January has been, as it usually is for me, a good reading month, with lots of recommendations coming off people’s year-end best-of lists and the children’s and young adult award winners from the ALA Midwinter meeting. Rita Williams-Garcia’s latest book was recently lauded, and I decided that before I got to that one I ought to read her two previous historical novels featuring the Gaither sisters. One Crazy Summer is the first one, and so far I’m enjoying the story of three young girls from New York visiting Oakland in 1968 to get to know their estranged mother. I’m also back to listening to Anne of Green Gables, as well, and just tonight finished the puffed sleeves chapter. It was good to get the text of the book back in my head, since the film version differs slightly (although they did get the excruciating comedy of Matthew’s foray into shopping just right).

I’m up to the heel flap on this sock, although I did get a little carried away with the stockinette while we were watching the basketball game last week, so I wonder if I’ll run out of yarn on the foot. I suppose I can always rip back if it ends absurdly early (odd-colored toes really oughtn’t to start at the arch, after all), although I do object on principle to undoing perfectly good work when it’s just for vanity’s sake. But the socks are for Rudi and I object more to people mocking his socks. It’s one thing if they were mine and I could defend my thriftiness in person, but I wouldn’t want people feeling bad for Rudi that he was stuck with some crazy, unfashionable knitter who forced him to wear ugly handmade clothes. Pure vanity on my part, I suppose, but I guess there are worse faults to have.

Today’s Top Ten Tuesday topic from The Broke and the Bookish is Top Ten 2015 Releases We Meant to Get to but Didn’t:

1. Ta-Nehesi Coates’ Between the World and Me: I must have taken the most talked about book of the year out of the library at least five times. You’d think I’d have managed to finish it, but no. This year.
2. Brian Selznick’s The Marvels appeared on my to-read list for last week’s #TBRTakedown, but I didn’t get to it because I didn’t want to rush through it. It’s on my list for this weekend, though, since my dad picked it up, too.
3. Kitchens of the Midwest, by J. Ryan Stradal, appeared on several lists of books that leave you with a smile at their end. That’s what I’m reading right now.
4. Becky Albertalli’s Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda appeared on a bunch of best-of lists (winning the Morris Award for best debut for teens) and also was cited as life-affirming. Also, Oreo-affirming, so I have a bag set aside to eat while reading. It’s written by a Wesleyan alum, so I have an especial interest.
5. Challenger Deep, by Neal Shusterman, won the 2015 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature.
6. Steve Sheinkin’s 2013 book, The Port Chicago 50, outraged me and was the book I talked about to everyone I encountered while reading it, including people who don’t seem to like books. His latest, Most Dangerous: Daniel Ellsberg and the Secret History of the Vietnam War, promises to be equally outrageous and has been named both a Cybils finalist in non-fiction and the winner of the YALSA Award for Excellence in Nonfiction for Young Adults. DCPL was a little slow to buy this one, but they’ve got it in stock now.
7. Bone Gap, by Laura Ruby, won the Printz Award yesterday and is a finalist for the Cybils in the YA speculative fiction category.
8. Carry On, Rainbow Rowell’s latest. I didn’t buy it in case someone wanted to give it to me for Christmas. All those someones probably expected I’d already read/bought it, so now it’s fair game for use with the credits I amassed at my local bookshops doing my Christmas shopping.
9. A Conn alum, Tracy O’Neill was listed as one of last year’s 5 under 35 winners by the National Book Foundation. Her novel, The Hopeful, came out last year.
10. Pam Muñoz Ryan’s Echo was named a Newbery Honor Book yesterday.

Those are just a few of the books I missed out on last year. I have another ten out from the library that I’m hoping to tackle in the upcoming weeks.

How about you? What books from 2015 did you just not get around to? Or that you’ve only just heard about from some of the best-of lists or award lists?

That there is a shoe for a newborn, a gift for friends expecting a wee girl in the next few weeks. Also there is my current read, the 600+-page tome, Illuminae. It’s my fiery book for #TBRTakedown. It turns out that the book I decided to finish on Monday, Come Hell or Highball, is the first in a planned series, so Illuminae is off the hook for counting in that category. I’m also slowly taking in Honest Engine as my poetry read.

I’m about 270 pages in for the week. Slower than I’d hoped, but I’ve been tired the last few days.

In addition to counting for all these reading challenges, this post is also part of Ginny’s Yarning Along roundup.

This coming week includes two semi-annual reading challenges I plan to take part in: #TBRTakedown, hosted by Shannon of Leaning Lights, and Bout of Books.

The Bout of Books read-a-thon is organized by Amanda @ On a Book Bender and Kelly @ Reading the Paranormal. It is a week long read-a-thon that begins 12:01am Monday, January 4th and runs through Sunday, January 10th in whatever time zone you are in. Bout of Books is low-pressure. There are challenges, giveaways, and a grand prize, but all of these are completely optional. For all Bout of Books 15 information and updates, be sure to visit the Bout of Books blog. – From the Bout of Books team

Bout of Books has daily blog challenges, so you’ll probably see more about that in the upcoming days.

While #TBRTakedown’s priorities also lie with just generally reading, you can also opt to take part in the challenges:

1. Book from your most recent book haul.
2. Book on your TBR Shelf over a year (or longest).
3. Book outside your comfort zone! (Genre, content, etc).
4. First book in a series.
5. Complete a series/Read a sequel in a series.
6. Read a FIRE color book (Fire colours such as shades of red, pink, purple, lilac, burgundy.) Lucky Colors for 2016.
7. Read a non-novel item: poem, verse, novella, short story, etc.

Here you can see some of the books I’m considering to fit the challenges. Illuminae is both red and the first book in a planned series. The Marvels arrived under the Christmas tree. Those are the two chunksters, but I expect them both to move quickly. Selznick books read fast, since they’re half illustrations, and Illuminae is filled with ephemera, I understand. I picked up the graphic novel The Adventures of Superhero Girl the August before last when I discovered the Union Station comic book shop, Fantom Comics, had relocated to my neighborhood. It’s by Faith Erin Hicks, who is collaborating on an upcoming comic book/graphic novel with Rainbow Rowell. I’m not sure if graphic novels cover that final item (novel is in the title, after all), so I’ve got a collection of poems, Honest Engine, from a local writer to fill that category. Forgiveness is a Harlequin romance book, decidedly outside my comfort zone, but part of a reading/knitting prize I won many years ago from the author. Winter Holiday is the part of the Arthur Ransome series, Swallows and Amazons, a charming British kidlit series from the early 20th century.

That said, after I took that picture, I put all those books away, with the intention of finishing the mystery novel I was reading earlier in the week. Next to the couch I also have three other novels, none of which I photographed (although at least two of them would fulfill categories). We’ll see how it goes.

What are you reading these days? Did you get any exciting/long desired books from Santa?

I admit that I’m a sucker for needing to try any new apple variety I come across, so it may not be a huge surprise that Apples of North America, a coffee table guide to nearly 200 of them, was an impulse grab at the library a few weeks ago. Plus, it’s National Non-Fiction November and it’s good to learn something new.

I’ve also added the audiobook of Anne of Green Gables to my routine this week.

The blob of knitting is the ribbing and first couple body rows of Foliage. It’s not mindless knitting yet, but I have hopes for it becoming less focus-requiring in the near future.

Yarning along with Ginny at Small Things.

Seven books finished back in February — two middle-grade, two YA, and three adult titles. (Please be warned: I tried to balance not giving away plot spoilers with offering trigger warnings in the final review. I’m not sure I was successful with either.)

The Meaning of Maggie, by Megan Jean Sovern. 220 pages.
A perfectly serviceable middle-grade novel about Maggie, who turns 11 at the outset of this work of historical fiction (sad to say that about the late 1980s…) and receives a diary in which to keep her thoughts. This future president shares her thoughts about her school year, her friends, and her family, which includes two older sisters, a mom who’s recently started working to support the family, and a dad who’s recently stopped. Because he’s now home when she gets in from school, they spend a lot of time together listening to classic rock and eating snacks, but not talking about the fact that he’s now in a wheelchair because his legs keep falling asleep and won’t wake up. So Maggie, being a precocious kid, decides to focus her science fair project on learning about and working on finding him a cure for the illness that’s affecting him, which she learns is called multiple sclerosis. It’s going to be tough getting started, though, because the “M” volume of their encyclopedia has been misplaced.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, by J.K. Rowling. 734 pages.
This was an on-again, off-again re-listen to the audiobook version over the course of eight months via Overdrive (which is why it took so long). I don’t know that I get anything new out of the books anymore at this point, although I’m always interested in noticing where the film version has edged out the book version of events or characters. Always enjoyable.

Practically Perfect, by Katie Fforde. 400 pages.
A sweet find at the library. Fforde (who is related by marriage to one of my favorite authors) writes cozy British romances, and this was just what I wanted around Valentine’s Day. The main character, Anna, is five years out from her interior design (not decorating, thank you very much) degree and has flipped her first apartment with the help of her sister. She’s taken the proceeds from that to strike out on her own and purchased a commuter cottage in the Cotswolds, which she’s going to live in while she fixes it up. In her downtime, she gets to know her neighbor, a young frazzled mother of three boys, who leads her into a variety of adventures, including adopting a rescued Greyhound, cleaning out the shed of the mother of the guy she had a crush on in university, and modeling a bathtub at a DIY fair. Because of her grayhound, she also gets to know Rob, who stops her dog from running away one afternoon and gives her an earful about its care. While she hopes the encounter is just a one-off, it turns out she’s going to spend a lot more time with Rob than she expects. Will it be a problem when the guy she had a crush on in college comes back into her life? Practically perfect if you’re looking for an inoffensive romantic read.

Texts from Jane Eyre, by Mallory Ortberg. 226 pages.
Have you ever wondered what your favorite characters from classic literature and history would have said to one another if text messaging and email had been invented during their time (or sometimes if they were transported forward to our time)? Wonder no more because editor of online magazine, The Toast, Mallory Ortberg, has filled us in on the exchanges between Jo and Laurie, Watson and Sherlock, and Elizabeth and Mrs. Bennet, William Blake and a friend, among others. Appearing on a lot of best-of humor lists from 2014, I’d hoped it would make this English major laugh. I did chuckle quite a few times, but found I enjoyed it more when just reading one or two exchanges at a time, rather than in large chunks. I found the same to be true of Kate Beaton’s cartoons, which I’d pair this with. That said, if they made a page-a-day calendar out of this or a sequel, I’d totally buy it, because wouldn’t this be an awesome way to start the workday?

DID YOU LEAVE BECAUSE OF MY ATTIC WIFE
IS THAT WHAT THIS IS ABOUT

-yes
Absolutely

-BECAUSE MY HOUSE IN FRANCE DOESN’T EVEN HAVE AN ATTIC
IF THAT’S WHAT YOU WERE WORRIED ABOUT
IT HAS A CELLAR THOUGH SO YOU KNOW
DON’T CROSS ME
HAHA I’M ONLY JOKING

The Lover’s Dictionary, by David Levithan. 211 pages.
I’d been looking forward to reading this collection of short dictionary entries about love since it came out. Since I’d enjoyed everything else I’d read by Levithan, who also is one of the most prolific YA editors out there, I figured it would be a perfect read for the month of Valentine’s Day. Not so, at least in my case. Sadly, I think it’s one of those cases where my expectations of what the book would be didn’t actually line up with what the book was. (This is not the fault of the book, but did taint my reading experience beyond salvage.) Turns out it was much more about a specific relationship and less about a general one, and that its story was not as happy-go-lucky as I’d thought it would be. That said, if you are one of the many people who liked Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation (which I absolutely despised), you might also enjoy this.

El Deafo, by Cece Bell. 248 pages.
A middle-grade graphic novel/memoir about Cece’s experiences as a young girl (depicted as a rabbit) who became hearing-impaired after a sudden illness when she was four. Through elementary school, she struggles with people’s judgments about her, from her friends to her siblings, with lip-reading (it’s really hard when people think they’re being helpful and slow down what they’re saying to an exaggerated degree), and with her hearing aid (her teacher wears a microphone, but doesn’t realize it’ll broadcast not only her classroom lectures, but also her bathroom visits). Some of her problematic interactions with people come from her disability, but some of them come with just getting older and the weirdness that happens as girls start to hit puberty, making her character — and her struggles — instantly and universally relatable. A Newbery Honor Book, I’d recommend it for anyone struggling through the mires of late-elementary/early-middle school.

Girls like Us, by Gail Giles. 210 pages.
Two young women from a special ed class age out of the foster system and graduate, but are not yet ready to face the world on their own. A caseworker helps find them an apartment where they can live in exchange for helping Miss Lizzy, its elderly owner (who lives in an adjacent house), with chores. What starts out as an antagonistic experience for Quincy, who considers Biddy stupid and has a chip on her shoulder about being considered a servant, turns out to be just what was needed for all three women, who help each other overcome well-intentioned missteps, the terrible moments of their past, and a horrifying experience Quincy survives at her job at the local grocery store. These three women go from having no one to realizing family is more than just kin. Told in alternating points of view from Biddy and Quincy, this is a powerful story. (It does, however, contain graphic situations that may be difficult for some readers. If you’re concerned about what they might be, leave a comment and I’d be happy to share what they are with you in an email.)