This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic from That Artsy Reader Girl invites us to share fictional characters we’d like to check in on. Here are some of mine:

1. Isola Pribby from The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Schaffer and Annie Barrows
2. Felicity from A Snicker of Magic by Natalie Lloyd
3. The teen protagonists of The Illuminae Files series by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristof
4. Will from Long Way Down by Jason Reynolds
5. Starr from The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas
6. Ruth from Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson
7. Claudia from The Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E.L. Konigsburg
8. Charles Wallace from A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L’Engle
9. Mary from The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgsen Burnett
10. Miranda from When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead

How about you? Are there characters whose lives you’d like to peek into even after the happily ever after takes place?

I’ve reached the final slip stitch rib section of the shawl! I just wish I were more confident that the shawl is big enough.

I’ve been taking Sonya Lalli’s A Holly Jolly Diwali with me on excursions. I started Allie Brosh’s graphic memoir Solutions and Other Problems in the bedroom. I’m down to the final two chapter of Michelle Obama’s Becoming, which I mostly listen to while washing dishes. But since Rudi is away, I guess I’d better start listening to it at other times, too, in order to wrap it up before it expires in four days.

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday from That Artsy Reader Girl asks us to share recommendations. In keeping with Nonfiction November, I’ve opted for the top ten books I’d share with someone who loves memoirs:

1. A Year in Provence by Peter Mayle
2. March by John Lewis and Andrew Aydin and illustrated by Nate Powell
3. My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell
4. Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations by Mira Jacobs
5. Yes Please by Amy Poehler
6. Becoming by Michelle Obama
7. My Mother Was Nuts by Penny Marshall
8. No Time Like the Future by Michael J. Fox
9. Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body by Roxane Gay
10. Becoming Duchess Goldblatt by Anonymous

How about you? What memoirs have you enjoyed?

I stayed up late to finish a book and I have no regrets. (But, also, now I’m going to bed.)

Someday I’ll be done with this shawl. We’re now into shawl weather, so it makes it more likely, but I’m coming up on another two color rib section and that’s my least favorite part of this knitting project. Which way will the seesaw tilt?

I did finish The Ex Hex by Erin Sterling, so I am not in stasis in all aspects of my life, which is good. It was a cute witch-themed romance, which asked absolutely nothing of me except to keep turning the pages. I don’t want all my reads to be like that (and the romances I’ve liked best the past couple years have mixed in weightier issues with the lovey-dovey stuff), but there are some weeks when that’s just what you need.

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic from That Artsy Reader girl invites us to consider titles that we’d share with those who claim not to love reading.

I decided I’d break my list up into three audiences:

1. Kids:
   1. The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick: Honestly, any of Selznick’s three historical fiction chunksters would work, but I have an especial fondness for this one set in a Paris train station and focused on early film and automatons. The way he alternates narrative and visual storytelling is unlike any other author I’ve encountered, making turning the pages compelling. Plus it will give kids who don’t think they like reading the satisfaction and confidence of having finished — and loved — a 500-page book.
   2. Kwame Alexander’s The Crossover: A verse novel about two basketball loving twin brothers where the rhythm of the narrative follows that of playing the game. If you’ve got a hoops-loving kid, I think this would be a great choice.
   3. Jen Wang’s The Prince and the Dressmaker: In this graphic historical novel, Prince Sebastian and Frances, a dressmaker, share a secret, that he has a secret identity as cutting-edge fashion icon Lady Crystallia, leaving him little time for the girls his parents keep trying to pair him up with. Graphic novels are a great way to get kids who don’t love reading picking up printed material. If your kid has exhausted superheroes or collected comic books and wants to move on, this would still offer someone in a costume and figuring out how to live an authentic life when the world may not yet be ready for your truth.

   Young adults:

   4. Jason Reynolds’ Long Way Down: This verse novel takes place during a single minute-long elevator ride and deals with gun violence, family, loyalty, and vengeance, with an open ending that will leave teens talking about what happens next.
   5. Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book: This follows the story of a boy raised in a cemetery by the ghosts of the people interred there and what that means when a threat from the living world tracks him down there.
   6. Illumninae by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff: This is another chunkster, but this time aimed at teens, rather than tweens, and set in space. Its epistolary style (told through emails, video logs, and other reports) makes for frequent stopping points and multiple points of view, plus there’s a killer AI who also gets to share its perspective.
   7. The Port Chicago 50: Disaster, Mutiny, and the Fight for Civil Rights by Steve Sheinkin: This story of fighting racism in the military during WWII is outrageous. The fact that we don’t know their story and that no one has been unable to reverse the outcome is a tragedy.

   Adults:

   8. Crazy ’08: How a Cast of Cranks, Rogues, Boneheads, and Magnates Created the Greatest Year in Baseball History by Cait Murphy: I feel like sports fans are an untapped market for nonfiction. Baseball fans, in particular, tend to be a wonky bunch, who love to focus on stats and minutia. This is a story from early baseball (1908, rather than our most recent ’08) told in great narrative fiction style.
   9. Peter Mayle’s A Year in Provence: This is a laugh-out-loud story about a couple who goes on an amazing vacation and decides they’d love to relocate there permanently. When they buy a ramshackle house in need of many repairs, they must quickly adjust to repairpeople with different life approaches, what red tape means when you’re working with a second language, and how their primary residence becomes the vacation destination for everyone they’ve ever met. If you’ve got a DIY fixer-upper project of your own, this is the read for you.
   10. Mama Makes Up Her Mind and Other Dangers of Southern Living by Bailey White: Any book that has me laughing aloud on a cross-country plane flight is probably a good one to share. And this one, about family in Georgia, is no exception.

   How about you? Any book you think would be great to share the written word with someone who may think they may not share your passion for reading?

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