This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic from That Artsy Reader Girl invites us to share ten books with titles that contain ordinal numbers. I wanted to give you just one for each, but capped out of individual numbers I’d read at nine. I’ve doubled up on “first,” which is also the number that appears most in books I’ve listed as to-read.

1. First Among Sequels by Jasper Fforde
2. The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight by Jennifer E. Smith
3. The Bookshop of Second Chances by Jackie Fraser
4. The Fourth Bear by Jasper Fforde
5. The Last Fifth Grade of Emerson Elementary by Laura Shovan
6. Ninth Ward by Jewell Parker Rhodes
7. Twelfth Knight by Alexene Farol Follmuth
8. The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield
9. Miracle on 34th Street by Valentine Davies
10. The Vanderbeekers of 141st Street by Karina Yan Glaser

I put this summary off, thinking I’d get around to sharing 2025’s reads before writing up the books I completed during January. But if I wait any longer, I’ll be behind for this year as well. So, onward to the ten books I read last month (and here’s hoping March is a better month for wrapping up last year):

The Librarians by Sherry Thomas

Shortly after a young widow starts working at the library near her grandmother’s home, two patrons die in seemingly separate events. But it turns out they may not be, and the employees of the branch may or may not be good suspects for their demise. If you like your murders straightforward, this is going to rely on coincidence too much for you. If you like your characters to be realistic, again, probably not your cup of tea. If, however, you are happy to read your murder mysteries with your tongue in your cheek and not to consider the circumstances too closely, I’d joyfully endorse this workplace found-family mystery.

Paper. Library copy. (more…)

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic from That Artsy Reader Girl is recommendations for armchair travelers:

1. Peter Mayle’s A Year in Provence (British couple goes on vacation, falls in love with the region, and buys a fixer upper there. Hilarious to read about, but probably not to live through.)
2. The Sun Is Also a Star by Nicola Yoon (Girl and boy meet by chance in New York City and have an adventure.)
3. My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell (A widow moves her family to Corfu, Greece, in the late-1930s)
4. Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods (Middle-aged man and his out-of-shape buddy embark upon a hike of the Appalachian Trail)
5. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (No matter your opinion of Cathy and Heathcliff, you can’t deny the power of the moors)
6. Gods of Jade and Shadow by Silvia Moreno-Garcia (A teen ends up bound to the Mayan god of death and must travel around Mexico to help free him—and her)
7. Evvie Drake Starts Over by Linda Holmes (A forced proximity romance between a widow and an MLB pitcher trying to overcome the yips in a coastal town in Maine)
8. Tuesday Mooney Talks to Ghosts by Kate Racculia (A treasure hunt through Boston)
9. All Creatures Great and Small by James Herriot (The fictionalized adventures of a vet in the Yorkshire Dales in the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s)
10. Empire of Shadows by Jacquelyn Benson (A woman finds a map to a secret city and travels to Belize to follow it)

Honestly, I feel like there are certain cities (New York, London, Paris…) that I could do individual lists for.

How about you? Are there books you’d recommend especially for the setting?

Once upon a time, bloggers used to share poetry on February 2nd to mark St. Brigid’s Day and the Imbolc festival, which span the first couple days of February and mark, like Groundhog Day and Candlemas, the midway point between the Winter Solstice and Spring Equinox.

Largely, the practice has faded away, but I’m fond of it, so today you get a poem by Billy Collins, which I think may resonate with a certain number of us in the wake of the last week:

Shoveling Snow With Buddha
    ~Billy Collins

In the usual iconography of the temple or the local Wok
you would never see him doing such a thing,
tossing the dry snow over a mountain
of his bare, round shoulder,
his hair tied in a knot,
a model of concentration.

Sitting is more his speed, if that is the word
for what he does, or does not do.

Even the season is wrong for him.
In all his manifestations, is it not warm or slightly humid?
Is this not implied by his serene expression,
that smile so wide it wraps itself around the waist of the universe?

But here we are, working our way down the driveway,
one shovelful at a time.
We toss the light powder into the clear air.
We feel the cold mist on our faces.
And with every heave we disappear
and become lost to each other
in these sudden clouds of our own making,
these fountain-bursts of snow.

This is so much better than a sermon in church,
I say out loud, but Buddha keeps on shoveling.
This is the true religion, the religion of snow,
and sunlight and winter geese barking in the sky,
I say, but he is too busy to hear me.

He has thrown himself into shoveling snow
as if it were the purpose of existence,
as if the sign of a perfect life were a clear driveway
you could back the car down easily
and drive off into the vanities of the world
with a broken heater fan and a song on the radio.

All morning long we work side by side,
me with my commentary
and he inside his generous pocket of silence,
until the hour is nearly noon
and the snow is piled high all around us;
then, I hear him speak.

After this, he asks,
can we go inside and play cards?

Certainly, I reply, and I will heat some milk
and bring cups of hot chocolate to the table
while you shuffle the deck
and our boots stand dripping by the door.

Aaah, says the Buddha, lifting his eyes
and leaning for a moment on his shovel
before he drives the thin blade again
deep into the glittering white snow.

In previous years, I’ve shared poems by Vadim Kagan, Tom Disch, Sharon Olds, Emily Dickinson, Kyle Dargan, Barbara Crooker, William Stafford, Mary Oliver (twice), Wislawa Szymborska, Stuart Dischell, Jean Esteve, John Frederick Nims, Grace Paley, Heather McHugh, and Barbara Hamby, all of which are worth another read.

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday at That Artsy Reader Girl invites us to share bookish discoveries we made last year. I thought I’d focus on writers. Of the 59 authors I read, 39 were new to me. Here are ten of those whose books I gave four stars to:

1. B.K. Borison, Good Spirits (romantasy)
2. Abiola Bello, Love in Winter Wonderland (YA romance)
3. John Scalzi, Starter Villain (sci fi adventure)
4. Kate McKinnon (yes, that one), The Millicent Quibb School of Etiquette for Young Ladies of Mad Science (kidlit adventure)
5. Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry of Time (sci fi)
6. Emily Henry, Book Lovers (romance)
7. Alexene Farol Follmuth, Twelfth Knight (YA fiction)
8. Sylvie Cathrall, Letters to the Luminous Deep (romantasy)
9. A. Kendra Greene, No Less Strange or Wonderful (nature essays)
10. Sara Raash, The Nightmare Before Kissmas (romantasy)

I’ll definitely be checking out more books by these authors in the future.

How about you? Did you stumble across any authors last year whose books will hit your tbr list?

Before we get to That Artsy Reader Girl’s weekly Top Ten Tuesday topic, our 2026 goals, let’s check in on how I did with last year’s:

1. Read 52 books. 62 titles finished.
2. Read 25 books I own. I managed a piddly four.
3. Read more diversely (15). 18 titles were written by authors who identified as BIPOC or queer.
4. Write at least 6 non-Top Ten Tuesday posts about books this year. I managed six review posts.
5. Read more backlist titles (15 books published outside this half-decade, and at least 7 from before the year 2000). I finished 10 books from before 2020 and only two from the 1900s.
6. Read 3+ books of poetry or novels in verse. Fail, although I did finish two works of prose by poets.
7. Read more nonfiction — at least 5. 10 books.
8. Read a book by an author who lives in Africa and one who lives in Central or South America. Fail.
9. Send the books I’ve bought as gifts to the people they’re meant for. Fail.
10. Give every book I own a permanent home on a shelf. Fail

Okay, so that’s not a great track record. I read more, read more diversely, and read more nonfiction, but still leant toward recent works of fiction from the library.

Let’s see what we can do about it with some goals for this year:

1. Read 52 books. This number works for me as a target.
2. Finish at least 20 books I own.
3. Read 3 works from pre-1900, 5 books from the 20th century, and 10 books (total) published before 2021.
4. Publish reviews for all 12 months DURING 2026 (with a few days’ grace period for December).
5. Finish 1 play, 1 short story collection, and 2 books of poetry.
6. Read works by authors from at least 7 countries, at least 5 of which should be in translation.
7. Read at least 5 books by queer and/or trans writers.
8. Read 5 works of nonfiction, in at least 4 different Dewey Decimal areas.
9. Send the gift books out into the world. (I bought them so friends would get to read them. Silly to hold on to them forever.)
10. Give every book I own its own shelf space. (This should be my ultimate goal for my personal library and if I can’t figure it out, more books should move on to other bibliophiles.