This week’s Top Ten Tuesday from That Artsy Reader Girl is Books with Geographical Terms in the Title. Here are ten I’ve enjoyed:

1. Anne of the Island by L.M. Montgomery (Gog and Magog!)
2. When the Sea Turned to Silver by Grace Lin
3.  Gone-Away Lake by Elizabeth Enright
4. River Secrets by Shannon Hale
5. Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories by Sandra Cisneros
6. The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America by Bill Bryson
7. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza by Gloria Anzaldúa
8. Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton
9. Where the Moon Meets the Mountain by Grace Lin
10. Rainbow Valley by L.M. Montgomery

I also want to acknowledge that Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books also popped into mind for this list, but I haven’t read them in a long time. While they definitely did contribute to this New England-raised girl’s childhood understanding of the middle of the country, I recognize they featured a number of very negative images of interactions with the Native Americans who lived on and were displaced from the land the characters were “settling.” Before I’d include them on a list that implies an endorsement or hand them to a young reader, I’d want to re-read them to see whether that’s still the case.

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic from That Artsy Reader Girl asks us to share ten books we loved so much when we borrowed them that we had to get our own copy. I wasn’t sure I’d get to ten, but it wasn’t as hard as I’d expected:

1. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Maryanne Shaffer and Annie Barrows
2. The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
3. The Girl Who Drank the Moon by Kelly Barnhill
4. The Book Thief by Marcus Zuzak
5. Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda by Becky Albertalli
6. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle
7. When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead
8. A Year in Provence by Peter Mayle
9. Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfeild
10. Stargirl by Jerry Spinelli

How about you? Do you buy books that you’ve borrowed if you love them? Or are you an avowed non-re-reader?

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic from That Artsy Reader Girl asks us to share finished series that we wish had more books. Here are mine:

1. The Rajes by Sonali Dev

(I was so crushed when I learned there’d only be four books.)

2. Nursery Crime by Jasper Fforde
3. Tillerman Cycle by Cynthia Voigt

(I loved this series as a kid and would have read dozens more stories about the Tillerman family.)

4. The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel by Michael Scott

(I believe there is now a collection of short stories about the other immortals that Scott originally published in an e-format.)

5. The Illuminae Files by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff
6. The Wrath and the Dawn by Renee Ahdieh
7. Book Scavenger by Jennifer Chambliss Bertman
8. Check, Please! by Ngozi Ukazu
9. The Brown Sisters by Talia Hibbert

(I know they’d have to change the title of the series, but I want a book about their grandmother.)

10. To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before by Jenny Han

How about you? Are there book series that you’d love for the author to write just one more story for?

My camera app has stopped working, and while this is annoying, it’s fine, as long as I find another app that does work before heading to New York on Friday. And I suppose even then it’ll be okay as long as Rudi or Eri take photos and share them with me.

In the meantime, let me share what I’ve been reading. I made some more progress with S.J. Bennett’s All the Queen’s Men on audio. I’d love to finish it tomorrow before we leave, so I can move onto my next audio option, but if I don’t, I’ll probably finish it on the train.

I did finish the first volume of Hikaru Nakamura’s Saint Young Men, a manga in which Jesus Christ and Buddha decide to take a year off after all the work at the millennium and spend a year living in a small apartment in Tokyo. It’s a thoughtful, but funny take on two divine immortals who also form a comedy act, have a blog, and have to live on a budget and not piss off their landlady. They have to deal with animals that want to sacrifice themselves when their cupboards are bare, celestial beings that would really like them to return home to heaven already, and inadvertently performing miracles, like Jesus accidentally turning the water at the bath house into wine because he found a pun funny. To help with in-jokes that aren’t obvious to an English-speaking audience, each of the 15 chapters is followed by an afterword with translations, context, and additional documentation.

Bout of Books has rolled around again. This is the final version of 2022 and the 35th iteration of the readalong.

The Bout of Books readathon is organized by Amanda Shofner and Kelly Rubidoux Apple. It’s a weeklong readathon that begins 12:01 a.m. Monday, August 15, and runs through Sunday, August 21, in YOUR time zone. Bout of Books is low-pressure. There are reading sprints, Twitter chats, and exclusive Instagram challenges, but they’re all completely optional. For all Bout of Books 35 information and updates, be sure to visit the Bout of Books blog. – From the Bout of Books team

During the readathon, I’d like to finish a couple books I have on the go so I can return them to the library. Today I read several chapters in Miss Moriarty, I Presume? by Sherry Thomas and listened to a chapter in All the Queen’s Men by S.J. Bennett.

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday from That Artsy Reader Girl asks us to share ten books we love that are more than a decade old. No problem! Here are mine, in no particular order:

1. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle (1962)
2. The Polar Express by Chris Van Allsburg (1985)
3. A Year in Provence by Peter Mayle (1989)
4. Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfeild (1936)
5. The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde (2001)
6. Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery (1908)
7. The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern (2011)
8. The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman (2008)
9. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak (2007)
10. The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver (1998)

On a side note, looking at this in Goodreads, I discovered the only years during the 20th century are:

1901, 1907, 1910 (although I may have read Kilmeny of the Orchard as a tween), 1914, 1916, 1924, and 1942 (although I think I read all the Moffats books as a kid). Just seven books could make the century complete, and included in those years are Baum, Wodehouse, and Christie publications. Hmmm…

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic from That Artsy Reader Girl invites us to share ten books with titles we find hilarious.

Hilarious is an awfully tall order. Let’s say the titles of these ten books I’ve read made me chuckle:

1. My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell
2. Angus, Thongs, and Full-Frontal Snogging by Louise Rennison
3. The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists by Gideon Defoe
4. The Quiche of Death by M.C. Beaton
5. Evans Above by Rhys Bowen
6. Mama Makes Up Her Mind and Other Dangers of Southern Living by Bailey White
7. The Big Over-Easy by Jasper Fforde
8. The Frog Who Croaked by Jarrett J. Krosoczka
9. I’d Tell You I Love You, But Then I’d Have to Kill You by Ally Carter
10. Come Hell or Highball by Maia Chance

How about you? Are there book titles that have left you in stitches?