This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic from That Artsy Reader Girl took me a little while. Our assignment: to share book titles that might make good crayon colors:

1. The Wonderful O (James Thurber): A bright orange, the color of the first citrus of the winter season
2. Sucking Eggs (Patricia Nicol): Venom green
3. Rancid Pansies (James Hamilton-Paterson): Greyish blue-purple
4. The Vinyl Princess (Yvonne Prinz): Sparkly black
5. Last Days of Summer (Steve Kluger): Cornflower blue
6. Dandelion Wine (Ray Bradbury): A pale, clear yellow
7. Canary (Rachele Alpine): Chartreuse
8. Vintage Attraction (Charles Blackstone): Dark plum
9. A Darker Shade of Magic (V.E. Schwab): Dark blood red
10. The Starless Sea (Erin Morgenstern): Dark midnight blue

How about you? Can you think of any book titles that should be a crayon name?

A couple years ago, Rudi and I found ourselves at the beach on a very breezy day. I didn’t think much of it and enjoyed the day for what it was, reading my library book as usual. Until we got to the end of the day and it was time to pack up, when I went to close my library book and found I couldn’t. So much sand had blown in between the pages as I’d read it that it no longer lay flat. I literally ended up pouring sand out of the plastic cover and shaking out each page before it even remotely resembled something I could return to the library in good faith.

So this week, when faced with a breezy forecast, I brought two books to the beach. One, An Unexpected Peril, was my current read, a new book of which I am the first reader of the library copy. There was a breeze, albeit a gentle one, so I opted to keep it in my bag. Instead, I started Silva Moreno-Garcia’s Gods of Jade and Shadow, which I procured from a Little Free Library sometime in the last year. Set in Mexico in the 1920s, it focuses on a teen girl who accidentally frees a Mayan god from a locked trunk in her grandfather’s room and who then must help him on a quest in order to save her own life. So far, so good.

On the knitting front, I’m down to a handful of rows on my Smock Madness socks, so I decided to pull out Wohin?, the pair of socks I didn’t finish from Sock Madness 2020. I only made it halfway through the heel flap before the world started to shut down and with it my desire to knit. I’ve done nothing more than find the UFO, so I have no info on whether this is the right project to tackle next or not, but I figured I’d at least take a look.

Head to As Kat Knits for the weekly roundup of reading and crafting.

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday list from That Artsy Reader Girl invites us to share books that frustrated us in one way or another. I rarely carry on reading books I hate, so there are plenty of books I’ve let go over the years, but this particular prompt suggests antipathy to me, which means I have to truly resent a book in one way or another, and that means I actually thought it worth carrying on until the end for one reason or another. Here are the nine one-star reads I have recorded on Goodreads, which amounts to “I finished it, but wish I hadn’t”:

1. Fat Vampire, by Adam Rex
2. The Elegance of the Hedgehog, by Muriel Barbery
3. A Walk to Remember, by Nicholas Sparks
4. The Old Man and the Sea, by Ernest Hemingway
5. The Pearl, by John Steinbeck
6. Flowers for Algernon, by Daniel Keyes
7. Summer People, by Marge Piercy
8. Needled to Death, by Maggie Sefton
9. Deck the Halls by Mary Higgins Clark & Carol Higgins Clark

How about you? Do you have any books you want to chuck in the ocean?

It’s been several weeks worth of days so far this week, so neither the sock nor the book has changed since Sunday.

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday from That Artsy Reader Girl invites readers to share the book settings where they’d most love to reside. Here are mine:

1. BookWorld from Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next books, because then you’d have access to all the bookish settings. Is that cheating?
2. The Burrow, because despite the ghoul in the attic and the gnomes in the garden, it’s overflowing with love.
3. Prince Edward Island.
4. Bandette’s Paris, as depicted by Paul Tobin and Colleen Coover. Because who wouldn’t want to watch films en plein air on a rooftop and then Vespa over to the bookshop or stop for a chocolate bar?
5. Marsyas Island, where you can find T.J. Klune’s The House on the Cerulean Sea. It’s sunny, it’s filled with forests and gardens, and everyone who lives there knows they are loved unconditionally.
6. The Scottish Highlands, the setting of Jenny Colgan’s Bookshop on the Corner series
7. Melbourne in the 1920s, because Phryne Fisher makes it seem super glamorous.
8. Guernsey, especially when it’s not filled with Nazis.
9. Midnight Gulch from A Snicker of Magic by Natalie Lloyd, with its ice cream company that lets you eat your feelings
10. New York City, from every book ever written about it. I have visited NYC and absolutely do not want to live there in real life. But the love letters that authors pen to it, be it Nicola Yoon’s The Sun Is Also a Star or Dash and Lily’s Book of Dares by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan, or Karina Yan Glasser’s Vanderbeekers series makes me want to want to live there.

How about you? What books would you move into today if you could?

I picked up a couple more books at the library. I seem to be under the impression that the more that live at my house, the more likely I am to find my way out of the reading slump I’ve been in for more than a year.

So I thought I’d look at the books I currently have checked out and put them in a possible order for actually catching and keeping my attention. (This does nothing to solve the root problem of mental exhaustion caused by a never-ending tower of work that is rarely more than an arm’s length away in my life now, but I can solve one of those problems today and not the other.)

1. Deanna Raybourn’s Unexpected Peril: The latest installment in the Veronica Speedwell mystery series, just out this month.
2. Class Act by Jerry Craft: A companion graphic novel to one I enjoyed last year. Reading graphic novels often gives me headaches, but they do move quickly.
3. Carlos Hernandez’s Sal and Gabi Break the Universe: I’m two-thirds of the way through this middle-grade sci-fi novel about friendship and loss and just need an hour or two to finish it off and get it back to the library.
4. Aurora Burning by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff: I love the YA sci-fi books this pair of Australian-dwelling writers make together. They’re action-packed, with distinct voices for all their characters and the found family trope that I love. But unlike in their first series, this one is willing to eliminate main characters, which throws a huge weight behind not reading it. I want all the characters I care about in a series (be it tv or book) to make it through to the end and I’d rather forgo the enjoyment of continuing the relationship than to lose them.
5. Serena Singh Flips the Script by Sonya Lalli: This romance is set here in D.C., which occasionally works out great and more often makes me stop reading as soon as the first wrong thing shows up. A local bookseller said nothing jumped out at her, so my fingers are crossed.
6. Janae Marks’ From the Desk of Zoe Washington: This middle-grade reader about a young baker who gets a letter from her incarcerated birth father started off slowly, but it’s gotten rave reviews everywhere, which suggests if I push through another chapter or two I’ll be hooked.

What books do you have lined up to read next?