After a slow start, I ended up finishing seven books during March, several of which I enjoyed quite a bit:

A Lady’s Guide to Marvels and Misadventure by Angela Bell

Not going to lie: If I’d known this was going to be Christian lit (albeit one that believes in women’s rights and science), I probably wouldn’t have picked it up. If you can put up with some mostly mild proselytizing with your steampunk, it’s worth reading this international scavenger hunt that Clara’s beloved inventor grandfather sets up for his uptight granddaughter, his footloose protege, and (in her role as chaperone) his animal-loving daughter (they’re traveling with a zoo by the end of the book). After realizing his granddaughter has become stuck in the role of caregiver (even when such a role is unneeded), he sets off anonymously in the gigantic owl flying machine he built with instructions that she and her traveling companions must follow in order to catch up with him before the newspapers do.

Paper from the library. (more…)

April in National Poetry Month, so for today’s Top Ten Tuesday topic, I’m going to do a poetic twist on That Artsy Reader Girl’s choice of “top ten books you’d be a fool not to read” and shout out novels in verse and books of poetry:

1. Long Way Down by Jason Reynolds: Reynolds does a flawless job in this novel in verse (written for young adults, but which everyone should read) of composing the narrative between our protagonist, a teen in an elevator out to avenge his brother’s death, and all the people he’s known who’ve been shot.
2. Out of the Dust by Karen Hesse: A work of historical fiction, this novel in verse focuses on a teen who was injured in the fire that killed her mother, who is grieving at the same time as the Oklahoma prairie on which she lives is dying from Dust Bowl storms.
3. Me: Moth by Amber McBride: A teen whose family was killed in a car crash and the abused boy next door embark upon a desperate roadtrip and, as with most literary roadtrips, find out more about themselves and each other than they expected to.
4. Booked by Kwame Brown: As with Long Way Down, this is one of those books I point to where the form allows you to things you might not be able to in prose. In this case, it’s a boy who loves soccer and coming to love books and whose narration mimics the tempo of a soccer match.
5. Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson: In this memoir in verse, Woodson looks back on a childhood spent in New York City and South Carolina in the 1960s and ’70s and aspiring to be a writer.
6. If God Invented Baseball: Poems by E. Ethelbert Miller: A local poet and journalist of renown, Miller infuses these poems with his love of the game.
7. Grief Is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter: An homage to the Emily Dickinson poem, but with a twist, since it is not hope that perches in this family’s souls, but grief. And quite literally moves into their London flat, when a six-foot-tall crow shows up at the door to greet a poetry scholar and his two young sons in the quiet after everyone has left following the funeral of his wife/their mother.
8. Honest Engine by Kyle Dargan: Another D.C. poet, whose collection of poems runs the gamut from the State of the Union to sleep deprivation to a dozen or so poems about loved ones gone from this earth, with a surprising amount of science fiction fandom thrown in for good measure.
9. The Last Fifth Grade of Emerson Elementary by Laura Shovan: On the first day of 5th grade, a teacher informs her students they’re going to write a poem every day in class. The novel shares a selection from each of the 18 students over the course of a tumultuous year of change and activism. Magnificently, Shovan succeeds in giving each kid enough of a distinct voice that you get so you can recognize a poem’s author without checking first.
10. The Complete Poems: 1927–1979 by Elizabeth Bishop: I would be remiss if I didn’t include the collected works by Bishop, one of my very favorite poets. Bishop loves to play with words and with traditional poetic forms. You probably read “One Art” long ago back in school. It’s worth revisiting now that you’re older, as are many of her other poems.

How about you? Do you have favorite poetry collections or novels in verse you’d recommend?

I read four books in February, three audiobooks and one in print:

A December to Remember by Jenny Bayliss

Eccentric curios shop dealer Augustus North of Rowan Thorp has died and left his three daughters an unusual bequest: They inherit his estate only if they complete two tasks as a unit. The three estranged women are unhappy about the plan, but each of them needs the money selling the property will bring. (more…)

So far, I have only read one of the books on my winter TBR list, despite the fact that I finished my 14th book of the year yesterday. I do not think I can read the other nine before spring arrives on Thursday, but I may sneak one more in. (I pulled several of them out so they’re in front of me to aid in that process.)

But, that said, I’m still going to make a list for spring that maybe I’ll ignore and maybe I’ll get to. But either way, what is a TBR list for but to strive to get to everything we want to read someday? Who’s to say it won’t be the coming season?

Here are ten of the books I hope to read before summer’s arrival, some of which I own and some of which will be library borrows:

1. Linda Holmes’ Back After This
2. The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong
3. Grace Lin’s The Gate, the Girl, and the Dragon
4. Jasper Fforde’s Shades of Grey
5. A Tempest of Tea by Hafsah Faizal
6. The Stargazers by Harriet Evans
7. Impossible Creatures by Katherine Rundell
8. Rainbow Rowell’s Slow Dance
9. Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers by Jesse Q. Sutanto
10. Mastering the Art of French Murder by Colleen Cambridge

What’s on your seasonal reading plan for the next few months? Lighter, fluffier fare to fit into the smaller moments between being out and about? Or now that the weather is getting warmer, are you feeling like you can tackle some weightier tomes?

You can see what else folks have queued up at That Artsy Reader Girl.

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl focuses on books set in another time. Here are some of my favorites, all of which are set in the 20th century:

1. The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak (fiction, WWII)
2. Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan (fiction, 1985 (I keep trying to say this is set in the 1950s, because this was most certainly not my experience of the mid-’80s))
3. Out of the Dust by Karen Hesse (novel in verse, 1920s Dust Bowl)
4. Maus: A Survivor’s History by Art Spiegelman (graphic nonfiction, WWII)
5. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows (fiction, 1940s)
6. The Color Purple by Alice Walker (fiction, early 20th century)
7. The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick (graphic novel, 1931)
8. Crazy ’08: How a Cast of Cranks, Rogues, Boneheads, and Magnates Created the Best Year in Baseball by Cait Murphy (nonfiction, 1908)
9. The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison (fiction, 1941)
10. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon (fiction, 1940s and ’50s)

How about you? What are some of your favorite reads set in other times?

One of the things I promised myself I’d do last year was to share the books I liked best in 2023, none of which I reviewed here. Today’s Top Ten Tuesday from That Artsy Reader Girl invites me to get my act together and do a down-and-dirty update of this draft and finally hit publish:

1. Family Lore by Elizabeth Acevedo
   Two generations of Dominican-American women with magical gifts (ranging from the ability to tell if someone is lying to possessing an “alpha vagina”) find their lives upended when Flor, whose gift is knowing when someone will die, announces she’s throwing herself a living wake. Organized as personal narratives/interviews told to Flor’s daughter, an anthropologist, the chapters mostly alternate through all four senior sisters and the two daughters/cousins. Each one looks back at how her life — both in New York and in Santa Domingo, Dominican Republic — has been shaped by her gift and her family and how these matrilineal powers cause them to walk through the (male-dominated) world. If you like family sagas or immigrant stories and magical realism, I highly recommend Acevedo’s first novel for adults.
    

(more…)