This week’s Top Ten Tuesday from That Artsy Reader Girl asks us to share books we’d like to re-read.

Here are ten of mine:

1. Shades of Grey by Jasper Fforde (It was so long between the first and second books that my memory of the story has grown hazy. It is sitting on my coffee table waiting for me to get moving.)
2. A Child’s Christmas in Wales by Dylan Thomas (A charming memoir to reread every few Decembers)
3. Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (I keep thinking I’ll start it in January (or maybe it really begins in March?) and carry on with a year-long readalong.)
4. Peter Mayle’s A Year in Provence (See above.)
5. Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next (One of my favorite books by one of my favorite authors.)
6. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (I haven’t re-read it in more than 20 years.)
7. As You Wish by Cary Elwes (I read it in print the first time and think it would be fun to listen to it at some point.)
8. The Delicacy and Strength of Lace by Leslie Marmon Silko and James Wright (I loved this slim volume of correspondence.)
9. The House in the Cerulean Sea by T.J. Klune (I have the sequel sitting on my coffee table and should revisit this one. I hope I love rereading it as much as I did Under the Whispering Door last year.)
10. Sorcery & Cecelia by Patrica Wrede & Caroline Stevermer (I’d like to read the rest of this series, but, again, it’s been a long time since I started it.)

How about you? What books do you want to revisit?

This semi-annual topic is always one of the wordiest Top Ten Tuesday titles from That Artsy Reader Girl, but it’s also a fun one. What’s coming out between July 1 and the end of the year that I might want to read? So many things, as always! Here are my top ten as of this moment:

1. Sangu Mandanna’s A Witch’s Guide to Magical Innkeeping
2. The Librarians by Sherry Thomas
3. Travis Baldree’s Brigands and Breadknives
4. The Space Cat by Nnedi Okorafor
5. Accomplice to the Villain by Hannah Nicole Maehrer
6. The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow
7. Freya Marske’s Cinder House
8. Hot Girls with Balls by Benedict Nguyá»…n (a volleyball romance!!!)
9. Rebecca Stead’s The Experiment
10. A Little Holiday Fling by Farah Heron

What new releases will you be hunting down for the rest of 2025?

It’s the week where I get to share my seasonal reading plans with the Top Ten Tuesday crew (as hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl). If history is any indication, this will get blown to bits by due dates and mood reads and volleyball and lots of other excuses.

But for today, at least, this is what I hope to read this summer:

1. T.J. Klune’s Somewhere, Beyond the Sea
2. The Phoenix Pencil Company by Allison King
3. Helen Simonson’s The Summer Before the War
4. David Grann’s The Wager
5. Sangu Mandanna’s A Witch’s Guide to Magical Innkeeping
6. Welcome to Murder Week by Karen Dukess
7. The Teller of Small Fortunes by Julie Leong
8. Dawn Staley’s Uncommon Favor
9. No Less Strange or Wonderful by A. Kendra Greene
10. The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride

My list includes a couple I own, several I have out from the library already, and a few I’m on the holds list for. We’ll see what comes of it all in a few months. (As for my spring list, I’ve finished one and am on track to wrap up a second before Friday.)

I’m a bit behind on sharing my reading, so I thought I’d take a stab at getting caught up. Here are the eight books I read back in April:

Lights on a Ground of Darkness: An Evocation of a Place and Time by Ted Kooser

Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner Kooser shares a 72-page memoir of his mother’s family in Iowa, mostly focusing on the summers he spent with his grandparents and uncle as a child in the 1940s. As you’d expect with an illustrious poet, you are dropped into the house next to their gas station, able to wander alongside the muddy Mississippi, taste the ice cold soda while waiting for the extended family to come along to play cards, and weep as, as it does for us all, time claims each one of them.

If you have loved Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine or A Child’s Christmas in Wales by Dylan Thomas, you will find a similar tonal perfection in this tight mini memoir. Highly recommended. (more…)

Today’s Top Ten Tuesday from That Artsy Reader Girl celebrates all things summer. I’m choosing to share ten books from my TBR list with summer in the title:

1. The Summer Book by Tove Jansson
2. Summerlong by Peter S. Beagle
3. Summer at Tiffany by Marjorie Hart
4. Last Days of Summer by Steve Kluger
5. Umbrella Summer by Lisa Graff
6. The Sword of Summer by Rick Riordan
7. One Summer: America, 1927 by Bill Bryson
8. The Summer I Saved the World … in 65 Days by Michele Weber Hurwitz
9. A Summer at Sea by Katie Fforde
10. The Summer before the War by Helen Simonson

How about you? Any summery books you’d recommend?

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic from That Artsy Reader Girl asks us to share books featuring traveling. All of these earned five stars from me:

1. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows: Pen pals are so fascinated by each other that one travels from London to the Isle of Guernsey to meet the rest.
2. Where the Mountain Meets the Moon by Grace Lin: A young girl runs away to find the Man in the Moon
3. Long Way Down by Jason Reynolds: Is the boy in this novel in verse in the same place as the one who got on the elevator just seven flights up? I’d like to think not.
4. 49 Days by Agnes Lee: In this sparse graphic novel, over seven weeks, a young woman must journey across unfamiliar terrain to come to terms with being dead — while her family must contend with still being in the land of the living.
5. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis: Four siblings evacuated from London travel through a coat closet into a magical, winter-stuck land.
6. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle: A girl, a boy from her class, her young brother, and three otherworldly beings travel to space.
7. Exit West by Hamid Mohsin: Two refugees leave behind their Middle Eastern home and step through a door to what they hope will be a new life.
8. Rooftoppers by Katherine Rundell: A girl everyone believes to be orphaned runs away to Paris in search of the mother she remembers from her babyhood.
9. The Remarkable Journey of Coyote Sunrise by Dan Gemeinhart: A nomadic father flees a particular moment in time with his child, but, unlike him, she wants to find her way back home to Washington state.
10. Shark Heart by Emily Habeck: In this heartbreaking love story, a woman must drive across the country to let her husband, who has turned into a shark, go into the wild.

Do you have favorite books about a journey?