Last year, 100 books left our apartment, but you would never know that by how many remain. And of those that do, so many are unread. I might love them. I might not. But right now they’re sort of Schrödinger’s Reads, and my apartment is not big enough for that kind of book collection. There are too many new books I want to buy and too many trips to the library!

Thanks to my BFF, Karen, who is working through her own selection of longtime shelf dwellers, and to Judith at Reader in the Wilderness, who pointed me toward the 2019 TBR Pile Challenge at Roof Beam Reader, I’ve decided to tackle a dozen of the books currently residing on our shelves.

The rules of the challenge are that you have to post your 12 books at the start of the year and then get through them, with two substitutions allowed, also pre-mandated. This is not the sort of challenge I do well at, so no one will be shocked at the end of the year if I’ve read every book in my collection except for these 14 titles, but let’s give it a shot anyway, shall we?

My 12 official contenders are:

1. Jake and Lily by Jerry Spinelli
2. The Bookshop on the Quay by Patricia Lynch
3. In the Company of Sherlock Holmes, edited by Laurie King and Leslie Klinger
4. Selected Fables by Jean de La Fontaine
5. Starglass by Phoebe North
6. On Writing by Stephen King
7. Jane Steele by Lindsay Faye
8. The Magicians by Lev Grossman
9. Woman Rebel by Peter Bagge
10. How to Find Fulfilling Work by Roman Krznaric
11. A Tyranny of Petticoats, edited by Jessica Spotswood
12. Eggshells by Caitriona Lally

My two alternates:

1. Truthwitch by Susan Dennard
2. The Bookman’s Tale by Charlie Lovett

Middle grade, ya, adult, fiction, and nonfiction. Seems like a reasonable mix.

Don’t you just want to judge these books by their covers?

I finished The Assassination of Brangwain Surge by M.T. Anderson and Eugene Yelchin earlier tonight. If you like fantasy novels and Brian Selnick’s latest tomes, which alternate prose and illustration, I think you should give this middle grade book a shot.

The others are what I’m on to next: Martina Benjamin’s Insomnia, which has a sparkly purple cover, like the night sky — that my photo does not do justice to, is a collections of musings on not sleeping in the middle of the night. Circe by Madeline Miller takes on the goddess of magic. And A Winter’s Promise about a young woman who travels via ark until she is promised in marriage to a man from a floating sky island.

I’m still listening to The Woman Who Smashed Codes, but it expires very soon, so I need to power through it. We’re currently in the inter-war years in D.C. and Elizebeth Friedman has just quit working for the War Department, but knowing the course of her cryptology work, I suspect not for long.

I’m nearly to the heel of my sock; I gave it a day at this length to decide if I wanted to stop here, but I think I’ll do another repetition of the colors before moving on. Stripes have the two-fold benefit of making it easy to compare length and keeping progress moving forward. I’ll just knit until the next time it turns blue, you think, and an hour later you’re saying the same thing. Just one more color change! Just one more chapter!

Exactly. Keep telling yourself that, self!

Check out other posts about books and crafting at As Kat Knits.

Today’s Top Ten Tuesday topic from That Artsy Reader Girl asks for the ten most recent additions to my to-read list.

Today’s youth media awards from the American Library Association (they’re the folks who give out the Caldecott and Newbery and other prizes) added several books to my list including:

1. Sam Graham-Felsen’s Green
2. Courtney Summers’ Sadie
3. The Fox on a Swing by Evelina Daciūtė

Last week I partook of the #AskaLibrarian chat on Twitter and sought recommendations for books that would make me laugh. Raidergirl3 and others offered suggestions, including:

4. Stories from the Vinyl Cafe by Stuart McLean
5. Unclaimed Baggage by Jen Doll

A sequel to a book I read last week:

6. The Tea Dragon Festival by Katie O’Neill

A recommendation from the Bout of Books:

7. The Gilded Wolves by Roshani Chokshi

The next novels from three favorite authors:

8. A Dangerous Collaboration by Deanna Raybourn
9. The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern
10. Wayward Son by Rainbow Rowell

What have you recently added to your TBR list?

A new book and new knitting this week.

Here we have the start of a sock. It’s just a basic ribbed top, stockinette sock, but I find I have the most likelihood of finishing boring socks than fancy ones. The yarn is Regia Snowflake that Mum and Dad gave me for Christmas a couple years back.

The book is the Brittany Cavallaro’s second Charlotte Holmes/Jamie Watson novel, The Last of August, which, despite the name, takes place in late December. It’s fine thus far, but a little slow to get started, so I’m hoping it picks up its pace soon. I think I recall this being an issue with the first one, as well, which is probably why it took me this long to revisit the series. I’m listening to The Woman Who Smashed Codes and enjoying quite a bit this biography of the nation’s forgotten foremother of codebreaking.

Head over to As Kat Knits for more reading/crafting combo posts!

Rudi and I are on different sleep/wake cycles with him doing both on the earlier side (note, not early by normal standards, just earlier) and me on the later.

Our cats have long sorted themselves out at night accordingly, often by following the person they liked best. (In the morning, Corey will sometimes get up with Rudi, but everyone returns to sleep after he leaves for work.) Della went to bed with Rudi. Posey floated between us, but took over that role once she was gone. When it was just the three of them, Jeremiah stayed out with me. When we once again became a family of three cats after Della died, he would go in with Rudi to make sure he got settled, but would come back out to me. Once Posey was gone, Jer took her place, so Rudi wouldn’t have to sleep alone. Corey will go in with Rudi and Jer if I’m not home, but normally remains out with me until I’m ready to go to bed.

But that doesn’t mean he wants to just hang out in the same room. No, at night, he wants to be doing the same thing I am doing. So if I am typing a blog post, Corey wants to be draped across my left wrist and part of the keyboard. And as you can see here, he also wants to help me read my book. He tried both sides in case I had a preference, but since my preference was for him to remain on the far side of my book, eventually he gave up and took a nap on Rudi’s chair until I picked up the laptop and it was time for us to write to you. (He says hi.)

Today’s Top Ten Tuesday topic from That Artsy Reader Girl invites us to look back at the books we meant to read last year but didn’t get to (and that, presumably, we intend to read in 2019). I am really bad at lists like this, not because I can’t make them, but because there are so many books I want to read (3,035 according to my Goodreads list as of this moment).

My track record is mixed. The list I made in 2018 includes only three titles I finished, but the one I set for myself in 2017 had seven completions. And I’ve read only four off 2016‘s list. So that’s 29 titles and less than half of them completed.

But what’s life without goals, right?

Here are ten titles I meant to read last year that I really think I’ve got a shot at:

1. Sarah McCoy’s Anne prequel, Marilla of Green Gables
2. Mackenzi Lee’s sequel, The Lady’s Guide to Petticoats and Piracy
3. Markus Zuzak’s Bridge of Clay (Rudi gave this to me for Christmas, so it’s high on this year’s TBR pile)
4. Bruja Born by Zoraida Córdova
5. The Kiss Quotient by Helen Hoang
6. Tiffany Jackson’s Monday’s Not Coming (I own a copy of it, so it, too, is a get-to sooner book)
7. Aisha Saeed’s Amal Unbound
8. Circe by Madeline Miller (Karen gave me a copy for Christmas and it is conveniently sitting right next to me)
9. Rebound by Kwame Alexander
10. What Truth Sounds Like: Robert F. Kennedy, James Baldwin, and Our Unfinished Conversation About Race in America by Michael Eric Dyson

How about you? Were there books you meant to read in 2018 you didn’t get to?