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.

Sometimes (when I remember to take a photo), Wednesdays are for sharing books and knitting projects as I yarn along with Ginny.

This is a week for attempting to finish things previously begun. My reading is the verse memoir, Brown Girl Dreaming, by Jacqueline Woodson, who was one of the authors I listened to at the National Book Festival. I’m enjoying her poems about growing up African American in the late-1960s and 1970s. I’m hoping to finish by Friday, because the book has holds on it at the library and I need to return it before the weekend. On the audiobook front, I just tonight (since I wanted something for while I was dealing with peeling a pot of tomatoes) started listening to Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South, via the CraftLit podcast.

My current knitting is the next in my stripey stockinette socks in progress. These, knit in Beyond Basic Knit’s Vintage Holiday, I started last fall in hopes of wearing them during the Christmas 2013 season, but that didn’t happen. Sock #1 is done and #2 is well started, so hopefully these will be completed well before this year’s holidays. I already have a skein of new stripey yarn waiting to be wound into a ball, ready to commence working on next week, although I probably ought to consider some baby knitting for the latest additions to the greater friend pool.

How about you? What are you reading and/or knitting this week?

Today’s Top Ten Tuesday topic, hosted by The Broke and the Bookish, asks participants to name ten books we plan on reading this fall.

Here’s some of what I’m hoping to tackle:

1. Kendall Kulper’s Salt & Storm: Kendall and I were Cybils judges together in 2012 and her debut novel was published today.
2. Eliot Schrefer’s Threatened: Honestly, I can’t tell you why I haven’t read this yet. It was on this summer’s TBR pile and I just didn’t come back around to it.
3. Anne Bronte’s Agnes Grey: This is one of my college roommate’s favorite Bronte novels, so seems only fair I get around to reading the copy I’ve had since 1987.
4. Helene Wecker’s The Golem and the Jinni: I put this down earlier in the year and am eager to get back to it. A library copy is currently in my possession.
5. Knitting Yarns: Writers on Knitting (edited by Ann Hood): Rudi bought this for me for Russian Christmas last winter and periodically it whispers to me that it’d like to be read. As cool weather comes back around, it seems like a good time to pick it up.
6. Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior OR The Lacuna: One of these is getting read this fall. Whichever hooks me in 50 pages gets the nod.
7. Jasper Fforde’s The Eye of Zoltar: I believe there is a law that dictates I must read every Jasper Fforde book within a year of publication. The third book in the Dragonslayer series comes out next month.
8. Jacqueline Woodson’s Brown Girl Dreaming: Recently published, this verse memoir was just listed as a contender in this year’s National Book Awards and got a ton of pre-press love in my Twitter feed.
9. Sarah Mlynowski’s Bras and Broomsticks: Because witchcraft and Halloween go hand in hand?
10. My True Love Gave to Me: Twelve Holiday Stories (edited by Stephanie Perkins): A dozen Christmas stories from some of YA’s best writers? Count me in!

How about you? What are you hoping to read before year’s end?

Sometimes (when I remember to take a photo), Wednesdays are for sharing books and knitting projects as I yarn along with Ginny.

Campaign season is upon us in D.C., as it is for many of you, too. For me, this means lots of time spent at candidate forums and endorsement meetings, which require something to keep the hands occupied and the body awake.

So on September 1, I cast on a new pair of socks:

The yarn, which I wound on a camping trip last fall while sitting in front of a fire, is Knitterly Things Vesper Sock Yarn in Autumn Sky, and as with all of her colorful, stripey concoctions, I am in love. She just emailed to say that she’s updated her shop and I am trying very hard not to buy all.the.yarn.

On the reading front, we’ve got Alaya Dawn Johnson’s The Summer Prince, which I started earlier in the summer and which appears on my list of books to finish by next week. It’s sci-fi/fantasy/dystopian set in a future, matriarchal Brazil and focuses on a teen artist, June, and Enki, the titular character, whom we are informed in the prologue is elected to his position as consort with the understanding that he will be sacrificed after a year. It’s dark and, obviously, the further you get into a book with such a plot, the darker it’s going to get.

I’m also reading and enjoying quite a bit Chicks Dig Time Lords (edited by Lynn M. Thomas and Tara O’Shea), a slim collection of personal essays, interviews, and comics about the women of Doctor Who, be they academics, fans, writers, actresses, or artists. I am a recent’ish convert to the long-running sci-fi tv show (we’re closing in on the end of Amy and Rory’s tenure as companions, so no spoilers, please), but my interest in gender studies dates back at least a couple decades. While the whole “chick” thing rankles a bit, I do appreciate the various perspectives presented by nerdy women.

I’m tired and out of inspiration at the moment, so I’m stealing a Broke and Bookish Tuesday topic from a couple weeks back:

Ten Authors I Own The Most Books From

1. Carolyn Keene: Although they are all in my parents’ attic, the plurality award goes to my Nancy Drew collection, which was started by a gift from my mother when I was in 3rd grade. There are probably close to 20 books there (although I loaned one out once to a friend of a friend who lives on the West Coast and never got it back…)
2. L.M. Montgomery: I loved the Anne books and the first one was definitely a present. But I can remember using my saved allowance to buy copies of the subsequent books in the series and then the Emily books and either bought or received as gifts several of her other titles. Some of them are up in Connecticut still, so I can’t give you an exact count, but I’d guess somewhere around 14.
3. Jasper Fforde: I have every book he’s published thus far in the U.S., which according to Wikipedia now numbers at 12. I will continue to buy them, so at some point, he’ll overtake the Nancy Drew team.
4. William Shakespeare: He’s another one I can’t give you an accurate count for, since I buy them used for cheap, but I’m probably somewhere around 10 or so…
5. J.K. Rowling: Seven Harry Potters in English (and possibly one in French), plus the most recent Cormoran Strike novel. If we count household copies, we have duplicates of the last three HP novels and Rudi is in possession of at least three in foreign languages: two in German and one in Welsh.
6. Barbara Kingsolver: 7 or 8. I can’t quite remember how many short story/essay collections I have. One of my favorite authors.
7. Louisa May Alcott: My grandparents gave me a set of six of her books when I was a kid and I received a second copy of Eight Cousins as a prize in third grade. With Harry Potter and the Anne books, Little Women is the book I’ve re-read most during my life.
8. Laura Ingalls Wilder: I know I don’t have the full collection, since I’ve been picking them up over the years as I find them (having read the library’s copies as a kid), but I’d guess I’ve got six of the ten Little House books and then a collection of her newspaper columns.
9. C.S. Lewis: 6, although I’ve never read the final book in the Narnia series, since a friend told me doing so runs the risk of ruining all of them. Since she doesn’t mess around about that kind of stuff, and since I thought the quality had tapered off after the first three or so, I’ve taken her advice thus far.
10. Toni Morrison: 5 or 6. Many of these were read during college, so I don’t quite recall whether or not I’ve read (and thus own) all the titles I think I have.

How about you? Are there specific authors you collect and/or read above all others?

Wednesdays are for sharing books and knitting projects as I yarn along with Ginny.

As part of my August goals and for a competition in one of the Ravelry groups I belong to, I’m working on finishing up some socks-in-progress. I began the first sock of this pair last summer while watching The Avengers at Canal Park, worked on it as a take-along at events where I wanted easy, focus-free knitting (like concerts and ballgames and the like), and bound off at a showing of Lover Come Back (Rock Hudson and Doris Day play ad execs and hijinks ensue) down on the Mall in July. Sock #2 was cast on at the ballpark last night. I’ve got some bus time coming up soon, so I’m hoping these will be a good project for that when I’m not sleeping (and sometimes even when I am, as Rudi will attest).

I just finished a book last night, so I’m mulling over something new to read. I’m 29 pages into The Last Days of California, a coming-of-age story about a teen girl traveling with her family to the West Coast in time for the day their cult predicts will be the end of the world, and haven’t made up my mind yet. The other two are baseball stories: George Will’s is about growing up a Cubs fan. I’m not especially a fan of his (or his politics), but we used to see him and Tim Russert at games when the Nats played at RFK periodically and baseball is a force that unites even the most polar opposite of folks, so I thought I’d give it a shot after seeing him talk about on CBS Sunday Morning. And the other book is a mystery/detective story about a minor league player who starts investigating things for his fellow teammates. It sounded like it might have potential. I have some other books, should none of those stick, but these seemed like the most likely next candidates.

What are you reading and knitting these days?