This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic from That Artsy Reader Girl is Top Ten Quick Reads/Books to Read When Time Is Short. Here are ten four+-star books that can be read in an afternoon (all of them well under 200 pages):

1. The 13 Clocks by James Thurber
2. Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan
3. A Child’s Christmas in Wales by Dylan Thomas
4. If God Invented Baseball: Poems by E. Ethelbert Miller
5. 84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff
6. The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros
7. The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
8. March: Book One by John Lewis
9. Cocaine Blues by Kerry Greenwood
10. For Every One by Jason Reynolds

How about you? Are there books you’d recommend grabbing if time is short and you just want to while away a few hours?

Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. I had friends over for a game night. Exploding Kittens was lots of fun, as was the company.

2. As I was biking to my volleyball game Saturday morning, I realized the air was scented with pine. Turns out, I was following the truck that was collecting Christmas trees for composting.

3. The time between volunteering and volleyball was too short to go home, so I stopped at a cafe for a snack. Half a cream puff and a cup of Earl Grey later, I was refreshed and ready to play.

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

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl invites us to share ten authors we discovered in 2023.

Here are 10 of the 31 new-to-me authors I read last year, all of whom I recommend:

1. GennaRose Nethercott (Thistlefoot)
2. Martha Wells (All Systems Red)
3. Sangu Mandanna (The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches)
4. Travis Baldree (Legends & Lattes)
5. Hannah Nicole Maehrer (Assistant to the Villain)
6. Richard Osman (The Thursday Murder Club)
7. Colleen Oakley (The Mostly True Story of Tanner and Louise)
8. Dave Grohl (The Storyteller)
9. Suzanne Park (The Christmas Clash)
10. Sher Lee (Fake Dates and Mooncakes)

How about you? Who were some authors you read for the first time last year?

Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. I started to get anxious about playing in a competitive league for the first time in ages. What if I suck? Will this group of pickup pals regret having invited me to join them? But I reminded myself that they did ask me, even knowing my weaknesses (because you can’t play with someone multiple times a week and not know their flaws on the court), and that my strengths include that I will show up consistently and play my hardest every time, and those are big plusses. We lost our first match and I made a few bad plays. But I also made some good ones, just like everyone else.

2. I decided, bravely and rather spur of the moment, to invite an acquaintance out for supper the other night. She accepted, and we had a nice time and are planning to do it again.

3. I walked back under sunny skies from the Cathedral last weekend, my longest stroll of the winter. It felt good to stretch my legs, even if I would have liked some of the sidewalks to have been better tended to after the snow from the day before. And it was fun to start an audiobook in a series I enjoy while I was on the move.

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

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic from That Artsy Reader Girl could be interpreted through a lens of regret — books we meant to read last year and didn’t get around to. Instead, I’m going to consider them delayed gratification or prolonged anticipation reads — ten books that I put on my to-be-read list, were published, or came into my possession last year and that I still get to look forward to diving into:

1. Brian Selznick’s Big Tree
2. Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
3. David Grann’s The Wager
4. Lies and Other Love Languages by Sonali Dev
5. Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries by Heather Fawcett
6. Anna-Marie McLemore’s Blanca & Roja
7. Woman Without Shame by Sandra Cisneros
8. In the Lives of Puppets by T.J. Klune
9. Bill Watterson’s The Mysteries
10. A Tempest at Sea by Sherry Thomas

How about you? What books do you still get to look forward to that you were sure would be read by now?

Edited to add: I went back and looked at the past four times topics of this sort have been covered, and I’ve read 8 of the ~35 books I shared at the time. Oops.

Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. We have booked a trip for my birthday next month.

2. It snowed several inches on Monday, and Rudi was around to shovel. (This was particularly beautiful because he will *not* be around for Friday’s snow.)

3. With snow still gently falling, a day off for many people already, and nearly two years since we’d had any accumulation, folks had a lot of fun playing outdoors. I watched kids (and parents) sledding down on on the “beach.” At at the Circle, one very excited Bernese alternated between flopping and rolling around on the ground and tugging on its leash to pull its adult owner and its child on a sled around faster and faster.

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