This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic from That Artsy Reader Girl invites us to share books with units of time in their title. Here are ten from my to-be-read list:

1. A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life by Donald Miller
2. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez
3. My Year with Eleanor by Noelle Hancock
4. The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemison
5. Four Seasons in Rome by Anthony Doerr
6. Around the World in 72 Days by Nellie Bly
7. Ghost Month by Ed Lin
8. Last Days of Summer by Steve Kluger
9. Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day by Winifred Watson
10. The 24-Hour Café by Libby Page

Have you read any of these? Do you have other timely titles to recommend?

Happy Sunday night, everyone! I hope you had a nice weekend. Mine included the usual — reading, knitting, going to the farmers market, playing volleyball, swimming, cycling, gardening, and attending an outdoor concert.

I also did something impulsive. After seeing Laura Lippman’s tweet Saturday morning, I signed up for #1000wordsofsummer, a daily writing accountability project. One Thousand Words of Summer is a bit of a misnomer, because technically it only goes for two weeks. But, it’s meant to act as a structure to get you moving for the summer on some type of writing project, 1000 words at a time.

Because I am on a summer sabbatical before looking for a new job and because my volunteer gig has gone on hiatus until next month, I feel a bit like a dandelion pappus — prone to being blown along by the winds of the day. I need a few must-do’s to anchor the day better, and I’m hoping a return to writing will be one of them.

For the first few days, I’m just journaling, trying to get my writing sea legs back under me. If, by the end of the two weeks, I can zero in on some larger writing goal — a series of articles or essays or a creative writing project, for instance — I’d be very happy, but I’m not inclined to make that a mandate of the project. Most of the writing I’ve done in the last year has been either grant applications or blog entries, and my writing muscles are feeling weak and whiny. So, I will ask them to get the reps in for the next two weeks, but I won’t critique form. However sloppy the work — tangents, unfinished thoughts, overuse of adjectives and conjunctions — it’ll count toward the finish line.

And even if nothing else comes of it, at least I’ll have shown up.

Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. English peas eaten straight from the garden

2. Cygnets and ducklings at Constitution Garden

3. Refrigerator jam

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

On my list of projects I’d like to get off my needles is my mother’s Christmas shawl, which will likely arrive to her with fall’s first frost. My progress is infinitesimal at this time, but I’m down to four more rows (or, roughly 1200 stitches) of that patterned section before I move on to knitting that lends itself to doing other things at the same time, like listening to an audiobook. (I tried to jump the gun on multitasking and ended up with an extra stitch a couple rows back. I’m hoping I corrected it properly after some time out to consider what it had done, but, Mum, if I didn’t, we may have to consider it a design feature.)

On the reading front, I started two new books this week. The first is Great or Nothing, a Little Women retelling set during World War II authored by Joy McCullough, Carline Tung Richmond, Tess Sharpe, and D.C. novelist and librarian Jessica Spotswood, each of whom voices a sister.

The second is The Bromance Book Club by Lyssa Kay Adams, which I’m listening to on my phone. I’d picked up the second one a couple years back and hated the “voice” of the main guy character, so had put it back down. In this one, the first book of the series, that guy is a secondary character and talks less. So while I still don’t love him, his obnoxious tone is less grating. But I borrowed the audio because a D.C. librarian recommended it as humorous. Once I remembered I could adjust the speed of the reader (we’re up to 1.4 times the normal speed), I found myself better able to relax into the story, which focuses on a major league ballplayer whose wife has just asked him for a divorce. His buddies (including the irritating guy) and some other high-powered Nashville men come to his rescue by inviting him to join their bookclub, which reads only romance novels in an effort to better understand the women in their lives.

Head over to As Kat Knits to see what others are reading and crafting.

Hi there!

I’m coming off a pretty nice weekend, so I hope you had one too.

On Saturday, I played pick-up volleyball for three hours, scarfed down a popsicle, and then headed to the park with Rudi to listen to the Rock Creek Kings perform. Their permit ends at 9, so we were home in plenty of time for me to finish two books and a shawl.

On Sunday, while I just missed getting to the library, I did make it to the pool. I also had a trip to the farmers market and some time in the garden — I love pea season! We watched the original Top Gun movie and drank our first strawberry daiquiris of the season. I also snuck in a load of laundry, just in case you thought it was only fun and games at the Burrow this weekend.

Monday rolled around, and the fun kept coming. Rudi and I made strawberry refrigerator jam and then joined friends for supper. We had the jam this morning on our English muffins, and it was so good!

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic from That Artsy Reader Girl invites us to share comfort reads — either titles if you have specific books you return to week after week or the qualities that you look for when the world is hard.

Here are ten things I’m considering when I need a book not to be one of my 99 problems:

1. A reread of a book I’ve loved. These are all over the place in terms of audience and genre, but they were all five-star reads.
2. A happy ending. I don’t want ambivalent and I don’t want tears.
3. Cozy mysteries are often good for the previous item.
4. As are romance novels.
5. Retellings of traditional tales — such as Jane Austen’s works, Little Women, and the Sherlock Holmes series — are often solid contenders. Much like the previous two items, retellings have a generally reliable structure.
6. 350 pages or fewer. This is not the time for a sweeping saga.
7. Likable main characters. Overall, I prefer this anyway, but an unlikable main character is immediately getting that book put down when I’m in a mood.
8. Sometimes combining words with pictures — like in a collection of comics or a graphic novel — is called for. But that one can be tricky, and it only works singly. I never binge read more than one.
9. A new book in a favorite series or by a favorite author can help a grumpy mood.
10. When all else fails, I turn to middle grade fiction.

How about you? What do you look for in a comfort read? And do you have particular ones you turn to in times of trouble?