This week’s Top Ten Tuesday at That Artsy Reader Girl invites us to share our favorite bookish settings:

1. The beach (It’s not enough on it’s own to make me bring a book home, but it’s always enough to make me read the blurb.)
2. Christmastime (Ditto. And, actually, it’s usually enough to make me take the book out from the library.)
3. London (In pretty much any era.)
4. D.C. (Unless they do a terrible job of it. I stopped reading a book once because of the way they described the fountain in Dupont Circle.)
5. Victorian England (The setting of many of my favorite cozy detective series.)
6. New England (Again, unless they do a terrible job of it. I gave up on a book recently because she used a real Connecticut town in the entirely wrong part of the state.)
7. Autumn (Everyone’s just happier in fall.)
8. The 1920s (It always seems such a glamorous time…)
9. Modern Paris (I’m less interested in it as historic setting, but I’d be delighted to follow cat burglars up the Eiffel Tower or into the Louvre.)
10. The 1980s (Many of my school years were in this decade, which means I have a nostalgic fondness novels (particularly y.a./kidlit) sprinkled with banana clips and Trapper Keepers.)

How about you? What places or times immediately make you give a book a second look?

We’re into the final mosaic chart of the shawl. There’s still a final ribbing section before the bind-off row, so that could take a month, because apparently I hate two-color ribbing. But I’d like to think that I’m about a week away from wrapping this thing up, which will still give me weeks before it’s actually cool enough to want to wear woolen neckwear. (Bring on the highs in the 60s!)

It’s been a quiet week reading-wise. I read a chapter of Beth & Amy, which was actually the sample chapter they included at the end of Meg & Jo, but that’s okay. And I have listened to more of Michelle Obama’s Becoming, which has now gotten past the 2008 Iowa Caucus. I suspect Rudi won’t mind listening to some of that on our drive north this weekend, but I also have Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman’s Good Omens for us to return to now that it’s been a few months since we watched the show. I’ll probably save finishing off Farah Heron’s Accidentally Engaged for my flight to Salt Lake next week, since that’s also come back to me on audio.

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday from That Artsy Reader Girl is all about the things that annoy us about books:

1. Bad editing
2. Unhappy endings, particularly ones that sneak up on me (This is often what nets books a single star on Goodreads.)
3. Surprise sequels (I’m looking at you, Miss Peregrine.)
4. A lack of description anywhere on a cover (It’s great that other people love it; I’ll need to know what it’s about first.)
5. Bad descriptions of D.C. (I stopped reading a book once based on its description of the fountain in Dupont Circle.)
6. Mysteries where the bad guy is obvious from the start.
7. Mysteries where the person dies of an accident and the person who witnessed it left town (I stopped reading the Aunt Dimity books after that.)
8. Endings that seem rushed (See #1.)
9. Self-help books (The only ones I’ve tried have focused on creativity, and usually it’s the author’s tone that makes me want to throw the book into traffic.)
10. Traditional gender roles reinforced in sneaky ways (The ones that are overbearing I’ve usually abandoned early on, so it’s usually a stupid remark after a couple has gotten together that makes me resent having spent any time with them at all.)

How about you? What pisses you off about books?

The good news is that I touched all three of these today. The bad news is that none of them are moving fast. But tomorrow is another day.

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday from That Artsy Reader Girl is a freebie, so I thought I’d do a quick rundown of the first ten books I read in 2021 and see how far into the year that gets me:

1. In a Holidaze by Christina Lauren: A cute holiday romance about three families, their grown children (and grandchildren), and the holiday cabin they visit every year. What happens when the adult daughter of one couple falls for the adult son of another? And what happens if they relive this one vacation over and over again? Groundhog Day meets Hallmark holiday movie.
2. Bringing Down the Duke by Evie Dunmore: I don’t remember how this one came onto my radar, but it’s set in Victorian times and features a young woman who gets the chance to attend university and who takes up with the suffragette movement. One of their hopes for an upcoming swing vote is a young duke, who’s been commissioned by the queen to quash the movement. A solid historic romance.
3. One Day in December by Josie Silver: A girl on a bus and a guy at a bus stop see each other one day in December and fall instantaneously in love. But the next time they cross paths it’s when her roommate introduces her to the guy she’s been dating, whom she thinks could be the one. Of course it’s him! And so it goes for years. Fans of Cecilia Ahern will enjoy this one.
4. Recipe for Persuasion by Sonali Dev: In a tribute to the Jane Austen classic, the second in this interlocking series of four stories about an Indian-American family focuses on Ashna, a chef, who is paired in a celebrity cooking contest with Rico Silva, a soccer star, who just happens to have been her secret high school boy friend — and the boy her father sent away because he wasn’t good enough for her. I love this series and recommend it to everyone.
5. The Midnight Library by Matt Haig: A young woman attempts suicide only to find that she’s been transported to a purgatory where she’s allowed to try out the different stories she might have lived if she’d made different choices through the years. The idea was an interesting one, but its execution didn’t live up to the premise.
6. Sal and Gabi Break the Universe by Carlos Hernandez: A cute middle-grade story about a boy, who in his grief at losing his mother a couple years earlier, accidentally found a way to access the multiverse. When he starts at a new school, a girl with an eye for details figures out what’s happening, and they set out on a series of adventures that just might destroy the world.
7. An Unexpected Peril by Deanna Raybourn: The latest in the Veronica Speedwell mystery series, it this time focuses on a  nation caught in the pre-WWI European machinations, its princess (who just so happens to bear an uncanny resemblance to our plucky lepidopterist), and a female climber who died while attempting to summit its highest peak. When the princess goes missing prior to a retrospective of the climber’s life that Veronica and Stoker are mounting, her envoys request Veronica’s assistance with some diplomatic subterfuge to save a treaty. Always a fun series.
8. The Happy Ever After Playlist by Abby Jiminez: A woman is on her way to her fiance’s grave on the one-year anniversary of his death when a dog jumps through her open sunroof. Turns out the pup belongs to a guy who’s currently in Australia, and she agrees to take care of the dog until he returns. But they start to fall in love through texts and cell phone calls and emails — until he returns and she finds out that he’s both exactly who he says he is … and also so much more. A romance that looks at what happens when one half of the couple has experienced the ultimate loss.
9. Murder on Cold Street by Sherry Thomas: The latest in the Lady Sherlock series, this Christmassy story sees Charlotte, Mrs. Watson, and Lord Ingram having to solve a murder that Inspector Treadles has been accused of. I adore this series and highly recommend it.
10. The Bounty by Janet Evanovich and Steve Hamilton: The latest in the Fox and O’Hare series focuses on FBI agent Kate and master burglar Nick, their respective fathers, and a heist that leads back to Nazi Germany. It’s better than the last book in the series, but lacks the joy of the books co-authored by Lee Goldberg.

And with that, we’re caught up through my April reads.

I have one and a half more mosaic charts left to knit and then I return to the wasteland of ribbing and an icord bindoff. It’s possible I’ll finish the shawl in the next month, which would be great, because I’m over knitting it.

Jared Reck’s Donuts and Other Proclamations of Love has had a slower start than I would have hoped, since who doesn’t love the idea of a doughnut and kebab sandwich food truck? I also wanted a little space from the audiobook I started last week, so I decided to pick up a long-neglected listen, Michelle Obama’s Becoming. We just reached the 2004 Democratic National Convention, which is when most of us first became aware of her husband.

Head over to As Kat Knits for the weekly roundup of reads and crafts.