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.

World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments by Aimee Nezhukumatathil

While I did not finish the book of poetry I started in April, I did read two works of nonfiction by poets. In her collection of essays, Nezhukumatathil marries moments of her life to the wonders of the natural world, such as childhood vacations with her family to the Great Smoky Mountains to see synchronized fireflies light the forest or when her teacher made her rewrite an essay about an animal because she’d chosen the national bird of her father’s homeland, the peacock, and not an American animal (nevermind that that hadn’t been the assignment).

I loved this evocative collection and will be seeking out more of Nezhukumatathil’s work.

The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley

In this genre-blending science fiction novel, a British civil servant joins a new agency, one where she will be the liaison, or bridge, for a person who has been “rescued” from the past and brought into the current time. In her case, an Arctic commander who died during a failed expedition in 1847, whom she will be responsible for bringing up-to-date on the ~250 years of history since he was plucked from the ice. As time goes on, the lines between time blur and our narrator starts to suspect something else may be afoot.

I found this in a similar vein to Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series, so if you’re looking for something to read while waiting for those to resume, you might enjoy this (albeit without the literary bent).

49 Days by Agnes Lee

This moving graphic novel explores the seven weeks that Buddhists believe elapse between when a person dies and their soul is reborn. In this instance, we cover the time from both the perspective of the young woman who has died and must traverse the afterlife and her grieving mother, siblings, and boyfriend left behind in the land of the living.

This book will take you next to no time to read, but will stay with you for a long time. Highly recommended.

Ghosts Raised Me by Briana Loewinsohn

In this fictionalized X-ennial graphic memoir of growing up in the 1990s, middle- and high-school Briana shuttles between divorced parents, ultimately spending most of her time amongst the friends with whom she passes notes, shares mix tapes, and sneaks out to attend concerts and just hang out. But without a home life to speak of, when things become fraught with her friends, she struggles. The illustrations elevated this for me, combining ephemeral diary entries, notes, and playlists with a more straightforward panel or narrative style.

Jeremy Thatcher, Dragon Hatcher by Bruce Coville

This is one of the titles I still had to read from the Top 100 Children’s Books list the School Library Journal published in 2010. The second in Coville’s Magic Shop series, this was a cute middle grade story about an artistic animal lover who stumbles upon a magical shop when outrunning some bullies and who is sent home with a dragon’s egg to raise. But while you can hold a newborn dragon in your palm, what happens when it rapidly grows into something that has to be housed in a barn and which has a mind of its own?

Solidly cute, and I think modern audiences will still enjoy this story first published in the 1990s.

Twelfth Knight by Alexene Farol Follmuth

Take the characters and the romance of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, bring them into a 21st-century high school (as football star royalty and an overachieving nerd), and introduce a MMORPG as the platform for Viola’s gender-swap and her chance to get to know Jack “The Duke” Orsino, sidelined with a torn ACL and desperate for something to do with the time that once went into his favorite sport, without the baggage of their IRL interactions.

This was a really well-done adaptation, and I recommend it to my fellow YA romance readers.

The Sinister Booksellers of Bath by Garth Nix

In the sequel to The Left-Handed Booksellers of London, Susan has a semester of art school under her belt and we’ve gone from summer to winter solstice when right-handed bookseller Vivien desperately reaches out in need of Susan’s drawing abilities to retrieve the left-handed Merlin when he’s sucked into a magical map. During the rescue, they find another ancient god who is ritualistically murdering humans and who has suddenly set her eye on Susan.

I didn’t like this quite as much as the first book (I usually like the middle book the least), but I’m still looking forward to finishing this fantasy trilogy set in the U.K. of the early 1980s when the final book comes out next year.