This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic from That Artsy Reader Girl focuses on books from my to-be-read list that were written before I was born. Here are ten I’ve been meaning to read for a while:

1. The Odyssey by Homer (I’ve had a pretty copy sitting on my desk for several years. Maybe 2021 is the year to crack it open.)
2. The Sagas of Icelanders (I dragged this ~800-page tome with me to Iceland thinking I’d hunker down and read myths from the 1200s while on vacation there. I did not.)
3. Walden and Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau (Karen and I were supposed to read this together a decade or so ago and I totally kept flaking on her. I’ll get to it someday.)
4. The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim (My two best college friends and I watched the movie, a travel adventure set in an Italian castle, a quarter century ago and I’ve been meaning to get back to it for a while. Maybe this year I’ll check out the source material, which dates from the 1920s.)
5. Cakes and Ale by W. Somerset Maugham (Don’t you want to read it based just on the title? Add to that it’s a satire skewering the literary world of London in the early 20th century and I’m doubly in.)
6. Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons (This routinely makes it onto lists of underappreciated, humorous novels of yore. There’s also an edition with Roz Chast illustrations, which tempts me even more.)
7. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte (I’ve long meant to read all the Bronte novels, and this is my college roommate’s favorite of the bunch.)
8. The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens (While I’ve intended to read this since I first devoured Little Women in elementary school, I haven’t tried since middle school. I can probably get through it now.)
9. Le Petit Nicholas by René Goscinny (I picked up a copy of this French children’s classic when I was in France more than a decade ago and I should really get around to reading it.)
10. Around the World in 72 Days by Nellie Bly (A memoir (based on the newspaper columns) of a journalist’s attempt to beat the 80 days it took the fictional Verne hero to circumnavigate the globe. Who doesn’t want to read a travelogue of a cutting-edge Victorian era newspaperwoman?)

What old books are on your reading list?

Here are some of the snow people I saw today:

The girl who lives next door built the first snow person I saw. Her family owns the art gallery, and her use of cherry tomatoes indicates a good understanding of color.

The farmers market is using their snow person as an extra employee to direct traffic. Note the correct use of a mask (neither carrot nose nor corncob pipe are visible).

Trader Joe’s had two snow people. I’m calling the larger one, Trader Snow.

And his younger brother, Little Trader Snow.

You’ll be seeing some more of my snowy stroll around D.C. through the week.

. . . But today we shall eat ice cream.

We’re expecting snow on Sunday — our first real accumulation in two years. The forecast keeps fluctuating for how much we’re going to get (the current forecast is hovering around four inches, but no one is ruling out a foot, as of yet), but they’ve all agreed snow will stick to the ground in some quantity.

I am excited; I am, after all, a New England girl, and it’s hard to believe winter is here if snow never falls.

Living in a city, the day of snowfall is a magical thing. The number of cars on the road drops significantly (that’s actually what the first couple weeks of the pandemic reminded me of, because of how much traffic was reduced), and it actually gets quiet. Anyone who is afraid of getting wet or freezing stays indoors, leaving the outside world for those who find winter precipitation joyful. And we do flock out, no matter the hour, drawn by the glitter falling from the sky.

Admittedly, the days after snowfall is less joyful, with far too sidewalks shoveled and snow on the side of the road turning yellow and grey by degrees.

But for the first 24 hours, we can hold on to the beauty. And maybe this year, this winter, that’s enough.

Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. Time in person with friends.

2. After the Christmas tree is removed, my usually crowded living room seems spacious.

3. The wall calendar from our alma mater finally arrives. (Rudi also got a calendar as a gift from a friend, so we’ll have two this year.)

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

One of the things I’d like to work on in the first half of the year is to account for and decide what to do with the large number of knitting projects I have scattered around the Burrow in half-finished states.

Here we have Smock Madness, started nearly two years ago. This looks like a pretty easy project to power through in the next few days in order to have our first finished object of the year.

Jane Austen adaptations are also great ways to start the year, and Sonali Dev’s Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors was one of my favorites a couple years back. To see that Dev had planned a loose version of all six Austen novels centering around the same extended California clan was really intriguing. I’m very much looking forward to spending some more time with the Raje family.

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