Yesterday’s Top Ten Tuesday topic from The Broke and the Bookish was the top ten books on our fall to-be-read piles.

I currently have 28 books out from the library and another 15 requested. It seems unlikely that I will get to all of them, as well as the ones that haven’t come out yet and the last few Book Riot Read Harder challenges that I haven’t accounted for yet, so this list is probably helpful in winnowing things down a bit.

1. Robert Galbraith’s Career of Evil doesn’t come out until Oct. 20, but I will drop everything in order to read the next Cormoron Strike book from Jo Rowling.
2. Likewise, Rainbow Rowell’s Carry On comes out next week. I own all her other books and love her work, so I feel pretty confident I’ll be reading this one soon.
3. Back to things in my possession: I was so bowled over by Claudia Rankine’s reading at the National Book Festival that I returned my library copy of Citizen and bought my own. I’ve read the first part, but it is not a book to be hurried through, so I expect to take my time with this over the next few weeks.
4. On a similar theme, I feel like Ta-Nahisi Coates’ Between the World and Me is equally important to read and equally necessary to read in small chunks so as to better digest his arguments. It just appeared on the longlist for the National Book Awards in nonfiction, and I anticipate it will win the category. And probably a bunch of other awards.
5. Julie Murphy’s Dumplin’ just arrived at my library this week and is just waiting for Pope madness to subside so I can get over there and pick it up.
6. Similarly, Amy Stewart’s Girl Waits with Gun also recently came through in my holds.
7. Scarlett Undercover by Jennifer Latham features a 16-year-old detective and I’m intrigued. D.C.’s library doesn’t have it, but Arlington does, so I guess that’ll be what prompts me to cross the river and renew that card.
8. Next week is Banned Book Week, which means it’s time to finally get around to Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.
9. Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda is written by Becky Albertalli, who was a student at Wesleyan during my time there. I don’t think I ever met her, but the connection is still enough to bump this well-reviewed, National Book Awards longlisted YA title up my TBR.
10. Can you believe I’ve never read Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park? Thanks to my Book Ninja Swap partner, Megz, I now have a copy, and I feel like fall would be a good time to read it. (I’ve seen the Billie Piper version of the story; do folks think that’s the best screen adaptation or do you prefer another?)

What are you hoping to read this fall?

I’m a day late for Ginny’s Wednesday Yarn-Along, but I’m posting here and now anyway. Better to publish a few hours behind everyone else than just in my head, which is where an awful lot of writing happens these days (book reviews, for example).

You can see there this year’s fall/Halloween socks, made in Knitterly Things’ Candy Corn colorway. It’s the traditional picot-edged 64-stitch stockinette sock that I favor for fast, public, self-striping knitting. That’s sock #1, which I started at the beginning of the month and then got ripped out and restarted over the weekend. I have probably another inch or so of legging before I start the heel. I had a long, boring work meeting yesterday, and some reading time the other night, which made for a lot of fast progress. Here’s hoping to being done by the end of the month!

On the reading front, I’ve been listening to final Harry Potter novel in my audio re-read of the series. It has to be returned today (and Overdrive is excellent at making sure I don’t keep books past their borrowing time), so I’ve paused just before our favorite trio head out to the Ministry of Magic. It seemed like the only safe place to leave them until it becomes available to borrow again.

I am still plodding through Unrivaled, which I keep reading out of loyalty to the subject matter (the rivalry between the UConn and Tennessee women’s basketball teams) rather than to the book itself. The author was a journalist who covered UConn’s women’s beat and it feels like much of the book is pasted together from contemporaneous media interviews/stories, rather than analysis or interviews with former players, fans, etc. I’m up to 2000 and the era of UConn basketball I loved best (the teams that included Sue, Svet, Shea, and Diana), though, so that’s something.

Ana of California is a book I feel a lot of you might enjoy, although admittedly I’m only a quarter of the way into it. It’s a modern retelling of Anne of Green Gables, focused on Ana, a mouthy 15-year-old Latina foster kid from Los Angeles who loves reading, drawing, and music and who’s run out of options in the system. She’s got one final shot, a month-long trial placement working on an organic farm upstate run by a pair of middle-aged siblings. But she’s not the boy the brother was expecting to help him run the farm and his crew of workers, so will it work out or will Ana be forced into juvie until she’s of age? You’ve read the original, you know what happens, and you totally won’t care because this version stands on its own, relying more on Neil Young lyrics than Tennyson quotations than in L.M. Montgomery’s classic.

Bout of Books 14 wrapped up Sunday night, and I consider my participation a great success. I read every day last week, finishing three books in various states of progress and read a couple chapters in a fourth.

Because everything was already partway through when the week began, I don’t have a complete tally of pages read, but I’d guess somewhere in the 600+ arena would be about right.

• I read two chapters of Unrivaled, about the UConn-Tennessee rivalry in women’s basketball.
• I raced through Circus Mirandus, a charming middle-grade novel about a boy whose seriously ill grandfather needs a miracle promised long ago by a magical circus performer.
• I completed Hyperbole and a Half, Allie Brosh’s illustrated/graphic memoir/essay collection.
• And I finally, after having it out of the library for seven months (thanks, DCPL’s generous new renewal program), finished the final few chapters of Signed, Sealed, Delivered, a look at the merits of letter-writing.

Out of the pages, I participated in both Twitter chats and a blogging challenge and enjoyed considering my answers to several others I didn’t write early enough.

I didn’t quite get two bookish posts in last week, but one progress post and a wrap-up post is better than the last Bout I took part in.

I look forward to participating again in January and hope you’ll consider doing so, too.

Day 1 Progress:

I resumed reading Hyperbole and a Half by Allie Brosh. I read 80 pages, but it’s a graphic memoir, so that’s less impressive than it sounds.

I also participated in the first Bout of Books Twitter chat. It was a lot of fun, and I was better this time at interacting with others, rather than just answering the questions, during the chat than I usually am. I’m supposed to be working a shift at the garden Saturday morning, when the next chat is, so that may be it for me in a “formal” Twitter capacity.

Today’s Bout of Books challenge is a Book Scavenger Hunt, hosted by The Book Monsters:

1. A Book that begins with “B” (for Bout of Books!)

2. A book you’re planning to read/currently reading for Bout of Books

3. Blue Book(s)

4. Books from your favorite genre!

Middle-Grade Fiction, aka Kid Lit

5. A book on your TBR shelf, or your full TBR shelves

The Shakespeare at the top is technically Rudi’s (and I’ve read all four). I’ve read Fangirl and My Father’s Dragon. The rest are all TBR.

It’s Bout of Books time again. I participated in January and May (with much reading and mixed blogging success) and am looking forward to reading and playing along again this week.

What’s Bout of Books you ask?

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, August 17th, and runs through Sunday, August 23rd, 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 14 information and updates, be sure to visit the Bout of Books blog. – From the Bout of Books team

My goals for this week remain consistent with my previous attempts at participation:

• To read every day;
• To finish two books OR to read 400 pages; and
• To blog about books at least twice next week. (The posts do not need to be long, and all topical posts do not have to relate to my current reading.)

Also, I’d also like to participate in at least three of the challenges/chats. They’re fun and build community, and since I haven’t been writing as much about books the past couple years, it would be good to get it in where I can.

It’s not to late for you to join: sign-ups run through midnight tonight EDT.

I have a few finished knits from last month to show you, but that will be later this week. In the meantime, August is the annual Sockdown in Ravelry’s Sock Knitters Anonymous group, wherein we all work on clearing off our needles by finishing lingering sock projects. I have two I’d like to finish, with two more as a stretch goal. This is the second of Rudi’s pair of 2×2 ribbed mummy socks. I’ve got about an inch more of leg before I start the heel flap.

On the reading front, a weekend away meant that my audiobook, Amy Poehler’s Yes, Please, expired before I was able to finish the last few chapters. As the weekend was otherwise delightful, I have no regrets and have re-requested it from the library. I hope it’ll be back before the end of the month, since I’d like to count it in my library summer reading totals.

I took Dietland up to Connecticut with me, but didn’t get much read. I did spend a lovely hour or two in the park this evening reading it, though. And I picked up Circus Mirandus at the library today after a dentist appointment when I didn’t have a book to read on the train trip back across town. I am optimistic about both of them, although in decidedly different ways.