This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic from That Artsy Reader Girl invites us to share quotes from books. While I love to quote books (ask Rudi how often I demand he stop doing something to listen while I read aloud), I don’t often record them someplace permanent. So instead of ten items, as would be normal on a Tuesday, I give you three: two quotes from my current reads and one from 2001, when I had a reading journal with a section for favorite passages:

“Literature duplicates the experience of living in a way that nothing else can, drawing you so fully into another life that you temporarily forget you have one of your own.” – Barbara Kingsolver, High Tide in Tucson

“The willingness to take a beating: That’s how you know you’re dealing with a man of substance. A man like that doesn’t linger on the sidelines throwing gasoline on someone else’s fire; and he doesn’t go home unscathed. He presents himself front and center, undaunted, prepared to stand his ground until he can’t stand at all.” – Amor Towles, The Lincoln Highway

“There were more books than the space seemed to allow. This is not unusual. Books, after all, have their own peculiar gravity, given the collective weight of words and thoughts and ideas. Just as the gravitational field around a black hole bends and wobbles the space around it, so, too, does the tremendous mass of ideas of a large collection of books create its own dense gravity. Space gets funny around books.” – Kelly Barnhill, The Ogress and the Orphans

How about you? Do you have favorite passages from books?

I continue along The Lincoln Highway with Emmett and Billy and Duchess and Wooly, but theirs is not a journey that can be hurried. So I’ve dipped into a couple of other books, looking for a companion read. I’ve found it with Kelly Barnhill’s The Ogress and the Orphans. If you read her The Girl Who Drank the Moon, you’ll know that she is an amazing fairy tale storyteller, and the first chapters of this book do not disappoint. I only wish I had a small person to read it aloud to. I read the first chapter to the cat, but he didn’t seem impressed. I think it’s his loss.

My rainbow socks are finally off the needles, and the Tour de France knitalong begins in a little more than six weeks. Rather than start something new, I’m trying to see what other lingering projects I can wrap up. Next up are my Smock Madness socks, which date back, I believe, to 2018. As you can see, this is not asking for a huge time commitment, because all I have are a toe to finish (and I think a hole to patch on the foot).

Head over to As Kat Knits to see what others are reading and crafting.

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic from That Artsy Reader Girl is to share books that we were desperate to get our hands on, but that have sat on our TBR pile ever since. Here are ten of mine, which include books by some of my favorite authors:

1. Paradise, Toni Morrison
2. The Lacuna, Barbara Kingsolver
3. The Secret Life of Bees, Sue Monk Kidd
4. At Home, Bill Bryson
5. On Writing, Stephen King
6. Threatened, Eliot Schrefer
7. Isla and the Happily Ever After, Stephanie Perkins
8. Truthwitch, Susan Dennard
9. Wayward Son, Rainbow Rowell
10. The Constant Rabbit, Jasper Fforde

How about you? Do you have any books lingering on your TBR pile that you just had to have?

While Sunday was overcast, it was not pouring, which was a pleasant change from Friday and Saturday. I was going to Sheep and Wool regardless, but I’ve been in the rain before and it definitely is a drawback. So to only have to deal with mud seemed pretty easy. I pulled on my wellies, and headed up to the fairgrounds.

It ended up being a nice afternoon all things considered, without the need for my coat, but with the advantage of it being cool enough that all the knitters were able to show off our handknits one final time for the spring.

I went with a limited budget and I stuck to it. I wanted something I couldn’t just buy at one of my local yarn shops, and I think I found it. Urban Girl Yarns is made locally in Virginia by a Black woman knitter and dyer. This is her Virginia Fingering in Caliente. The necklace matches a shawl pin I bought a number of years back and is made by a Maryland metalworker, Silver Siren Designs. I also came home with two jars of local honey and six seedlings, which have already been planted.

On the reading front, I’m still alternating between two print novels, The Lincoln Highway and Rosaline Palmer Takes the Cake. I gave up on the overly descriptive romance novel I’d been listening to when it came due and I’ve downloaded Ruth Hogan’s The Keeper of Lost Things to try instead.

Head over to As Kat Knits for the weekly Unraveled Wednesday roundup.

Two literary endeavors in one post!

The Bout of Books readathon is organized by Amanda Shofner and Kelly Rubidoux Apple. It’s a weeklong readathon that begins 12:01 a.m. Monday, May 9th, and runs through Sunday, May 15th, in YOUR time zone. Bout of Books is low-pressure. There are reading sprints, Twitter chats, and exclusive Instagram challenges, but they’re all completely optional. For all Bout of Books 34 information and updates, be sure to visit the Bout of Books blog. – From the Bout of Books team

It’s not too late to sign up and Bout of Books is super chill. I read a couple chapters of Alexis Hall’s Rosaline Palmer Takes the Cake for it this afternoon.

On the Top Ten Tuesday front, That Artsy Reader Girl has asked us to share our top ten bookish characters this week.

1. Thursday Next, literary detective: The Eyre Affair and its sequels by Jasper Fforde
2. Matilda, child reader: Roald Dahl’s Matilda
3. Liesel, book savior: The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
4. Nina Hill, bookstore employee: The Bookish Life of Nina Hill by Abbi Waxman
5. A.J. Fikry, bookstore owner: The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin
6. Lila Castro, creator of a book exchange and secret book blogger: The Holiday Switch by Tif Marcelo
7. Isola Pribby, quirky book club member: The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows
8. Queen Elizabeth, British matriarch: Alan Bennett’s The Uncommon Reader
9. The Mac, librarian: Booked by Kwame Alexander
10. Lily and Dash, the most adorkable couple to meet through The Strand: Dash and Lily’s Book of Dares by David Levithan and Rachel Cohen

How about you? What bookish characters do you love?

It occurred to me suddenly last week that this coming Sunday was Sheep and Wool and that if I wanted to debut something new (weather-pending), I’d need to get a move on finishing a piece. So I’ve pulled out Fully Charged, my Tour de France 2021 shawl, to see if I can finish it. Technically, I could do the border rows now, but I still have yarn and, frankly, the shawl seems a little small at the moment. So I’m just continuing on with the stripey section until one of the balls gets small enough for me to start feeling worried.

I have not yet started Amor Towles’ The Lincoln Highway, but I’d better get started because it’s 600 pages and due back in less than two weeks. It’s in my knitting bag for tomorrow.

Visit As Kat Knits for this week’s reading and crafting roundup.