Several bookish items to check off today:

First, here’s my Yarning Along photo. I picked up Paper Girls, a graphic novel written by Brian Vaughan about a quartet of middle-school paper girls back on Nov. 1, 1988, when weird goings-on start up in their hometown of Cleveland. I was a middle-school paper girl myself on that date, and although very little supernatural happened to me at the time, I couldn’t help but pick it up when I saw it on sale at Comic Book Day last weekend.

The knitting is my vanilla sock that just so happens to match my new book. I’m through the heel decreases and back to foot knitting thanks to a work meeting and some tv time.

My Bout of Books progress is going well. In addition to my above reading, I’m also still listening to Ally Carter’s All Fall Down and reading Mansfield Park, where I just passed the halfway point today. I’m hopeful two of the three will be done by the end of the week and may check a third book off, as well.

Tomorrow’s challenge asks us to recommend a book, and I’m happy to comply. If you like light crime/crime solving with an Audrey Hepburn-like lead, a merry band of urchins, and a Parisian setting, I recommend you check out Bandette, Vol. 1: Presto, a graphic novel by Paul Tobin and Colleen Coover. The sequel was another one of the graphic novels I picked up over the weekend, and I can’t wait to see what happens next in this fun caper.

Finally, today was the first day of Armchair BEA, and organizers asked us to introduce ourselves by answering some questions:

1. What is the name you prefer to use? I go by many names, but Sprite is probably how I’m best known online.

2. How long have you been a book blogger? I have been blogging since 2005 and published my first book review in my first week of publishing.

3. Have you participated in ABEA before? This will be my fourth year.

4. Do you have a favorite book? I know it sounds trite to say Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone, but I’m going to say it anyway. When I’m feeling low or am in a reading slump, I know that finding myself back on Privet Lane will get me through it.

5. If you could recommend one other book blogger, who would it be and why? Raidergirl3, who blogs from Prince Edward Island, writes An Adventure in Reading, and was probably the first book blogger I followed. She likes audiobooks and crime series and fantasy novels, so I guess I like her because we have similar taste and therefore I feel confident that if she likes something there’s a good chance I’ll like it, as well.

6. How do you arrange your bookshelves? Is there a rhyme or reason? Or not at all? Two rows of one bookshelf contain favorite series, including Alcott, Fforde, Tolkein, Montgomery, Lewis, Rowling, and Wilder. (They also contain a book that belonged to my dad’s aunt that my grandmother passed on to me as a child, my favorite Seuss, my bible, and my now ancient dictionary and thesaurus.) After that, there’s sort of a loose organization, with knitting books in one spot and poetry in another and writing books yet another. Language books are by the door. Cookbooks are on the butcher block. Fiction is everywhere. Library books are in a bag next to my chair.

7. What book are you most excited for on your TBR? What are you most intimidated by? On my overall TBR list? Good god, that’s thousands of books! Ummm… At this moment, I’m staring at Rainbow Rowell’s Carry On, which I’m excited to finally get to this spring. I don’t know that any book particularly intimidates me, but there are some that I feel like I ought to read, rather than that I want to read them, and at the top of that list is Thoreau’s Walden, which I tried reading several times several years ago unsuccessfully.