Today’s Top Ten Tuesday topic at That Artsy Reader Girl invites us to share ten books on our TBR lists/piles we’re avoiding reading and why:

I finished Early Riser last week, six months after starting it, so that is NOT a book I’m avoiding. However, there are plenty more:

1. There There by Tommy Orange: I started it. It’s about mass shootings. It was too much. Yes, I feel guilty, so I haven’t returned it yet. But I will.
2. Pumpkinheads by Rainbow Rowell and Faith Erin Hicks: It’s about fall and I want to wait until the season kicks in.
3. Hope Rides Again by Andrew Shaffer: Biden is running for president now and his real-life presence in my life disallows my feeling nostalgia for him. That got in the way of my caring enough to keep reading so I could determine if the author was trying too hard and had turned a fun romp into a pulp potboiler. I did return this one to the library.
4. The Body Papers by Grace Talusan: Written by the sister of someone I went to college with, I felt like I should read this memoir, but it’s about incest and again, I just didn’t feel up to it. I feel horrible about it and will likely give it another go.
5. My Twenty-Five Years in Provence by Peter Mayle: He’s dead and there will be no more books by my favorite Provençal transplant.
6. Daughter of the Siren Queen by Tricia Levenseller: I just finished another book about the daughter of a pirate king and it felt too soon to read another.
7. The Summer before the War by Helen Simonson: There’s a war coming at the end of the book.
8. Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman: Karen read it and suggested the recent adaptation is too close to the text to read it so soon after watching the series.
9. Me Before You by Jojo Moyes: I know how it ends.
10. Casual Vacancy by J.K. Rowling: I love everything of hers I’ve read, but I’ve heard this books is a downer. I don’t want to not love it.

How about you? Are there books you want to read, but just not right now?

Bradley, Connecticut’s major airport, serves all of western New England, including Springfield, Massachusetts, where Dr. Seuss was born. This is a new addition to the airport’s installations, since I last flew home this spring.

My folks supplemented our evening entertainment with a firelog in the fireplace:

I dozed off with the computer open next to me last night without telling you all that I’ve come up to Connecticut for a final long weekend before starting my new job.

It’s good to see my folks, and I’m looking forward to spending the afternoon with my best friend — they’re better than a tonic at chasing away the collywobbles.

Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. I have accepted a job offer and start next week. The work is worthwhile, the new colleagues seem nice, and the title and salary are a step up from my last job. I am nervous and excited and feel slightly twingy in my stomach when I think about it, which I usually take to mean I should do exactly what scares me most in that moment because it’s the right decision.

2. When Rudi and I attended a concert at the start of the summer, we entered to win tickets to a future show — and Rudi won. The show was this evening, Jenny Lewis, with the opening act of The Watson Twins. It was a great show, full of harmonies and a sense of whimsy and a love of music, and I’m so glad we were able to attend.

3. I spent last Saturday afternoon tucked away in the convention center listening to writers talk about their books and processes and other miscellaneous information. I didn’t get to hear everyone on my list, but I did get to hear enough of them to be pleased with the result and I got to check out a couple new-to-me writers as well whose work I’ll be looking for at the library in the near future.

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

I’m narrowing in on the end of the shawl. I have four more rows of mosaic work and eight rows of garter stitch before the bind-off. There are four rows of the purple — two colorwork and two plain — and while I think it may be tight, I’m hoping it’ll be okay. I have more of the pink (although how much of it has been munched on by moths and needs to be spit-spliced remains to be seen. Either way, I think that my fallback goal of having it off the needles by the start of next week is doable, although I may not have it blocked until the following weekend.

My reading currently centers around mid-1980s library fires, although wholly unintentionally. The Library Book is a nonfiction recounting of the fire that destroyed the Los Angeles Public Library’s main branch. Orlean has a very lyrical way of storytelling, so so far I’m enjoying the book. (If you didn’t know there was a massive fire at a major city library in the U.S. 30 years ago, that’s because it was the same day as the Chernobyl disaster.)

A Covert Affair is a contemporary romantic espionage novel about a librarian-cum-spy who gets involved when an ambassador and some priceless books go missing from the Library of Congress. The kidnappers make demands that relate to Operation Blue Star in India. I was woefully uninformed about this real-life event, in which a radical Sikh started espousing separatist views, the Indian government retaliated by attacking the most holy Sikh site where he was holed up, and in the aftermath the Sikh Reference Library was set ablaze. The only question that remains (in real life and in the novel) is whether the holy texts contained therein were incinerated or whether agents of the Indian government removed them first. Should you also not be familiar with Operation Blue Star, you most certainly heard of the action that resulted from it — the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.

Head to As Kat Knits for the roundup of who’s knitting and reading what.