This week’s Top Ten Tuesday from That Artsy Reader Girl asks us about the Top Ten Books I’ve Added to My TBR and Forgotten Why. I’ve added more than 3,100 titles to my list of books I’d like to read since I first joined Goodreads more than a dozen years ago. Obviously they sounded interesting at the time…

1. The Art of Travel by Alain de Botton
2. Sororophobia: Differences Among Women in Literature and Culture by Helena Michie
3. How to Pick a Peach by Russ Parsons
4. Ali and Nino by Kurban Said
5. The Secret Hour by Scott Westerfield
6. Tallulah Falls by Christine Fletcher
7. The September Sisters by Jillian Cantor
8. Through Black Spruce by Joseph Boyden
9. The Pull of the Moon by Elizabeth Berg
10. The Invisible Mountain by Carolina De Robertis

Have you read any of these books?

I didn’t give an update on the garden last month, but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t going. Thank goodness, right?

This shot was before Rudi and I did some work today. Rudi pulled out a lot of weeds and planted some new seedlings. We now have half a dozen basil plants, a half dozen tomatoes, several peppers, a zucchini, and a cucumber in addition to the plethora of herbs and spring veggies. I harvested the rest of the arugula today, unearthing a bed of lettuce beneath it and will probably pull the spinach later this week. I will need to thin the sorrel again. (more…)

Honestly, I feel like I could just write “sleep” after half a dozen bullets and that might accurately convey how I’d prefer to spend the weekend.

Since that’s probably not how I should spend the weekend, here’s what else I’ll probably do:

• Go to the Black Lives Matter protest.
• Have a video chat with friends.
• Shop at the farmers market.
• Make some bread.
• Read and knit in the park.
• Tend the garden.

How about you? How are you thinking you’ll spend the weekend?

Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. Loyalty Bookstores, one of D.C.’s indie bookstores owned by a Black woman, posted they’d received hundreds of orders this week requesting anti-racist books. Another local Black-owned bookstore, Mahogany Books, was featured in Time. D.C.’s other POC-owned indies — Sankofa, Solid State Books, and Duende District — also report people have placed a flurry of orders this week with a strong focus on getting more woke.

2. Super dramatic thunderstorms rolled through the area tonight (just after we watered the garden, of course).

3. José Andés’ local philanthropic endeavor, World Central Kitchen, reports they’ve made more than half a million meals since the pandemic began. Many of those meals have been cooked in the empty concession kitchens at Nationals Park.

How about you? What’s beautiful things have been getting you through this week?

This week I started reading I’m Not Dying with You Tonight by Kimberly Jones and Gilly Segal, about two teen girls, one white and one black, and how they try to get home after the football game they’re both at erupts in violence. I’d picked it up before the pandemic and it had lingered on my pile. It’s really good and one of those instances where alternating points of view work to enhance the reader’s understanding.

I also started listening to a romance novel, Get a Life, Chloe Brown by Tallia Hibbert, as a total change of pace after finishing up the Inspector Gamache mystery I was listening to.

I think I may do some re-reading as well. I have a lot of books about Black activism and storytelling from when I was in college, and it feels like time to literally dust off and dive back into Anna Deveare Smith, Angela Davis, and others’ works while I wait for newer books to become available.

What books are you finding helpful and educational in response to what’s going on in the world right now?