Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. Rudi returns home from his French cycling trip! We celebrate by going on an afternoon date to the movies.

2. The ducklings at the Constitution Garden pond are two weeks older than when I first sighted them. I think this makes them tweens. Large enough to have outgrown the cute and cuddly phase, but still small enough to be needing to hang close to mama duck.

3. I open a new jug of milk and give the kittens the pull tab to play with. Ember rockets around the tub with it in glee. When I wake up the next day, I remember to look under the drain cover, because she is clever enough to pull it up, hide her toy in the drain, and then put the cover back. (Rudi and I were slow on the uptake and spent her first few months here declogging the tub drain as a result.)

How about you? What’s been beautiful in your world lately?

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?

Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. There is roughly a two-week span when all the berries and all the stone fruits are in season, so my yogurt parfaits are currently overflowing with an abundance of produce.

2. A severe storm rolls up as the Nationals break their 11-game losing streak in extra innings. Sarah offers to drop me at the metro station after I walk her to her car, and I sprint for the escalator as the skies open up. By the time I’m back in Dupont, the worst of the rainfall is done.

3. Eton mess is made up of three components — macerated strawberries, whipped cream, and pieces of meringue. Trader Joe’s sells meringue cookies. I slice strawberries and take our pestle to the cookies, while Rudi whips the cream. In short order, we have tasty, summery desserts. (We both agree that we’re eager to try this recipe with peaches as well once the freestones come into season.)

How about you? What’s been beautiful in your world lately?

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.)

Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. We attend the wedding of two of Rudi’s cycling friends at a former turn-of-the-century amusement park. I don’t know the groom or bride, but can tell that the wedding is very much them.

2. I spend the afternoon picking tart cherries and blueberries at a nearby farm. If I am productive this weekend, there will be pie.

3. After two days in a row spent in large part with strangers, it feels restorative to curl up all afternoon with just the cats, the radio broadcast of the Mets game, my knitting, and various books.

How about you? What’s been beautiful in your world lately?

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…)