Today’s Top Ten Tuesday topic from That Artsy Reader Girl asks us to consider books that we just know we’re going to absolutely love. For the purposes of simplicity, I’m not going to consider books that are parts of series.

Books I predict will be 5-star reads:

1. Nic Stone’s Shuri (my favorite Black Panther princess-scientist)
2. The Telephone Box Library by Rachael Lucas (someone wrote a book about Little Free Libraries, essentially)
3. The 24-Hour Café by Libby Page (I would like to live in the title of this book)
4. Abbi Waxman’s The Bookish Life of Nina Hill (there might be more to life than reading?!)
5. Sherry Thomas’ The Magnolia Sword: A Ballad of Mulan (I loved the movie; I love the author)
6. Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style by Benjamin Dreyer (I am a grammar snob)
7. The Gilded Wolves by Roshani Chokshi (caper!)
8. Clap When You Land by Elizabeth Acevedo (I mean, isn’t everything she writes brilliant?)
9. Rebecca Stead’s The List of Things That Will Not Change (ditto)
10. Yes No Maybe So by Becky Albertalli and Aisha Saeed (they wrote a romance about political canvassing)

How about you? Are there books you are confident were written with you in mind as a reader?

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Today’s Top Ten Tuesday topic from That Artsy Reader Girl is a choose-your-own-adventure from That Artsy Reader Girl. Anything is fine as long as it relates to book covers. I debated about being deliberately snarky (clever?) and telling you about my favorite adaptations, but I’m hoping to get a few more things done tonight and I decided instead to just go short and simple:

That’s a photo showing you the ten covers I like best from the 22 (!) books I currently have out of the library:

Top Row: I’m Not Dying with You Tonight by Kimberly Jones and Gilly Segal, The Paper Magician by Charlie N. Holmberg, and Tristan Strong Punches a Hole in the Sky by Kwame Mbali

Middle Row: Lynne Kelly’s Song for a Whale, Don’t Date Rosa Santos by Nina Moreno, Homerooms and Hallpasses by Tom O’Donnell, and The Downstairs Girl by Stacey Lee

Bottom Row: The Remarkable Journey of Coyote Sunrise by Dan Gemeinhart, Wayward Son by Rainbow Rowell, and We Met in December by Rosie Curtis

Of the group The Paper Magician, We Met in December, The Remarkable Journey of Coyote Sunrise and Tristan Strong Punches a Hole in the Sky are my favorites.

No new knitting news to report at the moment, but I do have some reading updates.

I have finished listening to Tuesday Mooney Talks to Ghosts by Kate Racculia. Next up in the headphones will be the second installment in Louise Penny’s Inspector Gamache series, A Fatal Grace. I put both my paper books aside. I have a plane flight next week, so if I’m awake for any of it, it should be good listening.

I put both my paper books aside last week to finish Tuesday and am in no rush to pick them up again. I have a bunch of middle grade and YA titles out of the library right now though, so sampled a couple tonight to decide what will be next. Lynne Kelly’s Song for a Whale looks promising, but didn’t grab me the way Tristan Strong Punches a Hole in the Sky by Kwame Mbalia did. In this story, Tristan’s best friend has died, leaving him a journal filled with African and African American-based folklore stories from a class project they’d been working on. Except now the journal glows green and has an unusual symbol on the cover. Tristan is heading to Alabama to work on his grandparents’ farm for the summer and get past his grief, except that now, in addition to mending fences, he might also have to help John Henry and Brer Rabbit contend with African gods. Doesn’t it sound so good?

What are you reading?

For this week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic, That Artsy Reader Girl invites us to share the top ten most recent additions to our personal bookish collections:

1. Swimming Lessons by Claire Fuller: I picked up this at a Little Free Library on Saturday.
2. Kate Murphy’s You’re Not Listening: What You’re Missing and Why It Matters: This book came as a freebie with the purchase of …
3. The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern: I bought this on New Year’s Day, when one of our local indie bookshops was having a sale, because I loved her debut novel.
4. A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader, edited by Maria Popova and Claudia Bedrick: Karen gave me this collection of letters for Christmas.
5. The Prince and the Dressmaker by Jen Wang: A surprise gift from my parents for Christmas.
6. The Goblet of Fire by J.K. Rowling: Rudi’s mom gave me the illustrated version for Christmas.
7. Hillary McKay’s The Skylark’s War: I picked this up while doing some last minute Christmas shopping when I saw it, because I hadn’t realized it had finally been published in the U.S.
8. Jasmine Guillory’s Royal Holiday
9. Words in Deep Blue by Cath Crowley
10. The Flatshare by Beth O’Leary: All three of these books came from my #TBTBSanta, Helen.

What are some of the most recent additions to your personal library?

This week’s check-in of books and knitting is without a photo because my phone is charging and I am too lazy to go unplug it and to pull out my knitting, which is currently sitting beneath an avalanche-ready pile of laundry on the couch.

So instead, I’ll just tell you. Last weekend I got a row knit on my shawl. That would seem unimpressive (and it is), but since I haven’t done anything besides use its presence as an implement of guilt since September, I’m deeming that success. There is a possibility that I could knit the final row and then bind it off this coming weekend, but let’s not get carried away with things.

On the reading front, I’m listening to Tuesday Mooney Talks to Ghosts by Kate Racculia. I didn’t finish it on Overdrive, so I took it out on cd, which means I’m way less good about actually listening to it. But I’m enjoying this quest-read about a hospital development researcher (and her friends) who gets caught up in a scavenger hunt/quest game in the wake of a Boston billionaire’s death. I’m more than halfway through and would love to spend some time this weekend listening to it.

On paper, I’ve got two books in progress. Jennifer Chiaverini’s Christmas Bells tells the parallel stories of poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow during the Civil War and a contemporary Boston-area music teacher/choirmaster and the organist who is in love with her. It’s fine, but a bit slow-going since chapters alternate between eras and points of view. My other book, We Met in December, is a cute contemporary rom-com, but it, too, is going to shift perspectives. Three books on the go with this literary device is really too many, so maybe I’ll put one on hold and pick up something that can commit to telling a story from a single character’s perspective. I’ve picked up a bunch of the Cybils finalists from the library, so there’s probably at least one of those that doesn’t shift perspective by chapter.

What are you reading and/or crafting these days? (If you want to see what others are working through, head to As Kat Knits for her weekly roundup.)

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic from That Artsy Reader Girl is bookish discoveries of the past year. I’m choosing to interpret that new-to-me authors I particularly enjoyed:

1. Comic illustrator Debbie Tung
2. Author and illustrator Ngozi Ukazu
3. Fantasy and science fiction novelist Nnedi Okorafor
4. Author and illustrator Katie O’Neill
5. Jasmine Guillory, who writes contemporary romance starring African Americans
6. Linda Holmes, author and NPR host
7. Author and illustrator Nick Hayes
8. Writer Jessica Townsend
9. Author Sonali Dev
10. Writer Mary H.K. Choi

How about you? What were your bookish discoveries of 2019?