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…)

Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. I’ve harvested peas and strawberries and escarole this week — and seen two other exciting signs: Above is a black swallowtail caterpillar on one of my bronze fennel plants. And below are flowers in my potato patch, which have sprouted to ridiculous heights this year.

2. As I’m already on his side of the river, I text Sergio to see if he’s interested in a drink. (As it’s a Sunday afternoon, I do imagine it might be apple juice in a sippy cup.) He invites me to the playground to hang out with him, his wife, and his young children, and then later back to their place for supper on their balcony, which feels particularly kind.

3. Rebecca invites me to her place, where I get to see her beautiful rainbow bookshelves (it wouldn’t work for me, but I love that it does for her), before we head up to her building’s roof deck for snacks, a panoramic view of the city set to the National Cathedral’s bells, and a fluorescent sunset on an absolutely gorgeous evening.

What’s been beautiful in your world lately?

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?