Today’s Top Ten Tuesday topic from That Artsy Reader Girl invites us to look back at the books we meant to read last year but didn’t get to (and that, presumably, we intend to read in 2019). I am really bad at lists like this, not because I can’t make them, but because there are so many books I want to read (3,035 according to my Goodreads list as of this moment).

My track record is mixed. The list I made in 2018 includes only three titles I finished, but the one I set for myself in 2017 had seven completions. And I’ve read only four off 2016‘s list. So that’s 29 titles and less than half of them completed.

But what’s life without goals, right?

Here are ten titles I meant to read last year that I really think I’ve got a shot at:

1. Sarah McCoy’s Anne prequel, Marilla of Green Gables
2. Mackenzi Lee’s sequel, The Lady’s Guide to Petticoats and Piracy
3. Markus Zuzak’s Bridge of Clay (Rudi gave this to me for Christmas, so it’s high on this year’s TBR pile)
4. Bruja Born by Zoraida Córdova
5. The Kiss Quotient by Helen Hoang
6. Tiffany Jackson’s Monday’s Not Coming (I own a copy of it, so it, too, is a get-to sooner book)
7. Aisha Saeed’s Amal Unbound
8. Circe by Madeline Miller (Karen gave me a copy for Christmas and it is conveniently sitting right next to me)
9. Rebound by Kwame Alexander
10. What Truth Sounds Like: Robert F. Kennedy, James Baldwin, and Our Unfinished Conversation About Race in America by Michael Eric Dyson

How about you? Were there books you meant to read in 2018 you didn’t get to?

With the temperature rapidly nosediving, I decided to head to the garden and harvest any greens still alive. It would have been better if I’d done this on Friday, before things got so cold, because my poor plants were crunchy with the chill. There were small amounts of lettuce and arugula from a late season planting and my sorrel was still flourishing, so I ended up filling the bag I’d brought.

At home, I have a cheerful bouquet of yellow tulips in a blue glass pitcher we salvaged from someone’s discard box a few years ago. I thought it looked particularly nice with the red of our Dutch oven and the winter scene from our Conn College calendar.

As I was walking around northwest D.C. late this afternoon, I came across a flowering tree. We have a number of cherry trees that tend to flower in January (including some of the ones on the Mall, which always makes people worry there will be no flowers come springtime, but they’re two different types of trees). This one was in someone’s front yard, so I snapped a picture. It’s currently pouring out and temperatures are predicted to drop precipitously by Monday (it’ll be a 30 degree difference between now and Monday’s high), so I expect this will be it for these particular blooms. I’m glad I stopped to take their photo.

Things I’d like to do this weekend:

• Attend the Women’s March.
• Go to a birthday party.
• Dedecorate my Christmas tree.
• Deal with the anticipated flooding.
• Shop at the farmers market.
• Read.
• Do laundry. Woolens, in particular, top the list.
• Start a new pair of socks.
• Put flannel sheets on the bed.
• Play my ukulele.
• Watch a movie. Maybe My Man Godfrey, if I can figure out where my copy is hiding…
• Snuggle with Jeremiah, who is ailing, and Corey.

How about you? If you won’t be spending your entire weekend shifting snow, what do you hope to accomplish?

Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. It’s not getting dark until after 5.

2. I get to the bagel shop just after they open, and they have a single bag of day-olds waiting for me — and warm everything bagels fresh out of the oven.

3. I’ve been baking in the afternoons the past couple days so Rudi and I can have teatime when he gets home from work. (The cookies above are a variation on Gramma cookies I baked today on what would have been her birthday.)

How about you? What’s been beautiful in your world lately?

As you can see from this shot, I’ve decided to pick the shawl back up again. I continue to have problems with it, but it is user error, rather than instructional, and at least I’ve loosened up my tension enough that I can move the stitches on the needle again. A sure sign these days that I should put knitting down and not pick it back up again until I’m less anxious. I am coming up with a game plan for knitting this year, which involves socks and abandoned UFOs and finishing a sweater, and I’ll let you know more in the coming week or so.

I’ve mostly moved on to new reading this week. The Harry Potter continues to be picked up for a chapter here and there. They did not issue the fourth book in illustrated format this year, so I will have to either switch over to my original tomes (not a problem after I take down the Christmas so I can once again reach where the four of them are on my shelves) or wait until next year to read the next one. Luckily, I do not have to make a decision one way or another until I am so moved to revisit the Tri-Wizarding Tournament.

The Best We Could Do by Thi Bui is a graphic memoir about her Vietnamese family who immigrated to the U.S. in the late 1970s. The Emissary by Yōko Tawada (and translated by Margaret Mitsutani) is a novella focusing on a dystopian future in which an as-yet unnamed environmental disaster has left children unbelievably delicate. Mumei lives with his great-grandfather, Yoshiro, who literally has more pep in his step than his young relative. It just won the National Book Award for translation and has been described as delightful, funny, joyous, and playful, so I’m eager to find out why. And finally, I have a new audiobook on the go as well, having just finally started The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine who Outwitted America’s Enemies by Jason Fagone about the preeminent American codebreaker responsible for the capture of numerous Nazis. Right now there are no Nazis in sight and she’s on the estate of an eccentric Illinois millionaire who has brought her there to help his wife prove there’s a secret code embedded in Shakespeare’s plays that proves they were written by Francis Bacon. Enjoyable starts, all.

Check out As Kat Knits to see what everyone else is reading and knitting.