It’s been a while since I last had a trip, and I’ve decided that it’s time to start planning one. But to where? Help a girl out!

I spent part of this weekend looking at airfares to warm places. What’s the best beach you’ve ever visited?

How about other destinations? What’s your favorite vacation ever? And where would you go for a week if you could reasonably afford it?

The nicest beach I’ve ever been to is probably Coronado Island in San Diego.

We’ve been lucky enough to take a lot of good trips and I’d gladly return to any of them. Iceland, in particular, was really quite magical.

The list of where I’d like to visit is long, but Hawaii is high on my list and has been since I was a kid. Costa Rica sounds beautiful. I’d love to see the Northern Lights, since we did not get to see them while we were in Iceland. And if I could go on a longer trip (because a week is too short to travel around the globe), New Zealand.

Sarah and I spent Saturday afternoon together eating Southern food and browsing bookshops. I had cheesy grits and (noncheesy) beignets.

Saturday night, I stopped at Glen’s, our local market, to buy a baguette and found their outdoor fireplace lit, but deserted. I was dressed for cool weather and had a book, so bought myself a cup of tea, which I kept warm by keeping my handknit mittens on top of them. Knitters are always prepared.

Today, I caught the final waning rays of sunlight at the park by my house before retreating to the local bakery to continue reading. Sadly, it was too late in the day for them to be doing any baking because when they do, it’s an intoxicating place to sit, filled with the scents of butter and vanilla wafting upstairs.

How was your weekend?

During the second half of January, I finished four books (the first half’s are here):

The Lido, by Libby Page

Katie is a 20-something wannnabe journalist who suffers from panic attacks. Rosemary is an 80-something former librarian who swims daily at her neighborhood outdoor pool in South London and has since she was a child. When gentrification portends the closing of the pool, Rosemary mounts a campaign to save it and Katie is assigned to cover the story for her local paper. Rosemary agrees to be interviewed, but only after Katie has gone for a swim herself. The two commence an unlikely friendship and Rosemary helps Katie begin to view their neighborhood as home and her neighbors as friends. While the book glosses over Katie’s failure as a journalist to remain remotely impartial in reporting an ongoing story, it is otherwise a heartwarming tale of intergenerational friendship, anti-gentrification, the power of the people to effect change, and making your own sense of home as an adult.

Pages: 384. Audiobook borrowed from the library via Overdrive.

The Tea Dragon Society, by Katie O’Neill

Friends, if you are looking to read an utterly charming graphic novel purportedly aimed at kids, but just as appropriate for adults, quickly check this one out. In a world where all the characters are people-ish animals or animalish people, our main character is Greta, an apprentice blacksmith, who discovers a small creature one afternoon in town. Her father is able to identify it as belonging with the owner of a tea shop out of town, and she heads out to reunite them. Turns out that the creature is a tea dragon — a small, petlike dragon on whose head and antlers grow flowers and leaves that can be harvested (like cutting your hair) and brewed to a tea that reminds the drinker of past experiences — and that Greta has a way with them. Hesekiel and Erik each have bonded with a tea dragon, as has a young woman, Minette, who showed up on their doorstep a while back and who suffers from memory problems. Bad things have happened in the past, but nothing bad happens in the year of the book, which is drawn in such a sweet way that you’re going to want to live in it. And acquire a tea dragon, which the back of the book helpfully details the varieties of, so you can find one that best fits your personality. Read the book. Buy prints from the book. Check in later in the month to see if it wins the graphic novel category of the Cybils. Adorable.

Pages: 72. Library copy.

The Best We Could Do, by Thi Bui

In this graphic memoir, Thi Bui uses her own experiences as a first-time parent as a catalyst for looking back at her own confusing upbringing, as a child immigrant from post-war Vietnam, and those of her parents, who also came of age during a period of strife. She has two older living sisters, two older sisters who died as infants, and a younger brother who was born while they were in a refugee camp. Her parents had both been teachers prior to the war, but once they moved to the United States and settled in California, despite both of them being able to speak English, they were told their certifications were no good.

A moving refugee story that explores how even people living together can be strangers in some ways and how coming to understand them and their pasts can help you understand your own — and help you appreciate what you have gained from them.

Pages: 329. Library copy.

The Assassination of Brangwain Spurge, by M.T. Anderson and Eugene Yelchin

In this middle-grade fantasy novel, Brangwain Spurge is an academic who volunteers/is voluntold to take a recently unearthed Goblin ornament from the Elven capital city to the capital of the Goblins and deliver it to their leader as a gesture of goodwill between their peoples in the hopes that they will be able to prolong their shaky peace after a thousand years of warring — and to spy on the Goblins while there. So he is loaded into a large orb and shot toward their land via a giant catapult. While in the land of the Goblins, he will stay with one of their archivists, Werfel, who takes his job as host very seriously, in that he must pursue every opportunity to make his guest feel welcome and safe, which conflicts with his orders from the secret police, who order him to spy on Spurge, who is both the most disdainful guest in the history of gusts. He also is sending nightly messages via a spell that allows him to transmit only still, recalled images back home, where we discover that the Elven lord who assigned him his task may have had ulterior motives for the trip.

Unfortunately, Brangwain ends up being an unintentionally biased spy, because the reader is privy to the fact that what his message images depict do not perfectly match the nuanced action in the text and that they are frequently even are in direct conflict with it. Remarkably well executed in this finalist for the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature and recommended for everyone who loves fantasy and the interplay between words and images in a story. If you like Brian Selznick’s recent tomes, I think you’ll find this right up your alley.

Pages: 525. Library copy.

January stats:

Total number of books read: 7.
Total pages read: 2,084
Intended audience: 3 middle-grade; 4 adults.
Source: 6 from the library, 1 owned.
Format: 5 in paper, 2 in audiobook.
Classification: 6 fiction, 1 nonfiction.
Diversity of authors: 4 Americans, 2 Brits, 1 New Zealander. 1 author of color (Asian American)

Rudi is off for the next four days and I have no real plans except to take advantage of his not being here to put the apartment to rights. It’s not that his being here prevents that; it’s just that when he’s here, I’d rather spend time with him than waste time on putting away the Christmas stuff or finding the coffee table.

I’m going to head to the library to return things that have holds on them, but not before I make one more try to get the rest of the way through Isle of Dogs. I just don’t really like Wes Anderson films, even when they’re animated. And that will get me outside and into the sunshine.

I made some cookie dough today, so there will also be another batch of chocolate chip cookies to bake and eat.

And I’ll probably see if one of my local friends wants to hang out at some point.

I probably won’t watch the Super Bowl. I don’t care about football, the political bent of some of the Patriots have made them hard for this New Englander to root for, and the commercials aren’t really enough reason to sit through the rest of it. They’ll be on YouTube.

And I’m going to read and knit. Just maybe not until after I put away the Christmas ornaments.

Three beautiful things from a rather down week:

1. Trader Joe’s sells bouquets of ten tightly closed daffodils from a dry bucket. When you get home, you’re supposed to cut off the ends and put the flowers in water and then, à la peanut butter sandwich, the next morning you have a vase of sunshine.

2. We’ve largely been spared by the brain-numbing cold that has blanketed much of the country this week (don’t tell the Southerners who live in D.C. that; they were convinced they had it rough), but it did bring us a snow shower one afternoon that disappeared before the ground got cold enough for anything to stick. No shoveling and no ice and pretty snow falling from the sky is about as big a winter win as you’re likely to get. (I apologize to those in the cold to whom that sounds like gloating.)

3. A card arrived in the mail this week from an unexpected source, but was so kind and so appreciated.

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

Last year, 100 books left our apartment, but you would never know that by how many remain. And of those that do, so many are unread. I might love them. I might not. But right now they’re sort of Schrödinger’s Reads, and my apartment is not big enough for that kind of book collection. There are too many new books I want to buy and too many trips to the library!

Thanks to my BFF, Karen, who is working through her own selection of longtime shelf dwellers, and to Judith at Reader in the Wilderness, who pointed me toward the 2019 TBR Pile Challenge at Roof Beam Reader, I’ve decided to tackle a dozen of the books currently residing on our shelves.

The rules of the challenge are that you have to post your 12 books at the start of the year and then get through them, with two substitutions allowed, also pre-mandated. This is not the sort of challenge I do well at, so no one will be shocked at the end of the year if I’ve read every book in my collection except for these 14 titles, but let’s give it a shot anyway, shall we?

My 12 official contenders are:

1. Jake and Lily by Jerry Spinelli
2. The Bookshop on the Quay by Patricia Lynch
3. In the Company of Sherlock Holmes, edited by Laurie King and Leslie Klinger
4. Selected Fables by Jean de La Fontaine
5. Starglass by Phoebe North
6. On Writing by Stephen King
7. Jane Steele by Lindsay Faye
8. The Magicians by Lev Grossman
9. Woman Rebel by Peter Bagge
10. How to Find Fulfilling Work by Roman Krznaric
11. A Tyranny of Petticoats, edited by Jessica Spotswood
12. Eggshells by Caitriona Lally

My two alternates:

1. Truthwitch by Susan Dennard
2. The Bookman’s Tale by Charlie Lovett

Middle grade, ya, adult, fiction, and nonfiction. Seems like a reasonable mix.