March has arrived and with it comes Sock Madness, the annual foray I make into competitive knitting. The pattern dropped Monday evening (it was March already in Australia), but I sort of hemmed and hawed and put off starting until tonight. But now, Rudi has gone to bed (and with him Posey and Jeremiah) and I’m able to play the video showing the cast-on (a variation on one I already knew, but I didn’t realize that until I’d seen it) with only Corey to distract me. This particular sock calls for two contrasting sock yarns, so I’m hoping this pair of Ty-Dy Socks skeins will suffice.

(Also pictured are a cup of Darjeeling tea and the last of the cookies from my birthday.)

As usual, I have several books going at once. I’ve just begun the two pictured here — Connect the Stars by Marisa de los Santos and David Teague and V.E. Schwab’s A Darker Shade of Magic. I’m only a chapter into each, so I can’t offer an opinion of any significance yet, except to say I’m going to keep reading! I’m also just a chapter into Carola Dunn’s A Death at Wentwater Court, the first Daisy Dalrymple mystery, on my phone, since while I can read a paper book and knit at the same time, it’s definitely a slower process and is not conducive to advancing to the next round.

Other books that I’m still finishing up are Anne of Green Gables on audio and Barry Svrluga’s baseball book, The Grind.

Joining Ginny for the Yarn Along.

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday prompt from The Broke and the Bookish is an open-ended theme of Valentine’s Day. I thought I’d offer up the ten books currently in my possession I’d like to read in which love (supposedly) plays a role:

1. The Royal We by Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan: A fictional account of a commoner who falls in love with the heir to the British throne.
2. Attachments by Rainbow Rowell: The company’s IT guy has to police everyone’s usage of the company email. What he reads makes him fall in love.
3. Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda: Simon’s fallen in love with a boy on the internet, but his romance is put at risk by the school bully.
4. The Game of Love and Death by Martha Brockborough: The figures of Love and Death routinely pick two people and play with their lives to see which one of them will win. Heretofore, it’s been Death. Does Love have a shot this time?
5. Love Letters by Katie Fforde: A former bookshop owner takes over running a literary festival and must convince a reclusive writer to take part.
6. Connect the Stars by Maria de los Santos and David Teague: Two kids meet at summer wilderness camp. Not sure if this is fall in romantic love or fall in best friend love. Either will work.
7. Murder Most Unladylike by Robin Stevens: Because, honestly, what’s more passionate than the love between middle school BFFs?
8. Sense & Sensibility by Joanna Trollope: A modern retelling of the Jane Austen novel.
9. Hello, Goodbye, and Everything in Between by Jennifer E. Smith: The night before they leave for college, a high school couple has to figure out whether or not to break up.
10. Young Avengers, Vol. 1: Style > Substance by Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie: The next generation of superheroes has to figure out how to work as a team.

How about you? Will your reading be taking a thematic approach this week? Have you read any of the books on my list? Would you recommend bumping it up my list?

Shall we begin as we mean to go on? My plan is to post about the previous month’s reads on the first Saturday of the next month. Here, then, are the seven books I finished during January: (more…)

The craziness of the Christmas build-up and my commitment to blogging the Virtual Advent Tour last month (can you believe December was only last month?) led to an oversight on my part. While I acknowledged it on Twitter, I neglected to blog about The Broke and the Bookish Secret Santa and the wonderful package that came from Hannah on the Isle of Wight in Great Britain:

Hannah sent me two great books, some beautiful cards featuring photos she took of the area near her home, some tea, foxy socks (I love fun socks!), and two heads of locally grown garlic, which have made my living room (where they sat during the holiday season) smell divine.

All of which leads us to today:

I started Winter Holiday over the long blizzard weekend, since that seemed appropriate. It’s the fourth book in Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons series and includes fabulous maps as the end-papers. Because it’s an old copy, it also includes these hilarious blurbs from reviews in the day that include things like comments about how ridiculous it is to expect an author to illustrate his own work. [In looking up the dates for Ransome’s books, I discovered there’s a film adaptation of the first book due out later this year. So exciting! Interestingly and perhaps alarmingly, it will include a new character played by the guy who plays Moriarty in Sherlock.] And earlier today I began Murder Most Unladylike, the first book in a recent middle-grade mystery series set in a girls’ boarding school in 1934. I’m enjoying both of them thus far. I love that the books both have 1930s England as their setting.

The knitting is that stupid lightning shawl that will never be done, except that I’m making it my goal to complete it in the next two-and-a-half weeks for my birthday. Because I want to use it during the cold months and I’m tired of it being on the needles, rather than wearable.

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?