I’m doing the Bout of Books again this week and it’s not too late if you want to sign up!

The Bout of Books read-a-thon is organized by Amanda Shofner and Kelly Rubidoux Apple. It is a week long read-a-thon that begins 12:01 a.m. Monday, January 7th, and runs through Sunday, January 13th, in whatever time zone you are in.

Bout of Books is low-pressure. There are challenges, giveaways, and a grand prize, but all of these are completely optional. For all Bout of Books 24 information and updates, be sure to visit the Bout of Books blog.

– From the Bout of Books team

My goal for the challenge is to read every day, to finish An American Marriage and Dear Mrs. Bird, and to share my top ten reads from 2018.

So far, I’m about two-thirds of the way done with Dear Mrs. Bird, which I’m enjoying quite a bit and stuck in the first chapter of An American Marriage because bad things are going to happen and I’m not feeling up to it.

Monday’s challenge was to introduce yourself in six words:

How about this?

Would love to read for work.

Today’s challenge is to host a literary dinner party for five of your favorite characters.

Who do you invite and what food do you serve?

1. Jo March
2. Thursday Next (who will likely already know everyone else)
3. Hermione Granger
4. Charlotte Holmes
5. Petrova Fossil

And I’ll serve breakfast for supper — waffles, I think, or crepes, in case someone (I’m leaning toward Hermione) really wants vegetables with her dinner. And ice cream sundaes, of course!

It was a quiet weekend at the Burrow, with Rudi out of town pursuing a snowy ski hill for his team of young racers.

There were errands and chores, but they were interspersed with time outside, trips to the library, and hours of reading.

I thought about going to a free concert, but it would have required dressing up and getting over there, and in the end pj’s, French bread pizza, and videos on the couch with the cats won out. (A Christmas Prince: A Royal Wedding got better as I watched it, in keeping with the first one; Thoroughly Modern Millie was disappointing with its unnecessary and racist Chinese-American subplot. )

You just need to spend $5 on a bouquet of spray roses at Trader Joe’s.

Every year, in late February or early March, I place an order for a year’s worth of tea from a shop in New York City. I usually order somewhere around 8 pounds of tea across 10-12 types, but it varies, depending on what we’ve been drinking and what my tea supplier has in stock.

By January, I’m usually out of one or two kinds, but as you can see here, I’m still going strong, although I can see which teas I’m likely to be cutting it close on. (We bought a couple additional pounds during trips to New York City during 2018, so I’ll need to up my order for at least two kinds this winter.) And finishing up one or two types forces me to drink things I like, but like less than my normal six varieties.

I now know, for instance, that I need two pounds of Irish Breakfast tea to make it through the year. Keemun, which is the base for English Breakfast, was my go-to for a while, but a couple years ago there must have been a problem with the supply because the cost for the leaves went way up, and the English Breakfast blend is good, but not as good. Did you know that while English Breakfast tea is generally made from Chinese tea leaves, Irish Breakfast tea nowadays is a blend of two Indian varieties — Assam and Ceylon?

In case you’re wondering, the family go-to’s, in addition to our two breakfast blends, are Ceylon (if you buy the Ceylon from Porto Rico, skip the cheaper Ceylon OP for the Ceylon Kenilworth Garden (the name of the estate where it’s grown), because it’s a superior tea), Assam, and Yunnan. We also drink a lot of Earl Grey (my supplier makes a very nice version that has just the right amount of bergamot) and, depending on the mood, smokey Lapsang Souchong (that’s what’s in the ceramic jar) and Gurance, a citrusy Nepalese tea. We have a couple more in our rotation, including Java Santosa (an Indonesian black tea), Golden Kenyan (anything with golden in the name tends to mean it’s a less dark hues), and a custom blend from our second go-to tea shop in Greenwich Village (that has been in business since the late 1800s) that they say is the three-tea blend they made for Katherine Hepburn when she was alive.

I also have a large collection of Darjeelings, but Rudi and I have gone off them a bit in the last couple years (tea quality varies from year to year depending on the growing season and the drying process. I just hit a year that I didn’t love so much and can’t seem to force myself to drink it so I can buy a different year’s blend). They have the most number of grades you can buy, meaning you can pick your tea based on how big the leaves were before they started roasting them. In general, the more letters that appear when describing your Darjeeling, the better the tea. Nearly all the classifications (other than the lowest one, “D” for “dust”) end in “OP” which stands for Orange Pekoe. Orange Pekoe actually means tea leaf buds when used by tea growers, but the term seems to stand in for generic black tea when used by tea bag manufacturers these days.

Feel free to stop by for a cuppa!

Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. I got the chance to try the recent ice cream addition to the Mount Pleasant neighborhood, Mount Desert Island Ice Cream. I opted for a cone of Cranberry Bar Bliss, modeled after the Starbucks holiday dessert. The creamsicle-flavored base was studded with white chocolate chips and candied cranberries and ginger. It was delicious.

2. On of my favorite things about walking around D.C. is getting to see all the brightly-hued murals tucked away into corners of the city, like this one, Anne Marchand’s “Community,” on a wall overlooking a park/playground in Shaw.

3. All sorts of flowering shrubs and bushes are blooming right now, including rhododendron and roses.

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

I’ve only got half of this week’s unraveling here, having not knit a stitch in a week. I will put a pair of socks on the needles tomorrow and will pull out a project that’s further along to work on until I am feeling like working on the shawl I showed you last week.

I am delighted to report though, that I am enjoying the latest Lady Sherlock novel, The Hollow of Fear, tremendously. Charlotte is currently masquerading as Sherrinford Holmes, brother to the fictional Sherlock, whom she also portrays in the series, hoping to figure out how the estranged wife of her dearest friend, Lord Ashcroft Ingram, ended up dead in his ice house. Sherrinford cuts a far more dandified figure than Sherlock, who is too much an invalid to see anyone in person, relying on intermediaries to relate his revelations to those seeking his expertise.

Next up will be An American Marriage and Children of Blood and Bone, both of which were due back to the library today. The latter has a far shorter wait list to take it out again, should I decide to be an upright library user and return them immediately. (We have a 30 day grace period before fines kick in…)

I finished listening to the last of Cornelia Funke’s When Santa Fell to Earth last night. I should listen to the last few chapters of American Street so I can stop having to borrow and reborrow it. It’s stressful, though, so I tend to be inclined to leave it until it’s too late to listen to what remains before it expires from my phone… After that, I’m thinking The Lido, which I understand makes you feel good about life.

Head over to As Kat Knits to learn what everyone else is reading and knitting.