While I have hopes in the final two weeks of the year of sharing some of the things I’ve been reading in 2014, I thought it was time to start planning for next year. I know I’ve been woefully bad at blogging books since I did that stint of judging the Cybils two years ago, really, and I’d like to get back to writing about what I’m reading again.

I’d also like to broaden my reading a bit and so am planning to join a few reading challenges/readalongs in 2015 in addition to my annual participation in Carl’s Once Upon a Time challenge.

First up is Play On, hosted by Half-Filled Attic. This challenge asks participants to read a play a month for the first four months of the year, divvying them up by era: ancients, Renaissance, post-Renaissance, and a freebie of your choosing.

This seems reasonable and jibes with my desires to read more non-novels, to read more classics, and to read a Shakespeare play a year. I may be looking for some suggestions as we get closer.

As you may have seen, I had an ambitious weekend filled with holiday activities planned for Rudi’s absence.

It didn’t go according to plan.

I mean, I still got things done.

I hit three holiday markets/craft fairs — the DC Women’s Business Center Holiday Bazaar, the Upshur Street Art and Craft Fair, and the GRUMP Market — and did some shopping at each one. I’m not done shopping, but I’m probably in better shape than usual this far out from Christmas (yes, I totally realize I just gave you early planners a heart attack with that statement). I need to finish my online shopping over the next day or two and then hopefully finish the local shopping next weekend.

I rode my bike to take advantage of the mild, dry weather.

I vacuumed, did a load of laundry, and cleaned off my desk. Apparently it had been longer than I’d thought since I’d done the last did that latter item. But I couldn’t work on my Christmas mix or write my Christmas cards without taking care of it. (Yes, I suppose I could write Christmas cards in ink that isn’t red or green, but that’s what I like to do. But I did really need to clear things out of the way to access my cd drive on the computer before I could import some of my new holiday tunes.)

I learned all about the new composting system at my community garden and helped get it set up for us to begin using it.

I read Paul Auster’s holiday piece, “Auggie Wren’s Christmas Story.” It was, as Auster hoped, unsentimental, but also maybe not quite as cheering as I was looking for this weekend. Don’t get me wrong: it’s quite good. Just not an especially good match for my mood. If your mood is more upbeat than mine and you have a spare 10–15 minutes, I’d recommend the book. ISOL’s illustrations are particularly striking and fit with my Sesame Street-inspired impressions of New York City in the 1970s. I have Frank Baum’s and J.R.R. Tolkein’s Christmas books in my drawer at work, so I’m hopeful they’ll be more to my taste.

I ate the spiciest grilled cheese ever (it had habaneros in it) and drank a delightful housemade soda (plum-cinnamon).

I started work on my Christmas mix by eliminating some of the carryover songs from last year and by adding some new ones. I’m a little negligent about locating the tracks I’ve been wanting to include, so need to get moving more solidly on that.

I watched the Garfield Christmas special from the ’80s, the “Blizzard” episode of Fame (which did not take place at Christmas, as I’d misremembered it doing), and the first episode of the new TNT show, The Librarians. (I never saw any of the movies, but Amazon offers them for streaming. I guess I’ll have to decide if my boycott of them extends to their non-physical products…) The CW is airing the episodes a week later than the cable premieres and it’s online, so I’d recommend watching. It’s Indiana Jones meets nerds.

I’m still hoping to paint my nails, do the handwashing, and put away my summer clothes (not in that order) tomorrow morning, but as of right now, those are untackled, as is the baking (I got as far as planning what I was going to make, but not actually to getting off the couch). No cards got written, but I’ve pulled everything out that’s needed to get started on them, so perhaps that will happen tomorrow night after Rudi and I get home from the airport. I didn’t do as much knitting as I would have liked, but it required too much effort to open the knitting bag sitting next to me. And while I dozed on the sofa quite a bit (the one good thing about Rudi being away is that I had options for where to lounge), I wouldn’t really say I got enough sleep, and I felt it.

Speaking of which, I’m going to toddle off to bed now in hopes of getting up early enough in the morning to do those things before work.

Weekending along with Pumpkin Sunrise.

When the world is too much with me, it is nice to have someplace to escape to and my place tends to be books and knitting.

Among the projects I picked up (and put down again) a few times in the last weeks are the fingerless mitts I started last year. I’m up to the thumb separation on mitt #2 (the thumb remains unfinished on mitt #1, as well), and if I could focus for half an hour, I’d make it past that part and be rapidly sailing toward home. The mitts are now in my bag in an effort to facilitate doing just that.

The book is one of two I’m currently reading and the one I just started today. It was an impromptu grab from the new books shelf at the library, but now it’s coming due and there are holds that prevent me from renewing it. As you might guess from the title Ho-Ho-Homicide, it’s a murder mystery. The protagonist has been asked to look into a Down East tree farm a far-off friend inherited recently, so she and her husband have just arrived there (somewhat reluctantly) from their home in Moosetookalook, Maine. There are mysterious circumstances surrounding the inheritance, and our protagonist has just sighted a grove of trees that seems sinister. I suspect the action is about to take off.

I’ll be honest. It’s a little hard to read when every word is being said aloud in your head by Cary Elwes over a Mark Knopfler track. But it is a burden that I’m willing to take on, even after my hot chocolate is gone.

That’s right, folks. The man behind the Man in Black has written a book all about the experience of making the most quotable movie of, if not all time, at least my lifetime.

I would read this book if it were terrible. But I am delighted to report that, as of 50 pages in, at least, it’s not. Elwes’ coauthor/ghostwriter/writer has done a good job of keeping his cadence and the first chapters are interspersed with sidebars from other people involved in the book, similar to how it would be to watching a dvd with the commentary track turned on.

As for what’s on the needles, I’ll admit that I’m carrying projects around with me everywhere these days, but not actually knitting on them a whole lot. I pulled the bags containing my Hey Teach sweater and the second skein of yarn out of storage more than a week ago, but haven’t done more than shift the baggies around. I cast on a new stripey sock at a meeting, but it’s gone back into the pie chest with only a few rounds complete. I moved my fingerless mitts into a project bag from the baggie where they’ve been languishing the last 10 months. And Rudi’s sock is stalled out just before the start of the heel flap. I’ve got no excuse for why the needles lie idle — and certainly it’s not for lack of projects or new project ideas — but I do hope productivity picks back up again soon.

What are you reading or working on?

Yarning along with Ginny.

Every year between Thanksgiving and Russian Christmas, I like to read Christmas-themed books. They aren’t the only thing I read, but I do like to mix them in liberally.

Already on this year’s radar are the following:

• My True Love Gave To Me (a collection of short stories by some of the rock stars of YA)
• The Stupidest Angel (which Karen gave me a couple years back and which I didn’t finish the first go-round)
• Ho-Ho-Homicide (it was in the new releases at the library last week)
• 2 A.M. at the Cat’s Pajamas (this may not be a Christmas book technically, but it’s set on Christmas Eve, so I’m counting it)
• The Legend of Holly Claus (I bought this a couple years ago, and if I can figure out where it’s hiding, I’d like to read it)

Do you enjoy holiday-themed reading? If so, do you have a favorite to recommend that I should request from the library? (Thus the appearance of this post so early in the season.) And what’s on your list for reading this year?

I’ll be honest, I’ve been a little down recently. I’m not sure what the cause is, since it predates my grandmother’s fall, the loss of evening daylight, and the cool weather, so it’s probably just cyclical, rather than situational this time. But the net result is less reading and less knitting.

However, there’s nothing like the need for blog fodder to inspire picking a new book (I finally finished Flight Behavior last night), and I have a bunch out from the library to choose among. I settled on Deborah Wiles’ Countdown, the first book in her Sixties trilogy. The second book, Revolution, is a National Book Award finalist in this year’s young adult category. Set in 1962 here in D.C., I’m planning to read Countdown while listening to several of the compilations of music from that year that my dad has curated, which seems fitting for a book with a 45 on its cover.

The socks are for Rudi. The yarn is Wild Hare Studio’s Pinnacle Sock in I Want My Zombie, the 8th and final skein of yarn bought at Maryland Sheep & Wool this year. It is, at his request, a 2×2 rib, which is the most boring knitting ever, if you ask me. It’s not totally mindless, like stockinette would be, but it’s also not something that requires focus, so I often find myself floating away and with the wrong number of stitches at the end of a needle. That said, the spiraling stripe, which looks like a zombie’s wrappings (do zombies have wrappings or is that just mummies?), is a lot of fun, and they’re Rudi’s favorite colors, which means he’ll wear them lots when I’m done with them. And it is good knitting for the dark, so I got a lot done by the campfire when we were on vacation, and it’ll also work well for concerts and car rides, should either of those materialize in our future soon.