a little further along in both, but really not enough to bother boring you with a photo.

I have a four-day weekend coming up, though, so I do anticipate having new progress to show you next week.

Today’s Top Ten Tuesday from That Artsy Reader Girl invites us to come up with our own topic about Valentine’s Day or love. I’ve opted to go with the top ten books I’ve read with “Love” in the title:

1. The History of Love by Nicole Krauss: A teenager and a senior citizen bond over a book the girl’s mother is translating.
2. Love Is a Mix-Tape by Rob Sheffield: A memoir of Sheffield’s late wife and his grief in losing her, as told through music. Heartbreaking, but even more so because it’s so relatable.
3. Love, Rosie by Cecelia Ahern: A boy and a girl grow up and grow apart and grow back together again, always brought back together by the power of the letters they send each other.
4. Love That Dog by Sharon Creech: A boy begrudgingly writes a series of poems for a class assignment — and turns it into both a conversation with his teacher and an ode to a beloved pet.
5. My True Love Gave to Me: Twelve Holiday Stories, edited by Stephanie Perkins: This collection of romantic holiday-themed short stories written by the hottest YA authors of the time is varied and charming.
6. Book Love by Debbie Tung: A highly relatable collection of comics about being a bibliophile.
7. The Game of Love and Death by Martha Brockenbrough: Historical fiction about a young woman who wants to fly planes, a wealthy young man with a bright future, and the supernatural characters of Love and Death, whose games have caused all the star-crossed lovers throughout time. The final chapter of this book has been my mind a lot recently.
8. The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine who Outwitted America’s Enemies by Jason Fagone: A biography of Elizebeth Smith Friedman and her husband, William, and the role they played in the advent of cryptology and modern spycraft in the first half of the 20th century.
9. P.S. I Still Love You by Jenny Han: Really, the whole series of Lara Jean Covey Song novels, about what happens when diaristic love letters you meant to remain private end up in the hands of your crushes.
10. Love & Gelato by Jenna Evans Welch: After her mother dies, a teen learns her mother has asked a strange man who lives in Italy (in a cemetery) to be her guardian. She comes to understand that choice by reading the journal her mother kept during her own teen odyssey to Italy decades earlier.

How about you? Are there Love books you’ve loved?

I’m remarkably pleased with the heel turn on sock #1. I really don’t think I could have timed the color changes better if I’d actually been trying.

Recipe for Persuasion is good so far, as I would have expected from a Dev novel. It’s a loose adaptation of the Austen story, featuring Ashna and Rico, who must team up for a Cooking with the Stars piece despite having been an item in the past.

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic from That Artsy Reader Girl focuses on books from my to-be-read list that were written before I was born. Here are ten I’ve been meaning to read for a while:

1. The Odyssey by Homer (I’ve had a pretty copy sitting on my desk for several years. Maybe 2021 is the year to crack it open.)
2. The Sagas of Icelanders (I dragged this ~800-page tome with me to Iceland thinking I’d hunker down and read myths from the 1200s while on vacation there. I did not.)
3. Walden and Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau (Karen and I were supposed to read this together a decade or so ago and I totally kept flaking on her. I’ll get to it someday.)
4. The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim (My two best college friends and I watched the movie, a travel adventure set in an Italian castle, a quarter century ago and I’ve been meaning to get back to it for a while. Maybe this year I’ll check out the source material, which dates from the 1920s.)
5. Cakes and Ale by W. Somerset Maugham (Don’t you want to read it based just on the title? Add to that it’s a satire skewering the literary world of London in the early 20th century and I’m doubly in.)
6. Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons (This routinely makes it onto lists of underappreciated, humorous novels of yore. There’s also an edition with Roz Chast illustrations, which tempts me even more.)
7. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte (I’ve long meant to read all the Bronte novels, and this is my college roommate’s favorite of the bunch.)
8. The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens (While I’ve intended to read this since I first devoured Little Women in elementary school, I haven’t tried since middle school. I can probably get through it now.)
9. Le Petit Nicholas by René Goscinny (I picked up a copy of this French children’s classic when I was in France more than a decade ago and I should really get around to reading it.)
10. Around the World in 72 Days by Nellie Bly (A memoir (based on the newspaper columns) of a journalist’s attempt to beat the 80 days it took the fictional Verne hero to circumnavigate the globe. Who doesn’t want to read a travelogue of a cutting-edge Victorian era newspaperwoman?)

What old books are on your reading list?

One of the things I’d like to work on in the first half of the year is to account for and decide what to do with the large number of knitting projects I have scattered around the Burrow in half-finished states.

Here we have Smock Madness, started nearly two years ago. This looks like a pretty easy project to power through in the next few days in order to have our first finished object of the year.

Jane Austen adaptations are also great ways to start the year, and Sonali Dev’s Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors was one of my favorites a couple years back. To see that Dev had planned a loose version of all six Austen novels centering around the same extended California clan was really intriguing. I’m very much looking forward to spending some more time with the Raje family.

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