For this week’s Top Ten Tuesday, I originally thought I was going to get caught up on my 2021 reviews (And I still might! Stay tuned for tomorrow!), since I’ve only finished 10 books to date. But since that would call for more words than I want to write, I’m taking a page from Jana of That Artsy Reader Girl and simply giving you my last ten 4+-star reads:

1. Murder on Cold Street by Sherry Thomas: I will always recommend the Lady Sherlock series.
2. An Unexpected Peril by Deanna Raybourn: Another solid Victorian-era mystery series.
3. Sal and Gabi Break the Universe by Carlos Hernandez: An enjoyable middle-grade novel about a boy who (sometimes accidentally and sometimes not) creates rifts in the multiverse and his new friend who doesn’t think he’s crazy for it.
4. Recipe for Persuasion by Sonali Dev: The second novel in which this author takes inspiration from Jane Austen’s novels and applies it to a contemporary extended Indian-American family living in California. Warning: Don’t read while you’re hungry.
5. Bringing Down the Duke by Evie Dunmore: A suffragette tries to find a way to bring a member of the House of Lords around to her cause.
6. Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations by Mira Jacob: A memoir inspired by her son’s concern about growing up Brown in America.
7. The House in the Cerulean Sea by T.J. Klune: It topped my best reads of 2020, and I continue to adore it.
8. Nothing Is Wrong and Here Is Why by Alexandra Petri: A book of Washington Post satire columns that could only have been published during the last administration.
9. How Rory Thorne Destroyed the Multiverse by K. Eason: I don’t know what to tell you: While this is the second book on this list with a similar title, it is not remotely like the other. Great if you always wondered what the Star Wars trilogy would have been like if told from Leia’s POV.
10. Get a Life, Chloe Brown by Talia Hibbert: A young, disabled Black British woman makes a bucket list (with the hopes of jumpstarting her life, rather than to do before it ends) and enlists the super of her new apartment complex to help her.

How about you? What have you read recently that you’d recommend fairly universally?

I was sitting on an overturned milk carton at the garden this afternoon, trying to unbraid my purple sage and my violets so I could thin the latter, when the ground under my potato patch started pulsing.

Fascinated, I stared as whatever was approaching from the forest came closer, both curious and slightly horrified by what might emerge.

And then common sense kicked in and I realized I was far more likely to witness my tallest potato plant be sucked underground in a Loony Toons moment than I was to make an adorable new friend. I grabbed my trowel and tapped on the earth, causing my new neighbor to decide to exit via another door.

I’ve always had neighbors in my garden plot. They sometimes place doorways up in the middle of the plot, which I then tuck a rock into the next time I see it. It’s likely a field mouse or maybe a vole, but I suppose it could also be a rabbit or a rat. (The latter is the least likely; they’re far more likely to be found in the compost than in my plot, but I can’t rule it out.)

On the vegetative front, you can see it was another successful harvest week. There’s two types of sorrel, a red leaf lettuce, arugula, and spinach in my spring greens bag.

I have a couple rows of seedlings I need to thin, including one that maybe is bok choy. It’s unclear, and I’ll need to look through the seeds Rudi and I planted to see. My Swiss chard is growing delightfully neon, and I look forward to harvesting my first stalks later this week.

More peas have emerged, so I created some more string latticework for them. The tallest vine is past my knee and growing fast.

The potatoes, onions, garlic, and celery seem to be doing okay. I’ll need to add more compost to the potatoes next weekend (unless my new neighbor eats them all between now and then), and apparently I need to keep an eye on my celery plants for pests.

There are actual berries on the strawberry plants, so I’ll shift the straw around later this week to cut down on the likelihood of slugs. Rudi says he’s also prepared to proffer free drinks to anyone undeterred by that method.

And finally, I planted a basil, a sungold tomato seedling, and a cayenne pepper today. I figure if I buy only a few plants at a time, I have a better shot of getting them in the ground the same day.

Rudi had a call this morning that allowed me to catch up on some sleep without a cat dropping a lamp on my head (Corey’s discovered that’s the only way to wake me up, but I refuse to give in to extortion and just shift further down the bed).

After a lazy start to the day, we headed to the Georgetown waterfront, passing by a family of nine ducklings on the canal. We had some snacks, soaked up some sun, chatted with friends, bought a book (a collection of Zadie Smith essays from the discount table in front of Bridge Street books), and then stopped at the Rock Creek Kings concert on the way home.

Tomorrow, I’m planning on an early trip to the farmers market (strawberries!); some time at the garden stringing my peas up further; park time with books knitting, and chatting with my folks; and an evening of excellent tv — The Equalizer, Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist, and His Dark Materials. (Our internet company has given us free access to a number of premium shows for a week and the first season of the Philip Pullman adaptation is one of them. We’re going to have to hustle, though, because we’ve watched four episodes in five days and now need to watch the last four in two. It’s excellent, but filled with tension, and, having read the novel, I expect that only to ratchet up for the remaining episodes.)

This weekend is the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival, which would typically be where I would have picked up a variety of plants for the garden. However, it’s hard to acquire physical seedlings at a virtual festival, so for the second year in a row I’ll be looking closer to home for my summer veggies.

This does mean, though, that we’ve reached the point in the spring where it’s warm enough to put tomatoes, peppers, tomatillos, and cucumbers in the ground and expect them to survive. I’ll be excited to check out what farmers bring to the local markets and what the city’s nurseries have to offer over the next couple weekends. Last year we got fewer interesting varieties of tomatoes than I would have found at the festival, but I did end up with those super-long cucumbers.

Having a garden is never boring, that’s for sure!

Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. Work has announced they wanted to recognize how hard we’ve all been working and has given us a four-day weekend for Memorial Day.

2. Rudi and I have been had two lunch salads made with greens from the garden (topped with delicious strawberry poppyseed dressing from the farmers market).

3. My bike ride home along the river after volleyball this evening was lovely. I had to race down, so there’s nothing beautiful about that, but the ride home included a stop for zaatar fries at the Wharf, the last pinks of sunset over the Tidal Basin, and finally a true appreciation for a face mask as I rode through several minutes of gnats by the Reflecting Pool.

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

Just last night I wrapped up Murder on Cold Street, the latest Lady Sherlock novel by Sherry Thomas, and I’m still feeling a bit of a reading hangover from my favorite series, not quite willing to let go of my thoughts about Charlotte and Livia and Mrs. Watson and Ash. So I’m not quite sure yet where I’ll land yet on a print read, but it might be the comic collection of Check, Please!: Sticks and Scones by Ngozi Ukazu, about a hockey team at a small New England liberal arts college. I also wrapped up an audiobook this week, but I’ve moved on to A Deadly Inside Scoop by Abby Collette, the first in a new cozy mystery series set at an ice cream parlor in the Cleveland suburbs. I’m finding the reader’s style distracting and, for the first time, have sped up the speed in an attempt to see if that makes her less off putting. If it doesn’t, I may need to switch to paper on that one.

With my rainbow socks at the heel, I’m also feeling a little disconnected from my knitting. But I’ve started carrying around the bag that contains the Lightning Shawl, my oldest semi-active UFO, so I’m inclined to think that wants to come out of hibernation again. When I pulled it out of the bag to photograph, I discovered the needle and project had become detached, so some actual unraveling was necessitated to get the two reconnected once again. I think this had gone into timeout in its final strip because I’m working with scraps at this point and there was a weird blending that happened at the very midpoint of the shawl that looked unpleasantly obvious, so I don’t think that will end up having been even a minor setback. But wouldn’t it be great if 2021 were the year this finally became a wearable item, eight years after I started it?

Head over to As Kat Knits for the weekly roundup.