This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic from That Artsy Reader girl invites us to consider titles that we’d share with those who claim not to love reading.

I decided I’d break my list up into three audiences:

1. Kids:
   1. The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick: Honestly, any of Selznick’s three historical fiction chunksters would work, but I have an especial fondness for this one set in a Paris train station and focused on early film and automatons. The way he alternates narrative and visual storytelling is unlike any other author I’ve encountered, making turning the pages compelling. Plus it will give kids who don’t think they like reading the satisfaction and confidence of having finished — and loved — a 500-page book.
   2. Kwame Alexander’s The Crossover: A verse novel about two basketball loving twin brothers where the rhythm of the narrative follows that of playing the game. If you’ve got a hoops-loving kid, I think this would be a great choice.
   3. Jen Wang’s The Prince and the Dressmaker: In this graphic historical novel, Prince Sebastian and Frances, a dressmaker, share a secret, that he has a secret identity as cutting-edge fashion icon Lady Crystallia, leaving him little time for the girls his parents keep trying to pair him up with. Graphic novels are a great way to get kids who don’t love reading picking up printed material. If your kid has exhausted superheroes or collected comic books and wants to move on, this would still offer someone in a costume and figuring out how to live an authentic life when the world may not yet be ready for your truth.

   Young adults:

   4. Jason Reynolds’ Long Way Down: This verse novel takes place during a single minute-long elevator ride and deals with gun violence, family, loyalty, and vengeance, with an open ending that will leave teens talking about what happens next.
   5. Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book: This follows the story of a boy raised in a cemetery by the ghosts of the people interred there and what that means when a threat from the living world tracks him down there.
   6. Illumninae by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff: This is another chunkster, but this time aimed at teens, rather than tweens, and set in space. Its epistolary style (told through emails, video logs, and other reports) makes for frequent stopping points and multiple points of view, plus there’s a killer AI who also gets to share its perspective.
   7. The Port Chicago 50: Disaster, Mutiny, and the Fight for Civil Rights by Steve Sheinkin: This story of fighting racism in the military during WWII is outrageous. The fact that we don’t know their story and that no one has been unable to reverse the outcome is a tragedy.

   Adults:

   8. Crazy ’08: How a Cast of Cranks, Rogues, Boneheads, and Magnates Created the Greatest Year in Baseball History by Cait Murphy: I feel like sports fans are an untapped market for nonfiction. Baseball fans, in particular, tend to be a wonky bunch, who love to focus on stats and minutia. This is a story from early baseball (1908, rather than our most recent ’08) told in great narrative fiction style.
   9. Peter Mayle’s A Year in Provence: This is a laugh-out-loud story about a couple who goes on an amazing vacation and decides they’d love to relocate there permanently. When they buy a ramshackle house in need of many repairs, they must quickly adjust to repairpeople with different life approaches, what red tape means when you’re working with a second language, and how their primary residence becomes the vacation destination for everyone they’ve ever met. If you’ve got a DIY fixer-upper project of your own, this is the read for you.
   10. Mama Makes Up Her Mind and Other Dangers of Southern Living by Bailey White: Any book that has me laughing aloud on a cross-country plane flight is probably a good one to share. And this one, about family in Georgia, is no exception.

   How about you? Any book you think would be great to share the written word with someone who may think they may not share your passion for reading?

   Category: books. There is/are Comments Off on top ten tuesday: books for non-readers.
   
   

Teaism
2009 R St., N.W.
Sunday, Oct. 31, evening
Conditions: Pleasant

Okay, so I didn’t really have time to squeeze in a Coffeeneuring trip Sunday night in between apple picking and trick-or-treating, but I figured that’s why bikes were invented — to hurry up short trips. Plus, you have to start sometime.

So I pulled out the bike and rode down to the garden, which I hadn’t visited in a week and where I had sweet and regular potatoes I wanted to get into the ground before it got any later in the season. (With any luck, I’m still two months away from a hard freeze.) I got those in, picked some tomatoes, tomatillos (my plants grew an adorable second crop of tiny tomatillos after the regular sized ones), and basil, and hopped back on the bike. I took the long way back, past the library, and along the new-this-year 20th Street protected bike lane back up to Dupont.

I stopped at Teaism, which is only a block from my house, to pick up a chai. You’d think with Starbucks no longer next door it would be easier to park, but when they made the rule that scooters had to be locked to something, they didn’t increase the bike racks, and so now I’m finding it harder universally to find bike parking. I ended up locked to a sign. Chai in hand, I hurried home to grab my candy bucket and wait outside for my trick-or-treaters to show up.

Total miles: 2.1

It was a pleasant weekend. I picked up some library books, did some Christmas shopping, and took myself out for pizza.

I watched seasonal movies, read, knit (okay, it was only one row, but still!), and made it to the farmers market.

Sarah and I checked out a new-to-us farm, picked apples, bought cider doughnuts, and ate ice cream cones.

I biked to the garden, stopped for some chai, and handed out candy to trick-or-treaters. (This year it was mostly college students. I didn’t head outside until 6:30, so the little littles were done by then, and the tweens in my neighborhood probably headed to a neighborhood with a better participation rate. The last candy bar I handed out went to a grandma in a wheelchair wearing a cat-ear headband. She meowed at me and enthusiastically took a treat.)

Overall, it’s hard to complain about a weekend that could have been filled with a flood that wasn’t.

How was your weekend?

Before I get too far away from my trip to Salt Lake, I thought I’d share a few more photos:

These are all from the same road, within half an hour of each other in Big Cottonwood Canyon:

I don’t think I’ve ever eaten inside Silver Fork Lodge before, but there was a foot of snow on their deck and they showed no inclination to serve us out there. I parked myself as close to the fire place as I could.

This is Silver Lake. It’s encircled by a boardwalk, some of which goes along the shore, while other parts skirt the marshy sections along its edge. As you might be able to guess, we couldn’t tell which was which and which was just straight up pond. We followed some tracks for a ways, but then turned around before we fell in.

This is one of the few maple trees in the area.

You’re just driving along all content in the knowledge that October is fall, and then, boom, someone plants a wintery Rocky Mountain in your path.

It’s pouring again as I type this and I’ve checked our dry bags. Mostly they’re doing their job, which is to keep the water from seeping into the rest of the living room. You may have seen photos of water lapping at the feet of the MLK Memorial statue, so you can appreciate D.C. is getting more than a fair amount of rain today. The rain is supposed to taper off soon and the rest of the weekend should be dry. Fingers crossed everything holds.

Other than keeping my domicile dry, here’s what I’m hoping the weekend includes:

• Apple picking and doughnut procuring with Sarah on Sunday
• A trip to the farmers market before she and I leave
• Giving out candy to trick or treaters (I must figure out where the candy bucket has shifted to. I saw it right before I left for Salt Lake.)
• Painting my nails Halloween colors
• Going for my first Coffeeneuring ride of the season
• Picking up a Halloween and a Christmas read at the Arlington library (I really wish they’d coordinated their holds better so I wasn’t stopping in two weekends in a row, but c’est la vie.)
• Reading
• Knitting
• Visiting the garden to pick up the tomatoes that may have blown off the vine this week (I definitely won’t need to water!)
• Doing laundry
• Starting the Christmas cleaning
• Doing some writing

Okay, this feels pretty ambitious for the energy level I’ve had recently, but I’m confident I can put a dent in the list at the very least. And hopefully Sarah will want to drive tomorrow…

Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. My volleyball team played an excellent game.

2. One of Rudi’s dearest friends from college is on the first leg of my flight home. I notice her because she’s wearing a sweatshirt from our alma mater. She comes back to sit in the empty seat next to me for a while.

3. There have been breakthrough COVID infections at the assisted living facility where Rudi’s mom lives. She tested negative, as did I. (Rudi will test when he returns home next week. I figured two flights plus the possible exposure at the facility merited my testing before rejoining my volleyball team at an elementary school, particularly since I wanted to verify my sniffles and sneezing were due to allergies.)

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