So none of this is what I’m currently working on, but everything here has been finished since Sunday night:

The shawl is Kirsten Kapur’s Andrea’s Shawl, which I started knitting for the 2016 Ravellenic Games and which I finished while watching the Closing Ceremony of this year’s Olympics (several hours after this year’s Ravellenic Games finished, unfortunately). I was going to block it tomorrow after work, but Rudi’s final coaching gig of the season has been postponed by a day, so it’ll be Friday night when I tackle that job.

The books are Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, which I finally found lurking on the shelf under my desk, and Sun-mi Hwang’s The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly (translated from Korean by Chi-Young Kim), a novella fable not unlike Animal Farm. I wanted to re-read the former before the movie came out, and I’m glad I did because I’d forgotten all about Aunt Beast! And I read the latter because I wanted to read something from a South Korean writer during the Olympics and this seemed like the least depressing option of what I saw recommended. I keep seeing it compared to Charlotte’s Web and recommended for children, but that feels inaccurate with motherhood and self-determination being major themes. Animal Farm feels like the better comparison, although Hen is significantly less depressing than that book.

Head to Kat’s for more of what folks are reading and knitting.

Today’s Top Ten Tuesday question asked which books I could read over and over again. Since I’ve embarked upon a last-minute re-read of A Wrinkle in Time and feel the same warm feeling I get whenever I spend time with an old friend, I thought it a reasonable question to consider. In no particular order:

1. The Harry Potter series
2. Little Women
3. Anne of Green Gables
4. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
5. A Year in Provence
6. Ballet Shoes
7. Pride and Prejudice
8. The Eyre Affair
9. The Secret Garden
10. A Wrinkle in Time

I’ve only included books I’ve re-read as an adult and only ones I’ve actually read multiple times, as opposed to ones I intend to read again, which let out things like The Night Circus, A Man Called Ove, and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. Looking at the list, I’m unsurprised to find a combination of favorites from childhood and comfort reads from my adult years, but I do also see that the list is very white (and leans British), so I’m thinking I should make a point of re-reading some of my five-star favorites by authors of color to reacquaint myself with The Color Purple and The Joy Luck Club.

How about you? Do you re-read? And, if so, which books do you have the greatest affinity for?

Joining in today with Kat for Unraveled Wednesdays:

In my print reading, these are the two books I have going. The Stars Beneath Our Feet is a YA contemporary and The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly is a novella (akin to Animal Farm) translated from Korean. (I figured I’d read a South Korean writer during the Olympics, and this was one of the few I found recommended that seemed like it might be a good fit. Apparently, it’s been adapted for both a comic book series and an animated film. I need to read Strange the Dreamer soon; it was due back to the library almost 10 days ago.

Finally, audiobooks. Having finished listening to Magpie Murders today at work (while cutting and pasting text from one website to another), I’m about to begin a new audiobook, American Street, which I have to polish off before the end of the weekend, when its expiration date is on Overdrive.

With my Ravellenic Games sweater not working out, I’ve moved on to WIPs. This is a shawl I started two years ago, which just needs to have a final border knit. I have a couple other projects I plan to move on to after this.

I’m currently enthralled with three books: Anthony Horowitz’s Magpie Murders, which I’m listening to on audio and which is a mystery set inside a mystery; Leigh Bardugo’s Wonder Woman: Warbringer, about the ill effects of an encounter between our favorite Amazon and a descendent of Helen of Troy; and Gail Honeyman’s Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine, about a young woman who survived a horrific event as a child and who is now looking for love. It took me a bit to get into, but it’s now occupying a good amount of my brain.

The knitting is the sock I cast on during the play on Saturday. It’s Marathon North Pole yarn, which I’ve knit from previously, and which is doing some interesting wavy things in the jacquard section of the sparkly self-striping yarn.

Visit As Kat Knits to see what other folks have been reading and knitting this Unraveled Wednesday.

This is mostly just interesting to me, but I figured I’d record these stats here so I can find them later on:

Books read: 79
Pages read: 23,203
Paper vs. audio: 66/13
Library vs. owned: 65/14
Female author vs. male: 20/56/3 (male and female co-authors)
Translated works: 2
Re-reads: 1
New-to-me authors: 53
Genres:

Fiction: 58
Nonfiction: 9
Poetry (or verse novel): 4
Graphic novel/comic collection: 6
Picture book: 2

Fiction genres:

General fiction (including contemporary and historical fiction): 36
Mystery/caper: 12
Fantasy/sci fi: 10

Audience:

Kids: 2
Middle grades: 14
YA: 34
Adult: 29

#OwnVoices authors/illustrators: 37
5 star/4/3/2: 8/36/33/2

Finally! It took me an entire month, but at long last, I’ve settled on and summed up the top ten books of the 79 I read last year.

I’ll be honest. I was stuck on nine for a long time, not because I didn’t read enough good books to merit including ten, but because I read so many solid 4-star books last year that I had a really hard time figuring out which one to elevate. But in the end, convention dictated that a best-of list has ten or maybe twelve books and not nine, so I picked one that I wouldn’t mind owning and that I’d certainly re-read.

The top three books were the best books I read in the first half of the year. If I’d remembered at the time that I finished The Girl Who Drank the Moon in January, rather than in the previous calendar year, I would have included it in the list as well.

Without further ado, my favorite ten books read last year: (more…)