I’ve got some time this weekend, so I’m going to take part in MotherReader’s Ninth Annual 48-Hour Book Challenge. I’m listing my start time as 7 a.m., as that’s the latest start time to correspond to 48 hours from the conclusion, but let’s all understand that at 7 a.m. on a Saturday I am “reading” with my eyes closed with my head on a pillow and the lights off.

The goal for the challenge this year is to read books featuring a variety of characters in support of #WeNeedDiverseBooks.

First up is The Skin I’m In, by Sharon G. Flake, whose Pinned I read and loved two years ago when I helped judge the Cybils.

Other books I have out from the library that feature multicultural characters are The Summer Prince, Walk Two Moons, Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass, and The Girl of Fire and Thorns. And I’ve got a bunch in the home-owned piles, too.

Let’s get reading!

Designed by Amber of Shelf Notes

Today’s Armchair BEA genre topic focused on shorter works:

“Now it is time to give a little love to those little stories in your life. Share your love for your favorite shorts of any form. What is a short story or novella that doesn’t get the attention that it deserves? Recommend to readers what shorts you would recommend they start with. How about listing some short story anthologies based upon genres or authors?”

To be honest, I’m not a huge fan of short stories and novellas. With novellas, I find the length awkward and usually end up wishing they’d been novels or short stories. And with short stories or, rather, short story collections, I find they tend to be a little darker than I’d like my fiction to be and I often end up liking only about half of them. I’m not sure why if I only like half the songs on an album, I’d consider that acceptable, but not so with stories, but that’s the way it works for me. I do tend to like essay collections, so again, it’s clearly not the length that’s the problem.

That said, I have enjoyed a certain number of short story collections over the years. Here are a few I’d recommend:

• Let It Snow: Three Holiday Romances by John Green, Lauren Myracle, and Maureen Johnson: A trio of related short stories dealing with teens at Christmas during a blizzard. This was my introduction to all three of these YA heavy hitters, and while I don’t know I would have been wowed by any of the stories singly, as a group they worked for me.
• Miracle and Other Christmas Stories by Connie Willis: Possibly my favorite short story collection. There were definitely a few clunkers in this group of sci-fi/fantasy-leaning Christmas tales, but they were the exception and I still think of several of the individual stories every year around the holidays. Probably means it’s time for a re-read next winter.
• Any and all of the Paddington books by Michael Bond: These classic children’s stories focus on a marmalade-loving, trouble-attracting bear from the depths of Peru and are my go-to reads when I’m feeling under the weather.
• Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories by Sandra Cisneros: A group of feminist/womanist tales focusing on immigrants, the poor, and Latinas. Cisneros’ words are poetic and you can’t help but feel immersed in the stories she tells.
• You can’t go wrong with a good fairy tale collection. The Grimms or Andersen or Perrault are all solid places to start. Phillip Pullman recently revisited some of the tales and put a fresh spin on them, and I hope to find a copy soon to read.

How about you? Got any short stories, collections, or novellas that really work for you that you’d recommend I try? I’m not against checking some out from the library and giving them a shot.

Designed by Amber of Shelf Notes

One of today’s Armchair BEA topics focuses on interacting with authors:

“Let’s talk interacting with authors IRL (in real life) or online. This is your opportunity to talk about your favorite author readings that you have attended. Or, you can feature your favorite author fan moment (i.e., an author sent you a tweet or commented on your blog). Maybe you even want to share how your interactions have changed since becoming a blogger or share your own tips that you have learned along the way when interacting with authors as a blogger.”

I am fortunate to live in Washington, D.C., which is home to the National Book Festival and to Politics and Prose, which hosts readings and signings nearly every night of the year. Because of that, I’ve been lucky enough to meet several authors I like an awful lot:

Barbara Kingsolver, 2009

Jacqueline Winspear, 2011

Michael Scott, 2011 (He is my favorite author to attend readings for, because he’s awesome at answering every question every kid in the audience has and for taking their questions and comments very seriously.)

Jasper Fforde, 2010 (I once got to ask him about his lack of thirteenth chapters in his Thursday Next books.)

Rainbow Rowell, 2013 (She is hilarious and very accessible on Twitter. I highly recommend following her there. We chatted briefly about the series finale to Dawson’s Creek, which we both liked. Also, she has fantastic shoes.)

Eliot Schrefer, 2013 (He shares great stories about bonobos and other apes in his Twitter feed.)

Just in case you envied me these experiences too much, though, I thought I’d reprint this story that I originally shared after the 2006 National Book Festival when I got a book signed by Doris Kearns Goodwin:

…Authors tend to leave me tongue-tied and all the kind, gushing things I think of to say to them while I’m waiting in line leave me as soon as I get up to the table.

What went through my brain in this instance was, “I really loved this book [Wait ‘Till Next Year]. It was on an endcap at the library in my old town and it demanded to come home with me one evening even though it wasn’t remotely what I was looking for. And then as I was reading, I was magically transported back 50 years to the ballgames of yore, and I immediately knew that my dad needed to read it. And that I needed to buy copies for my baseball-loving friends. It was the gift-book of the year. And then I eventually had to buy my own copy because I knew it was a story I’d want to re-read. You really do have a gift for making history come alive.”

What came out of my mouth was, “Sorry about your Red Sox.” She smiled patiently at me and said, “Thanks. There’s always next year.” I might as well have been a nerdy middle schooler telling the boy I like “I like your hair.”

Designed by Amber of Shelf Notes

Last year I discovered Armchair BEA, the book blogging community’s answer to the industry convention (Book Expo of America). I wrote posts, took part in Twitter chats, visited a lot of blogs, entered (and won) a few contests, and generally had a lot of fun.

However, you may have noticed that book posts have been noticeably absent this year and for a good part of last year. I was working on the wrap-up post on the day Rudi got injured in January, and I haven’t been able to force myself back to it — or to move forward without it. I have been reading, as you’ve probably surmised from the Yarning Along posts I share some Wednesdays, but summarizing or evaluating or anything formal just hasn’t happened yet this year.

Because I’ve been largely absent as a book blogger, I’d planned to skip this year’s Armchair BEA. But then it started today and I had a little pang.

Over the years, I’ve learned to recognize those pangs. They’re my psyche’s way of smacking me upside the head and saying, “Hey, dummy, you want this!” So I just signed up and offer this (and the following answers to some of the questions posed for the formal intro post) as way of saying hello:

Please tell us a little bit about yourself: Who are you? How long have you been blogging? Why did you get into blogging? Where in the world are you blogging from?

Hi, my name is Sprite. I blog from the Burrow, the apartment my partner and I share with three cats. I’m into my ninth year of blogging here at Sprite Writes, a birthday present from my partner back in 2005, for purposes of doing the writing I claim to love and never do.

Describe your blog in just one sentence. Then, list your social details so we can connect more online.

Sprite Writes is a lot like me: highly disorganized, active in fits and spurts, and filled with what I like best — including books, knitting, friends, cats, gardening, and music. I also write on Twitter, where, as @spritewrites, I write about all those things (just more concisely), as well as life in D.C. and liberal politics.

What was your favorite book read last year? What’s your favorite book so far this year?

Two Boys Kissing by David Levithan topped my list last year. I loved his use of AIDS victims as a Greek chorus and the way his multiple storylines got more and more intense and overlapping as the book neared its climax.

This year, I’ve read a number of good books, but I think the most recent floats to the top as my favorite thus far: A Snicker of Magic by Natalie Lloyd is the story of Felicity Juniper Pickle, a 6th-grader who just arrived with her itinerant mom, little sister, and dog in the once-magical Tennessee town her mother grew up in. Felicity is a word catcher, capturing those she learns and those she sees emanating from the world around her in a book and on her sneakers, but she has difficulty sharing these words back with people outside her family. If she can harness the snicker of magic that remains in the town, it’s possible she can turn things around for herself and for Midnight Gulch, but her mother’s got that glint in her eye that means the open road is not far away.

What does your favorite/ideal reading space look like?

A bower? A hammock? A cushioned window seat? The Beast’s library? Jo’s apple tree? Under a comforter on a rainy afternoon? In a park? At the beach?

So from this, we can deduce my favorite spot to read might be in a window seat under a comforter in a formal library of a cottage when I feel like reading inside and then moving outside into a hammock beneath an apple tree in the surrounding park that overlooks the beach.

Actually, that does sound pretty fantastic.

What book would you love to see as a movie?

Gayle Forman’s Just One Day and Just One Year would make great films. A love story! International settings! Fun secondary characters! Mmmm!

So that’s a little bit about me. I’ll be back tomorrow (seriously!) with more bookish talk. See you then!

I admit my socks look much like they did a fortnight ago (I’ve added one icord of 14), but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been knitting.

The square is for a quilt being made in remembrance of an acquaintance of ours. He was hit by a car last fall, suffered serious traumatic brain damage, and died last month as a result of complications from the surgery to close his scalp after the swelling had finally gone down. Rudi learned the quilt was being made and asked if I’d be willing to knit the square from us. He picked out and bought the yarn at the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival (Marigoldjen Yarns worsted in Paradise Islands), and I did the knitting. The heart, which I decided to add at the last minute and which is hard to see in this photo, isn’t centered vertically, but I think it’s okay the way it turned out. I’ll block it tomorrow and Rudi will be able to send it off to the knitter who’s collecting the squares and putting them together as soon as it’s dry.

The other knitting is a gift, so I won’t talk about it much, but knitters will recognize it as a Color Affection shawl, which I made for myself several years back and which I wear all the time. I’ll share more information about it once it’s done and with its recipient, but I’ll say that’s nice, mindless knitting, good for multi-tasking.

On the reading front, I’ve got three things going on: My book books are Arabel’s Raven, about a young British girl and her troublemaking pet bird, Mortimer, and A Snicker of Magic, about a young American girl whose mother has brought her and her little sister back to the small town where she grew up — a town once renowned for its now-defunct magic.

My audiobook of the moment is The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, which was one of my favorite books of 2009. It’s performed by a cast of voice actors and I’m enjoying hearing the letters read aloud as much as I’d enjoyed reading them myself five years ago. I’d been thinking it might be time to revisit the book, and when I saw it was available in audio format, I recalled co-author Annie Barrows saying that they’d done a particularly good job with it. It’s perfect for keeping my attention while knitting.

How about you? Are you reading or knitting anything particularly enjoyable?

(Yarning along with Ginny.)

I’ve been meaning to write a post declaring my participation in Carl’s annual Once Upon a Time VIII Challenge for more than a month now, but for whatever reason, I haven’t made the time to do so. However, I thought I’d share that I am participating and I have been reading books in the fantasy/fairy tale/folklore/mythology realm and am looking forward to reading more before the end of spring. I’ll be taking part in the Quest the First, which calls on me to read at least five books.

Want to see what I might read? Check out the to-be read pile:

Currently, I’m reading and enjoying Seraphina, a young adult novel about dragons and music and politics and family. There’s a lot of world-building necessary in this story, so the start has been a little slow, but I anticipate the pace building quickly as the pages turn.

I’m also listening to several books, which is necessary when you’re knitting late at night. I started out with Mindy Kaling’s Is Everybody Hanging Out without Me?, but I quickly realized that modern memoirs, which tend to be topical rather than chronological, are hard to listen to when tired because you don’t realize that you’ve dozed off and are listening an hour later than when you last tuned in. So I moved on to Heat Wave, the first novel tie-in to the tv show, Castle.

The socks are my Sock Madness round three pair, Rainbow Pipes and Linen Stitch Sock. While the knitting is done, the embellishment is not. So there remains a bit more to do — icords and buttons — before they’re wearable. Luckily, I’ll be able to work on those at my leisure, as I failed to finish in time to advance to the next round. Next up, a square Rudi would like me to make for a quilt for the family of a friend of his who died.

How about you? What are you knitting or reading? (I’m Yarning Along with Ginny.)