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?

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…)