This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic from That Artsy Reader Girl is local authors. Here are ten authors who live or lived in Washington, D.C. (Please note, if you have Congressional representation, you aren’t from D.C., no matter what people from Maryland and Virginia may tell you.)

1. Elizabeth Acevedo (I met her on my birthday in … 2019, maybe, when I took myself to Mahogany Books in Anacostia and asked the bookseller for a recommendation for a local writer. I was still in the building when she stopped by, and the bookseller came to find me so she could sign my copy of her poetry collection, Beastgirl & Other Origin Myths.)
2. Jason Reynolds (Jason often comes out to support other authors’ talks, so you periodically see him out and about at a local bookstore.)
3. E. Ethelbert Miller
4. Leslye Penelope (She went to Howard, so we’re counting her.)
5. Tiffany D. Jackson (Ditto)
6. Jessica Spotswood (a D.C. Public Library employee, who helped run our book club chat for a while!)
7. Stephen Spotswood
8. Kyle Dargan
9. George Pelecanos (Confession: I haven’t read any of his books. But he’s probably one of D.C.’s most famous writers.)
10. Nicole Chung (I haven’t read any of Nicole’s books yet, but I will.)

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday from That Artsy Reader Girl invites us to pick a word and find ten books where it’s contained in the title. April and May are the months when I spend a lot of time planting (and, this year, watering), so I thought I’d share ten books from my to-be-read list that contain the word “garden” in one form or another:

1. In the Night Garden by Catherynne Valente
2. The Winter Garden Mystery by Carola Dunn
3. Frances Hodgson Burnett: The Unexpected Life of the Author of The Secret Garden by Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina
4. Down the Garden Path by Beverley Nichols
5. Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education by Michael Pollan
6. Baseball in the Garden of Eden: The Secret History of the Early Game by John Thorn
7. Lace & Pyrite: Letters from Two Gardens by Ross Gay and Aimee Nezhukumatathil
8. Garden Spells by Sarah Allen Addison (I think I picked this one up at a library sale when I was staying in Connecticut and left it with my mother.)
9. The Night Gardener by George Pelecanos (Goodreads informs me I own this book, which is a surprise to me.)
10. The White Garden by Stephanie Barron

Have you read any of these? Do you have other gardeny reads you’d recommend?

After a slow start, I ended up finishing seven books during March, several of which I enjoyed quite a bit:

A Lady’s Guide to Marvels and Misadventure by Angela Bell

Not going to lie: If I’d known this was going to be Christian lit (albeit one that believes in women’s rights and science), I probably wouldn’t have picked it up. If you can put up with some mostly mild proselytizing with your steampunk, it’s worth reading this international scavenger hunt that Clara’s beloved inventor grandfather sets up for his uptight granddaughter, his footloose protege, and (in her role as chaperone) his animal-loving daughter (they’re traveling with a zoo by the end of the book). After realizing his granddaughter has become stuck in the role of caregiver (even when such a role is unneeded), he sets off anonymously in the gigantic owl flying machine he built with instructions that she and her traveling companions must follow in order to catch up with him before the newspapers do.

Paper from the library. (more…)

April in National Poetry Month, so for today’s Top Ten Tuesday topic, I’m going to do a poetic twist on That Artsy Reader Girl’s choice of “top ten books you’d be a fool not to read” and shout out novels in verse and books of poetry:

1. Long Way Down by Jason Reynolds: Reynolds does a flawless job in this novel in verse (written for young adults, but which everyone should read) of composing the narrative between our protagonist, a teen in an elevator out to avenge his brother’s death, and all the people he’s known who’ve been shot.
2. Out of the Dust by Karen Hesse: A work of historical fiction, this novel in verse focuses on a teen who was injured in the fire that killed her mother, who is grieving at the same time as the Oklahoma prairie on which she lives is dying from Dust Bowl storms.
3. Me: Moth by Amber McBride: A teen whose family was killed in a car crash and the abused boy next door embark upon a desperate roadtrip and, as with most literary roadtrips, find out more about themselves and each other than they expected to.
4. Booked by Kwame Brown: As with Long Way Down, this is one of those books I point to where the form allows you to things you might not be able to in prose. In this case, it’s a boy who loves soccer and coming to love books and whose narration mimics the tempo of a soccer match.
5. Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson: In this memoir in verse, Woodson looks back on a childhood spent in New York City and South Carolina in the 1960s and ’70s and aspiring to be a writer.
6. If God Invented Baseball: Poems by E. Ethelbert Miller: A local poet and journalist of renown, Miller infuses these poems with his love of the game.
7. Grief Is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter: An homage to the Emily Dickinson poem, but with a twist, since it is not hope that perches in this family’s souls, but grief. And quite literally moves into their London flat, when a six-foot-tall crow shows up at the door to greet a poetry scholar and his two young sons in the quiet after everyone has left following the funeral of his wife/their mother.
8. Honest Engine by Kyle Dargan: Another D.C. poet, whose collection of poems runs the gamut from the State of the Union to sleep deprivation to a dozen or so poems about loved ones gone from this earth, with a surprising amount of science fiction fandom thrown in for good measure.
9. The Last Fifth Grade of Emerson Elementary by Laura Shovan: On the first day of 5th grade, a teacher informs her students they’re going to write a poem every day in class. The novel shares a selection from each of the 18 students over the course of a tumultuous year of change and activism. Magnificently, Shovan succeeds in giving each kid enough of a distinct voice that you get so you can recognize a poem’s author without checking first.
10. The Complete Poems: 1927–1979 by Elizabeth Bishop: I would be remiss if I didn’t include the collected works by Bishop, one of my very favorite poets. Bishop loves to play with words and with traditional poetic forms. You probably read “One Art” long ago back in school. It’s worth revisiting now that you’re older, as are many of her other poems.

How about you? Do you have favorite poetry collections or novels in verse you’d recommend?

I read four books in February, three audiobooks and one in print:

A December to Remember by Jenny Bayliss

Eccentric curios shop dealer Augustus North of Rowan Thorp has died and left his three daughters an unusual bequest: They inherit his estate only if they complete two tasks as a unit. The three estranged women are unhappy about the plan, but each of them needs the money selling the property will bring. (more…)

So far, I have only read one of the books on my winter TBR list, despite the fact that I finished my 14th book of the year yesterday. I do not think I can read the other nine before spring arrives on Thursday, but I may sneak one more in. (I pulled several of them out so they’re in front of me to aid in that process.)

But, that said, I’m still going to make a list for spring that maybe I’ll ignore and maybe I’ll get to. But either way, what is a TBR list for but to strive to get to everything we want to read someday? Who’s to say it won’t be the coming season?

Here are ten of the books I hope to read before summer’s arrival, some of which I own and some of which will be library borrows:

1. Linda Holmes’ Back After This
2. The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong
3. Grace Lin’s The Gate, the Girl, and the Dragon
4. Jasper Fforde’s Shades of Grey
5. A Tempest of Tea by Hafsah Faizal
6. The Stargazers by Harriet Evans
7. Impossible Creatures by Katherine Rundell
8. Rainbow Rowell’s Slow Dance
9. Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers by Jesse Q. Sutanto
10. Mastering the Art of French Murder by Colleen Cambridge

What’s on your seasonal reading plan for the next few months? Lighter, fluffier fare to fit into the smaller moments between being out and about? Or now that the weather is getting warmer, are you feeling like you can tackle some weightier tomes?

You can see what else folks have queued up at That Artsy Reader Girl.