I am done knitting the body of my shawlette and need to move on to picking up the stitches around the edge for the border next. Conveniently, the pattern calls for yarn overs on every row for the ease of just this task, so I hope to be nearing the end of this project this month.

Tonight brought some bad news, so I opted to start a new book by the most amusing author I know, Jasper Fforde. It’s the third Jennifer Strange novel and the first few chapters promise as entertaining a read as the previous two books in the series.

I’ve been off my reading game in general this year and specifically in the last month, so I’m excited to participate once again in the 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, May 11th and runs through Sunday, May 17th 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 13 information and updates, be sure to visit the Bout of Books blog. – From the Bout of Books team

When I participated in January, my goals included reading daily, finishing a couple books, and blogging about what I was reading. This time, I think my goals will be similar:

1. To read at least a few pages every day.
2. To finish at least one book and/or read 300 pages across several books.
3. To update you on what I’ve been reading. Daily would be nice, but let’s be realistic and aim for three posts this week.

Today’s Bout of Books challenge is to answer a survey posed by Lori at Writing My Own Fairy Tale:

1. How do you organize your shelves?

I have a loose understanding of the word organize in this context. I have a couple shelves with books of sentimental value: works by Louisa May Alcott, Laura Ingalls Wilder, C.S. Lewis, L.M. Montgomery, my bible and dictionary, a book that used to belong to my dad’s aunt, etc. And there’s a second half-shelf that has some other books that were gifts and are valuable for that reason. Otherwise, things are vaguely arranged by genre and/or time of acquisition. Poetry books are all together. Crafting books are all together. Feminist texts are all together. Books acquired at one of the ALA meetings I went to are all on the bottom shelf of my desk. Books that came into the Burrow during the period I served on the Cybils committee are in or on the blue cabinet. Library books are by my chair. Fiction is spread all over the house, as is appropriate.

2. What is one of your favorite book that’s not in one of your favorite genres?

I guess I tend not to read a whole lot of history, so let’s go with Cait Murphy’s Crazy ’08: How a Cast of Cranks, Rogues, Boneheads, and Magnates Created the Greatest Year in Baseball History.

3. What is the last 5 star book you read?

According to GoodReads, it was The Book of Unknown Americans, which I read last summer. (I don’t award five stars frequently: something on the order of twice a year.)

4. What book are you most excited to read during the read-a-thon?

I hope to get to Jasper Fforde’s latest in the Chronicles of Kazam, The Eye of Zoltar. I’m just hoping I remember enough of the previous two books to dive back in comfortably. I also picked up the second volume of Ms. Marvel last weekend, so that’s high on my list, too. And I’m finding The Soul of Baseball: A Road Trip Through Buck O’Neil’s America surprisingly comforting.

5. What book do you recommend the most?

For what and whom? For Bout of Books participants? I don’t feel like I have a single pat answer. But I suppose if you haven’t read The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde you should do so immediately.

I’ll be honest: I haven’t really felt like reading or knitting anything in the last few weeks.

Every few days I knit a couple rows on my Lazy Katy shawlette. The yarn is Lang Yarns Jawoll Magic Dégradé and there was a knot partway into the skein, which explains the weird color changes that will jump out at knitters, but hopefully not to too many other people. I am nearly done with the expanded stockinette body and will next turn to the lace edging. Despite my slow progress, I am looking forward to wearing it.

The books are ones that I’ve dipped into over the last month: The Pratchett is the first in the Discworld series, of which I’ve only read the first Tiffany Aching novel. Fablehaven was a Christmas gift from Karen, and I purposely put it aside to read this spring during my annual fantasy readalong. The Soul of Baseball is about one of the Negro League’s great names and promises (literally, in several places on the dust jacket) to be uplifting and make you feel better about life. I could use both right now, as well as being a general fan of baseball stories. Finally, the Sherlock Holmes companion piece is a collection of short works that accompany works in Conan Doyle’s canon. I admit I haven’t actually opened that one yet, but I’d like to see if I can’t read Gramma-style stories without weeping through them.

Technically, this photo is a lie.

I am NOT currently reading Lola and the Boy Next Door because I just spent six hours power reading it nearly non-stop. Stephanie Perkins writes YA contemporary romance and composes fun protagonists and swoon-worthy love interests. I might like Cricket, the scientifically minded guy in this story, even more than I liked St. Clair in Perkins’ debut novel, which is saying something significant.

And while that looks like the top of a sock and DOES, in fact, constitute two concerts’ worth of knitting, I’m just not completely sold on it becoming what I told it to be (which, yes, was a sock). It’s sport-weight yarn and it feels too thick to be a sock, but it maybe just wants to be a thick sock? I’m still mulling… which is fine because the next round of Sock Madness should begin by the weekend.

I’m still working on my Lightning Shawl and am loving the color changes along and between the panels and the bright hues of the yarn on such grim winter days. I am excited to wear it, even if that doesn’t seem likely for Hungary.

I’ve got a couple different physical books I’m wrapping up, but am listening to Anne Ursu’s Breadcrumbs, a modern retelling of the Snow Queen that seems especially apt in a week that involved several days of shoveling and a cold between two weekends of being home alone.

I’m looking forward to the start of Sock Madness next week and to picking a couple non-library books to take with me on vacation. My audio book selection is already downloaded to my phone — the fifth Harry Potter.

Tonight has been an evening of starts and finishes. I plowed through the final 100 pages of Katie Fforde’s Practically Perfect, a sweet romance set in an English village where Anna has just bought a cottage she’s renovating. There’s not a lot in the way of character development, particularly once you reach the secondary characters, but I didn’t mind. It wasn’t overly treacly, and I found myself missing the characters when I opted to take a different book with me to Connecticut last weekend.

While in Connecticut I finished the cowl I was test knitting (and which I’ll share with you once I have the designer’s go-ahead to do so), so needed either to cast on something new or pick up something old. I opted for both by pulling out my Lightning Shawl, which is knit in strips. Yes, I did cast on the next strip just for the sake of the blog post. And, yes, it took me three tries to realize that I’d used a different cast-on than what I’d expected on the previous strips. But we’re good now (I hope) and it’s not out of the question that this could be done in time to take with me to Hungary as a completed accessory.