Once upon a time, back in the early days of my blog, I decided I’d review the books I read here. I was better about it at some points than others, but it used to get done, for the most part. But three years ago I took part in the judging for the Cybils Award and it broke my reviewing mojo. I have some theories about why that happened, but mostly it’s unimportant. I’ve never actually enjoyed the process of reviewing what I’ve read, but I love having the record of them to refer back to.

I’d like to get back into that habit and intend to do so more fully and contemporaneously in the new year. But in the interest of better being able to share a favorite reads list at the end of this year, I thought some capsule reviews might suffice.

Here’s what I read way back in January:

My True Love Gave to Me, edited by Stephanie Perkins. 2014. 321 pages.
A dozen holiday-themed, romance-filled stories from some of the most recognized names in YA, including Perkins, Rainbow Rowell, David Levithan, Holly Black, and Jenny Han. I’d read and enjoyed books by most, although not all, of the contributors, and so had suggested it might make a nice Christmas present last year. Some of the stories are contemporaries, while others have a fantasy setting. Some are, as with any collection, stronger than others, but not always the ones I would have expected based on the authors’ novels. I especially enjoyed “It’s a Yuletide Miracle, Charlie Brown,” from Perkins and Kiersten White’s “Welcome to Christmas, CA,” but I can totally see myself re-reading some or all of the stories every holiday season or two. If you like the current YA novels, enjoy winter holiday (especially Christmas)-themed stories, or like teen romances, I recommend the buying or borrowing the collection.

The Amazing Thing About the Way It Goes: Stories of Tidiness, Self-Esteem and Other Things I Gave Up On, by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee. 2014. 224 pages.
The Yarn Harlot offers up a collection of humorous essays that don’t have to do specifically with yarn. Instead, they have to do with a range of modern-day topics, including parenting, email, invasive skunks, messiness, and personal appearance. Another Christmas present last year, I enjoyed the essays while reading them, laughed aloud at several, but overall didn’t love them the way I do Stephanie’s blog or her previous knitting-related collections and had to leaf back through the book to have any recollection about what she’d written about. Good for a chuckle, but I’d probably check it out from the library, rather than buying it.

2 A.M. at the Cat’s Pajamas, by Marie-Helene Bertino. 2014. 272 pages.
‘Twas the day before Christmas and nine-year-old Madeleine, despite having the best voice in her grade (and neighborhood) and a recently dead mother, will not be singing the solo in the holiday concert that day. In fact, the day is about to go so sideways, that by afternoon, she’s been expelled from school. Her fifth-grade teacher, Sabrina, just ran into a woman she once knew at a bakery and now has to go to a dinner party with a group of old friends that includes an estranged, now-married flame. And Lorca, the owner of The Cat’s Pajamas, one of the most famous nightclubs in all of Philadelphia, is in danger of losing the club because of a gigantic fine for fire code violations and his teenaged son to inattention. Alternating between their perspectives, we inch closer to a holiday none of them are looking forward to. But before it arrives, they’ll all experience a night at the jazz club they’ll never forget. I was really looking forward to reading this book during Advent last year, but my library copy didn’t come in until January. The idea behind Bertino’s debut novel was a strong one and her characters were well-plotted out, and it’s clear she was trying to make the book’s structure resemble a jazz piece, with recurring motifs and story lines that looped back into one another. But, that said, it was hindered by inadequate editing, which might have reined in her love of vocabulary and flowery phrases (again, I imagine this was intended to be reminiscent of some of the complexities of jazz) and tightened up the time frame. Ultimately, it was just an okay book.

Ms. Marvel, Vol. 1: No Normal, by G. Willow Wilson with art by Adrian Alphona. 2014. 120 pages.
The first collection of Ms. Marvel comics features Kamala Khan, New Jersey high school student, comic book fangirl, and Muslim daughter of Pakistani immigrants. Sneaking out to a party one night, Kamala undergoes a transformation where she gains superpowers that include elasticity, super strength, and the ability to change her appearance and rescues one of her classmates. (If you watch Agents of SHIELD or any of the later Marvel movies, you may recognize Kamala’s symptoms as making her one of the Inhumans, a human with recessive alien DNA that, when triggered by some external force, gives the person one or more super powers.) Kamala deals with this transformation on her own for a while, trying to figure out how to be a teenage crime solver, but eventually loops in her best guy pal, who helps her with her costume and by serving as someone who knows her whereabouts in case something goes wrong. But even with his help, it’s still tough solving crime when you still have to get your homework done and you sneak out of the house past your very strict parents. If you like comic books, you’ve probably already read this, as it’s probably the highest touted new series out in the past couple years. If you haven’t, though, or if you like graphic novels or YA with feisty heroines, grab this one as soon as you can. I read a library copy, but bought Volume 2.

I’m between portable knitting projects again, which means I’ve picked up my Lightning Shawl again. But I’ve been eyeing hat patterns on Ravelry (Remember when I declared 2015 would be my year of hats? I haven’t knit one.), so maybe that will be cast on in the next few days.

On the reading front, in addition to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, which is my audiobook of the moment, I have the three blue books you see here in progress:

Hotel Bosphorus is a mystery set in contemporary Turkey and features the owner of a mystery-themed bookstore. The Thing about Jellyfish is a highly touted middle-grade read that had me tearing up on page 19 and full-out bawling by page 50, which led me to pick up Come Hell or Highball, about a 31-year old Long Island widow who takes up sleuthing after the death of her (it turns out) no-longer-so-rich husband. (I was hoping for Nora Charles or Phryne Fisher, but I don’t think she’ll be as charming or funny as either one, although, to be fair, Nora is both smarter and less interesting on the page than on the screen.)

Back at the beginning of the year, I decided to do Book Riot’s Read Harder challenge. Then I stopped reading much of anything, which makes completing any book-based challenge more difficult. I thought I’d take today to assess where I am in the challenge in order to see what I need to request from the library or pull from my TBR stacks.

No one will be surprised by some of the categories I’ve managed to leave until the end (foreign, non-fiction, sci-fi):

1. A book written by someone when they were under the age of 25: Nimona by Noelle Stevenson, age 23, was long-listed for the NBA in YA this year.
2. A book written by someone when they were over the age of 65: 68-year-old Dave Barry’s middle-grade book about an 8th-grade field trip gone awry: The Worst Class Trip Ever
3. A collection of short stories (either by one person or an anthology by many people): POSSIBILITY: In the Company of Sherlock Holmes (edited by Laurie King and Leslie Klinger)
4. A book published by an indie press: TO FINISH: Claudia Rankine’s Citizen was put out by Graywolf Press.
5. A book by a person whose gender is different from your own: Ross Gay’s Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude
6. A book that takes place in Asia: POSSIBILITY: The God of Small Things
7. A book by an author from Africa: POSSIBILITY: Something by Veronique Tadjo, perhaps.
8. A book that is by or about someone from an indigenous culture (Native Americans, Aboriginals, etc.): TO FINISH: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie
9. A microhistory: POSSIBILITY: I think I have one of Simon Winchester’s books in the other room… Or maybe Rebecca Skloot’s book’s book about Henrietta Lacks and the HeLa cells.
10. A YA novel: Ana of California by Andi Teran.
11. A sci-fi novel: POSSIBILITY: The Martian or Ready Player One (I’ve taken both books out several times this year; I’m starting to doubt my actual interest in reading either.)
12. A romance novel: Katie Fforde’s Practically Perfect was adorable and just what I wanted for a Valentine’s Day read.
13. A National Book Award, Man Booker Prize or Pulitzer Prize winner from the last decade: Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See won the Pulitzer earlier this year.
14. A book that is a retelling of a classic story (fairytale, Shakespearian play, classic novel, etc.): Breadcrumbs, by Anne Ursu, takes on Hans Christian Andersen’s tale of the Snow Queen.
15. An audiobook: I listened to Mr Churchill’s Secretary by Susan Elia MacNeal on audio.
16. A collection of poetry: Jane Hirshfield’s The Beauty
17. A book that someone else has recommended to you: George by Alex Gino, was recommended to me by the children’s librarian at the Georgetown library.
18. A book that was originally published in another language: TO FINISH: Hotel Bosphorus by Esmahan Aykol (Translated by Ruth Whitehouse) was originally published in Turkish.
19. A graphic novel, a graphic memoir or a collection of comics of any kind: Ms. Marvel, Vol. 1: No Normal, by G. Willow Wilson, is the collection of the first five comic books that tell how a nice Muslim girl in New Jersey becomes a superhero.
20. A book that you would consider a guilty pleasure (Read, and then realize that good entertainment is nothing to feel guilty over): I’m putting Jeff Goldberg’s Unrivaled: UConn, Tennessee, and the Twelve Years that Transcended Women’s Basketball here. I don’t feel guilty about the things I read, but this book fell so far of my hopes for it that I felt bad sticking with it when I had so many other books I wanted to read.
21. A book published before 1850: TO FINISH: Mansfield Park by Jane Austen, published in 1814, was the last of her completed novels I hadn’t read.
22. A book published this year: Career of Evil by Robert Galbraith
23. A self-improvement book (can be traditionally or non-traditionally considered “self-improvement”): Find the Good: Unexpected Life Lessons from a Small-Town Obituary Writer by Heather Lende

So I still have nine categories to finish, but several books are in progress and/or in my possession at the moment, so here’s hoping. If anyone has alternative suggestions for those categories where I’ve put down possibilities (as opposed to ones where I have books to finish), I’m open to them.

This is not my 22nd hour of participation in Dewey’s 24-Hour Readathon, but is the 22nd hour the readathon has been going on. I am a bad readathon participant and fell back asleep this morning, got a slow start, went out for a while this afternoon, and put my book down after a while to listen to the Mets game on the radio. Oh, and I went out a few hours ago to find a non-apple snack.

The good news is that I’ve read three books during these past 22 hours:

Bandette by Paul Tobin and Colleen Coover is a graphic novel about a charming teen cat burglar/Robin Hood. I bought it last spring on Free Comic Book Day, when the cover and a rave review from my local comics shop caught my eye. If you enjoy capers (of the hijinks variety, rather than the pickled vegetable matter), this is for you. The book is also interesting in that it includes a few pages of script from the writer (so you can see his suggestions vs. what appears on the page), as well as a demonstration of how the artist goes about doing her work. I was captivated enough that I contemplated running over to the shop to see if they had the second volume in stock.

Dumplin’ by Julie Murphy (which I checked out from the library) is about a fat Texas girl growing up in a small town noted for its annual beauty pageant. Dumplin’, aka Willowdean, juggles grief after her beloved aunt dies, confusion over boys who have crushes on her, frustration at the growing distance between her and her lifelong best friend, and disappointment with her ex-pageant winning mother, who greets Willowdean’s (and several other misfits’) surprise entrance into the pageant (which she runs) with a lack of enthusiasm. The book has received a lot of buzz among the YA book community, and it’s easy to see why. Willowdean, a mostly confident, Dolly Parton-loving teenager, is not a perfect hero, but she knows it and is working on making her space in the world a comfortable one.

I Am Not Joey Pigza by Jack Gantos is about a boy, Joey, whose father comes back into the picture after winning a comfortable sum of money on the lottery. Declaring himself a new man (with a new name), he declares his interest in picking up as a family man, and Joey’s mother, eager herself for a new life, agrees. Joey, whose parents have decided will be henceforth be called Freddy, is suspicious of his father’s transformation and his mother’s willingness to be bought off, but isn’t given a lot of choice in the matter. He’s moved, made to throw out all his old things, taken out of school, and given a series of increasingly erratic tasks to do by his parents, and somehow this 6th-grader must still find a way to live with himself and the adults who ought to have his interests at heart. Probably a good series for those who have aged out of the Wimpy Kids books, but who aren’t yet ready for Percy Jackson.

I may read a bit more, or I may call it for the night. I have to go back to work on Monday, and I’d like not to do it as a zombie.

That, there, is a photo by someone who was very tired. So tired, in fact, that after she took the picture, she uploaded the photo, opened the laptop, and then dozed off without writing a post to merit the shot.

The sock, which is inside-out because I haven’t finished weaving in the ends, is the first of my Halloween socks. I hope to get some serious knitting done on sock #2 over the next few days so I can wear them a decent amount for the rest of the season.

I’m also hoping to finish Julie Murphy’s Dumplin’ this weekend. I meant to get more reading done while up in Connecticut, but there’s just never enough time when visiting. I’m enjoying the story so far: it features an overweight teen girl who is (apparently) going to decide to try out for the local beauty pageant run by her mother. The book’s gotten great reviews in the YA book community, so I’m excited to see if the buzz is deserving.

Belatedly yarning along with Ginny at Small Things.

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?